Blog Posts by Vera H-C Chan

So you didn't score tickets for Yahoo! On the Road. Watching live-stream concerts on your iPhone may be the next best thing, but you may have noticed that your headsets aren't doing your music much justice. And these days, Dr. Dre has convinced the masses that they need to lay out anywhere between $200 to $1,000 for a set of headphones (a million, if you want yours diamond-encrusted) for seriously deep bass. But we understand, you may be prone to mutilating or losing your set, and, you're saving up for a bikini wax for the summer season.

Our experts (plus average Joes) hold some strong opinions on earbuds under $40. The sound threshold, says Yahoo! technology editor Jason Gilbert, is usually around the $45 to $50 mark. "Once you get above $45, you start to get into the higher-quality headphones from the nicer audio companies," he says. Under $30, the sound quality's not as sick, the gear's more fragile, and the cable's more prone to rips and tangles. "You might not get headphones with a

March Madness

Sure, your workplace will let you do an NCAA tournament office pool. Allow a little bit of smack talk about Notre Dame's leprechaun camouflage uniforms. Maybe some gung-ho boss will go as far as corralling saggy-bottomed minions to a game of after-hour hoops, in the misguided spirit of a team-bonding-cum-CPR-training exercise. But watch March Madness during business hours? Not unless you fill out your application for the local Dairy Queen at the same time.

Then again, we're living in 2013, the era of auto-flush toilets and military drones. Don't tell me you can't sneak in some NCAA action without getting caught. The easiest way of course is to charge up the battery the night before, slip the phone somewhere inconspicuous, and work on stifling whoops of delight as you stream NCAA.com/march-madness-live from Yahoo! Sports. (Don't forget your cable log-in.)

What if even this avenue is closed off to you? Some suggestions on counterintelligence hoops surveillance in:

The Boss Button. An

Megan Phelps-Roper, the granddaughter of fundamentalist preacher Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.When Megan Phelps-Roper—heir apparent to the notorious Westboro Baptist Church founded by her grandfather Fred Phelps—left with her younger sister Grace in November, they joined that rare population of women who leave extreme faiths.

Indeed, more women are more likely to be cast out—like former WBC follower Lauren Drain, whose memoir comes out this week. Experts say to an extreme faith — be they cults or fringe elements — there is only us vs. them, chosen vs. unenlightened, saved vs. sinners. To leave is to forgo community, structure, kin and perhaps one's eternal soul. Leaving meant "sadness, and Hell, and destruction, and losing the only family, friends, faith, truth I'd ever known," Phelps-Roper recently wrote. "It simply wasn't on the table."

WBC spokesperson Steve Drain characterized the Phelps-Roper sisters' departure as "the natural course of things" to Topeka Capital-Journal, adding, "They wanted to serve themselves." (Drain is the father of Lauren Drain.) He also said:

To paraphrase the Bard: The first thing we do, let's kill all the law school applicants.

As maligned as lawyers may be, their profession comes with prestige and visions of hefty billable hours. So the plummet in law school applications—to the lowest number in 30 years—is both shocking yet unsurprising. For years, a growing movement from bloggers to senators has pushed for greater transparency about the legions of unemployed lawyers: Turns out some law schools bragging about their gainfully employed students have padded the stats by including nonlegal jobs—graduates were ending up as baristas, not barristers. (A few schools even hired their own alumni, an altruistic act that also satisfied a criteria to get a good ranking from U.S. News & World Report.)

Last year, the American Bar Association (ABA) at last released daunting numbers, detailing a dismal 55 percent legal employment rate for the class of 2011. With those employment figures—and the fact that tuition rates have been well

A 5-year-old faced with a pile of Legos did what boys have done since the dawn of time: He fashioned a weapon, ran about and made shooting sounds.

That's when the Massachusetts elementary school sent a letter to his parents and warned that the next time, their son Joe would be suspended. "I said listen, he's a 5-year-old, I think maybe a redirection would be more appropriate," his mother, Sheila Cruz, told a local radio station. "She (the principal) said, 'it's a threat to other children, and other children could have been scared.'"

In the gun debate following the Newtown massacre, a spate of media reports has centered on cases of very young children being disciplined for playing with fake guns or making aggressive gestures: A 6-year-old boy was suspended for pointing a finger and saying "pow." A fifth-grade girl's paper gun, crafted by her grandfather, got her searched before classmates and threatened with arrest.

The zero-tolerance policy applied to children existed well

FILE - This Jan. 20, 2009 file photo shows the crowd on the National Mall looking from the Capitol toward the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial listening to the inaugural address of President Barack Obama. While Washington won’t likely see the record-setting turnout from the last inauguration, officials are planning for a bigger-than-average crowd making plans for a second chance to see a president’s swearing in. District of Columbia officials have pieced together early data projecting 600,000 to 800,000 people will crowd onto the National Mall on Jan. 21. That’s based on past attendance and data including hotel and restaurant reservations and chartered buses. The inauguration is the biggest event every four years in the nation’s capital, followed by July 4th celebrations. The 2009 inaugural drew 1.8 million. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File), Mass-media firsts, Marine bands, frozen canaries, poisoned pigeons. Now that's a party?

The presidential inauguration is a chance for the nation to celebrate a milestone—its continued peaceful transition of power. The Fourth of July might bring communities together in street parades and backyard barbecues, but the inauguration is a time when all eyes focus on the nation's capital for fine speeches, political reflection, and high-powered inaugural balls.

Understandably, second inaugurals tend to be smaller affairs since, among other things, the bloom's off the rose, so to speak: Gallup Inc. notes that among post-war presidents, only Richard Nixon had higher approval ratings at his second inauguration than at his first (and that didn't last). The presidents themselves have become careworn with the realities of the office—they'd probably benefit more from a spa retreat than a Washington, D.C., gala event.

While first inaugurations get more of the pomp, the second ones are more

People walk past a makeshift memorial in Sandy Hook, after the December 14 shooting tragedy when a gunman shot dead 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary, in Newtown, Connecticut, December 28, 2012 REUTERS/Carlo Allegri (UNITED STATES - Tags: CRIME LAW EDUCATION)This is a group nobody wants to be part of.

In this undated publicity photo released by Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Jessica Chastain, center, plays a member of the elite team of spies and military operatives, stationed in a covert base overseas, with Christopher Stanley, left, and Alex Corbet Burcher, right, who secretly devote themselves to finding Osama Bin Laden in Columbia Pictures' new thriller, Kathryn Bigelow may have been denied a chance to repeat Academy Award history, but her film "Zero Dark Thirty"—which expanded to wide release on Friday—has made the best picture list for the Oscars, Golden Globes and multiple others.

The story about the 11-year hunt for Osama bin Laden also made hit lists of a different sort. On the day of its Dec. 19 premiere, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., John McCain, R-Ariz., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., sent aggrieved letters to the CIA and Sony Pictures objecting to the "clear implication" that intelligence derived from enhanced interrogations eventually led to bin Laden's capture. Protesters from groups like Amnesty International turned out at the movie's Washington, D.C., premiere to decry the film as a "Pentagon-sanctioned movie." An Academy voter has urged fellow members not to cast a best picture vote for the film.

"Zero Dark Thirty"—the military term for half past midnight, the time Navy SEALs landed in bin Laden's compound in Pakistan—has