Last year New York City announced that it would begin paying students for attending school, taking standardized tests and getting good grades.  In spite of criticism - Barry Schwartz said the external rewards would not replace showing kids why it's good to do well in school - and no known lack of results, New York City has decided to push forward with a new reward plan.  New York City school kids that get good grades can now earn cell phones and free minutes. 

Chris Anderson has written an excellent article, Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. Go read it. Send it to anyone who is having a hard time understanding how you can make money off of free stuff.   

Matt Asay says Twitter is "mindless" and "useless".  I'd say he doesn't know how to use Twitter.

Matt Asay blogged this morning about our announcement today covering our results and learnings from last year.  We covered our significant growth in customers as well as the trends we have seen in customer usage over the past year.

Avoid the Find.find method if at all possible if you are working on an app that may need to be deployed with JRuby (instead of a native version of Ruby).

When I mention that I work from home occasionally, there's always someone who says, "That's great! You get to spend more time with your kids."  Either they don't have kids or my kids are not normal kids. Here's what a day at home would look like for Caleb, my 18 month old, if I tried to work with him at home.

From the SCALE list: