RI Progress Report: 38 Studios, Woonsocket Race To Bankruptcy

38 Studios laid off all of its employees yesterday … I guess Curt Schilling and Linc Chafee will be completing Copernicus by themselves.

Speaking of going bankrupt, Woonsocket’s supplemental tax increase failed to win approval in the House yesterday afternoon after Rep. Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, a Woonsocket Democrat, stymied its passage. “The end came suddenly, with a sharp bang of Speaker Gordon Fox’s gavel cutting off discussion with resounding finality on a parliamentary maneuver by Baldelli-Hunt to send the bill back to committee,” wrote Jim Baron of the Woonsocket Call.

Barrington did indeed back off its idea to offer a limited number of out-of-town students to attend the high-achieving local schools if the could afford to pay tuition, as we reported yesterday.

This is something Rhode Island should work on changing: the state ranks 12th from the worst in the nation in terms of being bicycle friendly.

5 Ways The Facebook IPO Teaches Us About How Wall Street Games The System

Paul Krugman: “…overall business productivity in America grew faster in the postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed was good.”

A great story by the Associated Press on CEO pay and how to compare those outrageous salaries compare to the rest of us.

Rest in peace, Scott Nixon, a much-heralded professor of Oceanography at URI. According to Provost Donald H. DeHayes, he “was a world leader in the study of how coastal and estuarine ecosystems work, initially using Narragansett Bay as his laboratory and employing mesocosms to measure respiration and production at a community level. While his findings helped define our understanding of marine ecosystems locally, Scott applied his knowledge at broader scales, too, exploring marine ecosystems around the world, comparing and contrasting them to shape a global view that he then used to challenge himself to think in new ways and to challenge the scientific dogma of the times.”