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The innocent-sounding “Mobile Information Call Act” would allow all sorts of nuisance calls to cell phones, eating into customers’ costly minutes, Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Sunday.

[..]

“What politician in his right mind would support this?” asked John Berigan, 44, of Park Slope, who uses his cell phone for his real estate business.

“There’s no one in the general public who would want this. “It would seem that some lobbyist in Washington has gotten to [Towns],” he said.

Current law bars telemarketing calls to cell phones unless the customer has given approval. The proposed change would allow prerecorded “informational” calls to be made to cell phones without consent.

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Cyborgs of the future beware: Humans are working on computerized contact lenses with display technology.

"Some day maybe we’ll have full-fledged streaming in your contact lenses," said Babak Amir Parviz, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington who co-authored a paper describing the computerized new contact lens in the latest issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

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Economics blog VoxEU debates Why do we need a financial sector? Serious, important and very dull articles discuss the trade-offs and myths of innovation, and whether the sector is overrated, critical or a contributor to the wider economy.

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From Econ4.org, a group that’s devoted to building an alternative to the economics orthodoxy that the economy is about Wall Street and not about the well-being of working people, a statement that’s been signed by 170 economists so far

Silly economists. You need 25,000 signatures before you get to have a petition ignored.

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The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

And the more urgent the issue, the more people want to remain unaware, according to a paper published online in APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"These studies were designed to help understand the so-called ‘ignorance is bliss’ approach to social issues," said author Steven Shepherd, a graduate student with the University of Waterloo in Ontario. "The findings can assist educators in addressing significant barriers to getting people involved and engaged in social issues."

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Quick, were Egyptian protesters successful in their bid to overthrow longtime president Hosni Mubarak earlier this year?

According to a new poll (PDF) from Fairleigh Dickinson University, if you watch Fox News you are significantly less likely to know the correct answer to that question than if you mostly avoid news shows and newspapers all together.

After controlling for factors like partisanship, education, and other demographic factors, the pollsters found that Fox New viewers were 18 points less likely to know that the revolt was successful than their non-active news consuming counterparts. Fox News viewers were also 6 points less likely to know that the Syrian uprising has yet to succeed.

“Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News,” said Dan Cassino, a Fairleigh Dickinson political science professor who took part in the analysis of the PublicMind data. “Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”