Courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Richard Vedder at the Chronicle notes that 5,000 Ph.D.s are working as ... janitors.Did those of us who went to college before a political party decided a college education was 'a right' know there would be diminishing returns to a college education once everyone had one?  Sure we did, but that's no miracle of economics.  Heck, even Paul Krugman could have figured that out.   Vedder agrees.

In the modern world of Wikileaks and ClimateGate, where and how you get things and their credibility matters less than how opponents can make political hay with it, the impact on science is evident as well.Jennifer Couzin-Frankel and Gretchen Vogel writing at Science detail how accusations of scientific fraud from an anonymous e-mail address sent to the researchers in question but also to other prominent stem cell biologists, several scientific journals, and reporters has the paper authors defending themselves, virtually without cause.   

Appearing on CNN’s “Parker Spitzer” program last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that people who don’t like Google’s Street View cars taking pictures of their homes and businesses “can just move” afterward to protect their privacy. Ironically, he said this on the very day that Google admitted those cars captured more than just fragments of personal payload data.

Dr. Paul Shin, Chemical Instrumentation Manager at CSU Northridge, has long been a science outreach guy.   He's also more recently a fighting cancer guy.    But he has done so much for ... well, everyone ... that the science cheerleaders at the USA Science&Engineering Festival (he could not attend due to health issues) sent him a special message when they found out he could not go.

Interesting trivia fact; who is the only player in baseball history to appear in the World Series against the team that traded him that same year?   If you guessed Bengie Molina because his name is in the title, you are correct.The Giants had Molina as a catcher from 2007 until they discovered rookie Buster Posey was an offensive force and should be playing every day, so Molina was traded to the Texas Rangers, where he helped them get to the World Series as well.   That was a good move because Posey is much better on offense and much younger but Molina was a valuable guy to San Francisco in developing their young pitchers to where they are today.

Beneath its dreary shroud of clouds, Venus could be positively hopping: Planetary geologists have spotted a lava flow they say is just decades old. If confirmed, it would be the youngest evidence for volcanism on Venus.Some researchers believe that Venus is geologically active, since more than 1,000 volcanoes dot its surface but definitive evidence that the planet is active today, like Earth, and not long dead, like Mars, has been elusive.

Want to become a terrorist?  It's easier than you think to get sucked in, writes New Scientist.The anthropology of terrorism makes for compelling fieldwork and Scott Atran is on a quest to understand what makes people kill and die for a cause.   He says he has met with the Hamas high command in Damascus, unpacked the web of connections behind the 9/11 and 2004 Madrid train attacks and been forced to flee for his life from militants in Indonesia and Pakistan unsettled by his probings.

Some people feel like they were born in the wrong century and should have been born when there were cowboys or knights or whatever.   Paul Krugman simply thinks he was born in the wrong decade and should have come along two decades earlier than he did, when money was free, the Great Society was just being funded and activism mattered. 

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his organization are famously liberal with the secrets of the U.S. military but he is not so forthcoming about his own private affairs.Assange walked out of a CNN interview after the reporter asked him about his often terse relationship with fellow workers and the court case in which he was cleared of sex abuse charges in Sweden.

You think Batman's pretty cool, don't you?  Outside of America, they make Batman even cooler because he guns down bad guys and has sex with the ladies he rescues. Other countries have been working around the clock to improve our cultural icons in similar. From Cracked.com, here are 9 ripoffs that are better than the US originals, proving you can create something awesome no matter where you're from or how limited your budget is, as long as you don't give a shit about copyrights.