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Based on the dates mentioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, it takes place on September 16, 2011. The date on the professor’s calendar is September 16, and he’s looking for a 2006 paper written “about five years ago,” setting the year as 2011.

And this morning, at the iPhone keynote, Apple announced Siri, a natural language-based voice assistant, would be built into iOS 5 and a core part of the new iPhone 4S.

So, 24 years ago, Apple predicted a complex natural-language voice assistant built into a touchscreen Apple device, and was less than a month off.

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The familiar address of Sesame Street is about to get a new visitor, one who could surely benefit from the sunny days and friendly neighbors there. For a prime-time special to raise awareness about hunger faced by American families, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces “Sesame Street,” has created a new Muppet character named Lily, a 7-year-old girl representing one of the 17 million American children that the Department of Agriculture estimates are “food insecure,” meaning their access to food is limited or uncertain.

“We thought long and hard about how do we really represent this from a child’s point of view?” Jeanette Betancourt, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president for outreach and educational practices, said on Monday morning in a telephone interview. “We felt it was best to have this new Muppet take this on in a positive way and a healthy way.”

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Most people know that Venice has long been threatened by chronic flooding, but in recent years the Queen of the Adriatic has faced a rising tide of a different sort: advertising.

From the Doge’s Palace to St. Mark’s Square to the bittersweet Bridge of Sighs — named for the grief its splendid views once inspired in crossing death row prisoners — immense billboards lit late into the night now mar the city’s most treasured places.

Allegedly built to cover the cost of restoration work in the face of government cutbacks, the ads have brought in around $600,000 per year since 2008 — a fraction of the shortfall — and show no sign of going away any time soon. Their presence prompted a consortium of the world’s leading cultural experts led by the Venice in Peril Fund to air an open letter demanding the city government put a stop to the placards that “hit you in the eye and ruin your experience of one of the most beautiful creations of humankind.” Mayor Giorgio Orsoni, for one, was not moved, saying last year “If people want to see the building they should go home and look at a picture of it in a book.”

Another photo of the now-pitiful Bridge of Sighs

Venice stages its own funeral to mourn population decline

Why are Venetians fleeing, anyway? It’s not due to flooding…

Troubled waters: Paintings show Venice in decline

“Venezia” by flapjax at midnite

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“This is not a seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night shakedown.”

Correct – the proper term for this is “barratry”.

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As the board of Amgen convened at the company’s headquarters in March, chief executive Kevin W. Sharer seemed an unlikely candidate for a raise.

Shareholders at the company, one of the nation’s largest biotech firms, had lost 3 percent on their investment in 2010 and 7 percent over the past five years. The company had been forced to close or shrink plants, trimming the workforce from 20,100 to 17,400. And Sharer, a 63-year-old former Navy engineer, was already earning lots of money — about $15 million in the previous year, plus such perks as two corporate jets.

The board decided to give Sharer more. It boosted his compensation to $21 million annually, a 37 percent increase, according to the company reports.

[..]

The idea behind setting executive pay this way, known as “peer benchmarking,” is to keep talented bosses from leaving.

Remember, when a worker asks for 4%, he’s greedy. When a CEO gets 37%, it’s just market efficiency in action.