There is a chart at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110... that shows the average annual return for an investment in the stock market broken down by year of the start and end points. The returns are high if you invest early in a bull market and sell before the next crash, otherwise the returns are rather low. The conventional wisdom that holding stocks for several decades and getting annual returns of 7% or more seems wrong.
After using Ubuntu for three years I switched to Arch Linux and I like it a lot. It has a great package system, and packages are updated continually. I upgraded my desktop to Gnome 2.30 a few days ago with only a couple of minor issues.
I wish the author had been more clear here and cited his statistic, but he's mostly right. The report "High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 2007" (http://nces.ed.gov/pubSearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009064) has a graph showing that the middle income dropout rate is about the same as the overall rate. The upper income students make up for the lower income ones. And according to the report at http://www.americaspromise.org/Our-Work/Dropout-Prevention/C... "Nationwide, nearly one in three U.S. high school students fails to graduate with a diploma."
I wouldn't be so sure about that. While it's true that Catholics and members of the mainline Protestant denominations are unlikely to believe dinosaurs and men lived together, there are still millions of other more conservative religous people out there. I did a quick Google search and found that there are about 16 million Southern Baptists, 6 million Mormons, 3 million members of the Assemblies of God, and 2.5 million members of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod (whose doctrine statement supports young Earth creationism). So there are easily 30 - 40 millions of these kind of people in America. Now most young-Earthers probably haven't thought much about dinosaurs and people living together, but they do believe in the story of Noah and the ark and that the Earth is about six to ten thousand years old, and it would only follow from that. So what percent of these 40 million are voting for Palin and also believe dinosaurs and people lived together? Easily five percent, but I'd wager it's closer to 50-75%.
The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig, does a good job describing many of the problems with popular business books like Good to Great and In Search of Excellence. It's worth reading.
The BIL conference (http://bilconference.com) is being held in Monterey after TED as a free alternative. They had to cap attendance at 150 though. Some of the scheduled talks look interesting.