The housing market has been in the doldrums so long that most of us believe that when we are ready to buy a new home there will be plenty of deals out there. Think again, the rising costs of everything from land to labor are causing new home prices to climb.

As U.S. residential real estate begins to rebound from its worst downturn since the Great Depression, the pace of recovery is beginning to cause bottlenecks in all sorts of areas. Suppliers of various building materials, for example, after shutting down much of their operations over the last few years, suddenly are besieged with orders from homebuilders across the nation. Unfortunately, it will take time, money and a willingness

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Over the last decade, online enrollment in college classes has exploded. Many hope that it will ultimately help reduce the burgeoning future costs of a college education. The evidence, thus far, indicates that we have a long way to go.

At the outset, readers should understand that there are two initiatives that have yet to converge in online education. There are MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) offered for free by several universities and colleges, although in some cases the educational institution will issue a certificate or letter of completion (for a price).

These MOOC courses enroll hundreds of thousands of students in 150 or more countries worldwide. The courses are

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In the wake of across-the-board government spending cuts, this month President Obama proposed a new R&D initiative aimed at mapping the brain. Critics immediately balked over the $100 million price tag, but those protests may be pennywise but pound foolish given some of the breakthroughs government has achieved in the past.

The BRAIN initiative (short for Brain Research Through Advancing Innovation Neurotechnologies) is designed to promote innovation and job growth while finding ways to treat and cure ailments such as Alzheimer's disease and brain damage from strokes. It will be funded by the National Institute of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the

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Tuesday's "flash crash" precipitated by a fake tweet attributed to a major news organization is old news by now. No long-term investors got hurt in the debacle and by the end of the week it was business as usual in the nation's exchanges. That doesn't mean it won't happen again and again.

In just four minutes, $136 billion was erased from the S&P 500 Index, the main benchmark average of the stock market. The Dow lost 145 points at the same time. Both averages regained those losses over the next two minutes causing some traders to check whether the elevator ride was real or a computer glitch. It was neither.

Having a front-row seat to the

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It happened while most of us were focused on paying our taxes. By unanimous consent, both the House and the Senate repealed a portion of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (The STOCK Act) in just 30 seconds with no debate or discussion. President Obama signed it into law on April 14 — shame on them.

I should have known it was too good to be true. Readers may recall my December 2011 column where I celebrated the passage of the STOCK Act, which made it illegal for congressmen and their staffs to profit from insider information just like the rest of us. It was one of the few actions of a do-nothing Congress (their approval rating at the time was just 9 percent) that

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