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2/23/2010 10:07 AM

http://www.pbs.org

Ahmadinejad's import mania

by HAMID FAROKHNIA in Tehran

20 Feb 2010 22:38

Ahmadinejad's import mania drives farmers to bankruptcy; industrial workers arbitrarily denied wages.

Over the last few months, as the economic downturn has picked up momentum, a new demand is increasingly being voiced by protesting workers across Iran: payment of back wages (see the three reports below).

It seems that managers at some state and private enterprises have devised a brilliant new scheme to respond to their companies' financial woes, which in certain cases appear grossly overstated: pay the workforce intermittently or not at all.

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2/17/2010 10:08 AM

http://news.bbc.co.uk

Why did so many people die in Haiti's quake?

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1/19/2010 12:04 PM

http://www.nytimes.com

Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left

The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors.

To Mr. Gross, accusations by conservatives of bias and student brainwashing are self-defeating. “The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism,” he said, “the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.”

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http://gizmodo.com/

First postulated by Jules Verne in his novel From the Earth to the Moon, the idea of space cannons is not new. Many engineers have toyed with the concept, but nobody has came up with an actual project that may work. Hunter's idea is simple: Build a cannon near the equator, submerged in the ocean, hooked to a floating rig. At the cannon's bottom there is a combustion chamber, which uses natural gas to heat hydrogen up to 2,600ºF, increasing the pressure 500%. When released, the gas will launch a capsule with half a ton of material into space, at a swooshing 13,000mph.

The project itself would only cost $500 million, which is a really stupid amount considering the potential benefits: A system like this will cut launch costs from $5,000 per pound to only $250 per pound. It won't launch people into space because of the excessive acceleration, but those guys at the ISS can use it to order pizza and real ice cream. [Popsci]

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http://www.nytimes.com/

The Tel Aviv Cluster

Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.

Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.

This shift in the Israeli identity has long-term implications. Netanyahu preaches the optimistic view: that Israel will become the Hong Kong of the Middle East, with economic benefits spilling over into the Arab world. And, in fact, there are strands of evidence to support that view in places like the West Bank and Jordan.

But it’s more likely that Israel’s economic leap forward will widen the gap between it and its neighbors. All the countries in the region talk about encouraging innovation. Some oil-rich states spend billions trying to build science centers. But places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv are created by a confluence of cultural forces, not money. The surrounding nations do not have the tradition of free intellectual exchange and technical creativity.

For example, between 1980 and 2000, Egyptians registered 77 patents in the U.S. Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652.

The tech boom also creates a new vulnerability. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic has argued, these innovators are the most mobile people on earth. To destroy Israel’s economy, Iran doesn’t actually have to lob a nuclear weapon into the country. It just has to foment enough instability so the entrepreneurs decide they had better move to Palo Alto, where many of them already have contacts and homes. American Jews used to keep a foothold in Israel in case things got bad here. Now Israelis keep a foothold in the U.S.

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1/16/2010 7:43 AM

http://online.wsj.com/

The Death of the Slush Pile

Even in the Web era, getting in the door is tougher than ever

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk

America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels

December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.

The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.

Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.

The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy –– just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.

Fed hawks are playing with fire by talking up about exit strategies, not for the first time. This is what they did in June 2008. We know what happened three months later. For the record, manufacturing capacity use at 67.2pc, and "auto-buying intentions" are the lowest ever.

Mr Rosenberg is asked by clients why Wall Street does not seem to agree with his grim analysis.

His answer is that this is the same Mr Market that bought stocks in October 1987 when they were 25pc overvalued on Shiller "10-year normalized earnings basis" – exactly as they are today – and bought them at even more overvalued prices in 2007, long after the property crash had begun, Bear Stearns funds had imploded, and credit had its August heart attack. The stock market has become a lagging indicator. Tear up the textbooks.

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1/9/2010 10:48 AM

http://finance.yahoo.com/

Contrarian Investor Sees Economic Crash in China

As most of the world bets on China to help lift the global economy out of recession, Mr. Chanos is warning that China's hyperstimulated economy is headed for a crash, rather than the sustained boom that most economists predict. Its surging real estate sector, buoyed by a flood of speculative capital, looks like "Dubai times 1,000 -- or worse," he frets. He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent.

"The Chinese," he warned in an interview in November with Politico.com, "are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell."

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http://www.wired.com/geekdad

One thing that every geek can do is quote their favorite geek-culture media, whether it’s movies, books, television, theater or music. The GeekDads have tried to compile a list of such quotes for your enjoyment. This list is certainly not definitive. Indeed, it’s only the beginning! Feel free to add your own (clean) ones in the comments below.

1. “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.” — Dennis the Peasant, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
2. “Three rings for the Elven kings under the sky, seven for the Dwarf lords in their halls of stone, nine for the mortal men doomed to die, one for the Dark Lord on his dark throne, in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie. One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring the bring them all, and in the darkness bind them. In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.” -LOTR
3. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” - HAL, 2001: A Space Odyssey
4. “Spock. This child is about to wipe out every living thing on Earth. Now, what do you suggest we do….spank it?” — Dr. McCoy, Star Trek: The Motion Picture
5. “With great power there must also come — great responsibility.”  - Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962)
6. “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you oughtta go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it’s not for the timid.” — Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation “Q Who?”
7. “Five card stud, nothing wild. And the sky’s the limit” — Captain Jean Luc Picard, uttering the last line of the series, Star Trek: The Next Generation “All Good Things…”
8. “If you think that by threatening me you can get me to do what you want… Well, that’s where you’re right. But - and I am only saying that because I care - there’s a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing.” - Chris Knight, Real Genius
9. “We’re all very different people. We’re not Watusi. We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A’, huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog.” - John Winger, Stripes
10. “If I’m not back in five minutes, just wait longer.” - Ace Ventura, Ace ventura, Pet Detective
11. “I’m going to give you a little advice. There’s a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it, stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.” - Ty Webb, Caddyshack
12. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE - God (Douglas Adams), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
13. “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb!” - Adam West, Batman & Robin
14. “Bill, strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” - Ted, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
15. “Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple.” - Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
16. “Didja ever look at a dollar bill, man? There’s some spooky shit goin’ on there. And it’s green too.” - Slater, Dazed and Confused
17. “Alright, alright alright.” - Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
18. “Heya, Tom’, it’s Bob from the office down the hall. Good to see you, buddy; how’ve you been? Things have been alright for me except that I’m a zombie now. I really wish you’d let us in.” Jonothan Coulton, Re: Your Brains
19. “Never argue with the data.” - Sheen, Jimmy Neutron
20. “Oooh right, it’s actually quite a funny story once you get past all the tragic elements and the over-riding sense of doom.” - Duckman (Jason Alexander)
21. “Fantastic!” - The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), Doctor Who
22. “I must not fear. / Fear is the mind-killer. / Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. / I will face my fear. / I will permit it to pass over me and through me. / And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. / Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. / Only I will remain.” - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, Dune
23. “This is the way society functions. Aren’t you a part of society?” - Kramer, Seinfeld
24. “Okay. You people sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning. And if we’re not back by dawn… call the president.” - Jack Burton, Big Trouble in Little China
25. “No matter where you go, there you are. ” - Buckaroo Banzai, Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension
26. “Do you know of the Klingon proverb that tells us revenge is a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold in space.” -Khan, ST:TWOK
27. “Ray, if someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!” - Winston, Ghostbusters
28. “Greetings, programs!” -Flynn, TRON
29. “I guess you picked the wrong god-damned rec room to break into, didn’t you?!” -Burt, Tremors
30. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” -Darth Vader, Star Wars
31. “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side, kid.” -Han Solo, Star Wars
32. “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.” - Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back
33. “It’s a moral imperative.” - Chris Knight, Real Genuis
34. “Talk with your mouth full / bite the hand that feeds you / bite off more than you can chew / dare to be stupid” - Weird AL “dare to be stupid.”
35. “Well, let’s say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. Based on this morning’s reading, it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.” - Egon, Ghostbusters
36. “This episode was BADLY written!” -Gwen, Galaxy Quest
37. “Worst. Episode. Ever.” - Comic Book Guy, The Simpsons
38. “Goonies never say die.” -Mike, The Goonies
39. “Nothing shocks me–I’m a scientist.” - Indiana Jones, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
40. “Bright light! Bright light!” - Gremlins
41. “The Road goes ever on and on/Down from the door where it began/Now far ahead the Road has gone/And I must follow, if I can/Pursuing it with eager feet/Until it joins some larger way/Where many paths and errands meet/And whither then? I cannot say.” - J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
42. “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!” - Dr. Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters
43. “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” - Albert Einstein
44. “Wait a minute, Doc. Ah… Are you telling me you built a time machine… out of a DeLorean?” - Marty McFly, Back to the Future
45. “Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight blob of grease!” - C3PO, Star Wars
46. “I’d just as soon kiss a wookiee!” - Princess Leia, The Empire Strikes Back
47. “But one thing’s sure: Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody’s responsible.” - Detective, Plan 9 from Outer Space
48. “I know kung fu.” - Neo, The Matrix
49. “This is your receipt for your husband… and this is my receipt for your receipt.” - Officer, Brazil
50. “Your soul-suckin’ days are over, amigo!” - Elvis, Bubba Ho-Tep
51. “I don’t believe there’s a power in the ‘verse that can stop Kaylee from being cheerful. Sometimes you just wanna duct-tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month.” - Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly (episode: “Serenity” (pilot))
52. “Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?” - El Guapo, ¡Three Amigos!
53. “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!” Vizzini, The Princess Bride
54. “There is no Earthly way of knowing… which direction we are going. There is no knowing where we’re rowing, or which way the river’s flowing. Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hurricane a’blowing? Not a speck of light is showing so the danger much be growing. Are the fires of hell a’glowing? Is the grisley reaper mowing? YES! The danger must be growing for the rowers keep on rowing AND THEY’RE CERTAINLY NOT SHOWING ANY SIGNS THAT THEY ARE SLOWING!!” - Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
55. “Time…to die.” - Roy Batty, Blade Runner
56. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” J. Robert Oppenheimer
57. “Check, please.” - Lone Starr & Barf, Spaceballs
58. “So say we all.” - Battlestar Galactica
59. “After very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.” - General Beringer, WarGames.
60. “I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar.” - Wash, Serenity
61. “No matter what you hear in there, no matter how cruelly I beg you, no matter how terribly I may scream, do not open this door or you will undo everything I have worked for.” - Young Frankenstein
62. “Ahh, a bear in his natural habitat: a Studebaker.” Fozzie, The Muppet Movie
63. “He’s dead, Jim.” McCoy, ST:TOS
64. “Who’s gonna turn down a Junior Mint? It’s chocolate, it’s peppermint - it’s delicious!” - Kramer, Seinfeld
65. “Bring out your dead.” Monty Python and the Holy Grail
66. “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!” -Inigo, The Princess Bride
67. “Why a duck? Why-a no chicken?” - Chico Marx, Cocoanuts
68. “Redrum.” Danny, The Shining
69. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.” - announcer, The Shadow radio drama
70. “We’re going to need a bigger boat.” - Chief Brody, Jaws
71. “Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.” - Ian Malcolm, The Lost World: Jurassic Park
72. “Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.” Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space
73. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” - President Merkin Muffley, Dr. Strangelove
74. “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” - Obi-Wan, Star Wars
75. “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” - Taylor, Planet of the Apes
76. “You maniacs! You blew it up! Oh, damn you! Damn you all to hell!” - Taylor, Planet of the Apes
77. “Klaatu barada nikto.” The Day the Earth Stood Still
78. “Monsters from the Id.” - Doc Ostrow, Forbidden Planet
79. “ET phone home.” - ET
80. “What… is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?” - Bridgekeeper, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
81. “We thought you was a toad!” - Delmar, O Brother Where Art Thou?
82. “Face it tiger, you just hit the jackpot!”–Mary Jane, Spider-Man.
83. “You don’t have to be a gun.”-Hogarth, The Iron Giant.
84. “Danger Will Robinson! Danger!” - Robbie the Robot, Lost in Space
85. “Yeah, well. The Dude abides.” - The Dude, The Big Lebowski
86. “All things serve the beam.” various instances, The Dark Tower series
87. “You can’t fool me! There ain’t no Sanity Clause!” - Chico Marx, A Night at the Opera
88. “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” - Harry Lime, The Third Man
89. “And I said, I don’t care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I’m, I’m quitting, I’m going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they’ve moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…” - Milton Waddams, Office Space
90. “Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.” - Peter Gibbons, Office Space
91. “Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho.” - John McClane (in writing), Die Hard
92. “Gimme some sugar, baby.” - Ash, Army of Darkness
93. “Well hello Mister Fancypants. Well, I’ve got news for you pal, you ain’t leadin’ but two things, right now: Jack and sh*t… and Jack left town.” - Ash, Army of Darkness
94. “Kneel before Zod.” - Zod, Superman II
95. “Shall we play a game?” - Joshua, WarGames
96. “Daddy would have gotten us Uzis.” - Samantha, Night of the Comet
97. “It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.” “Hit it!” - Elwood, The Blues Brothers
98. “Make it so” / “Engage” - Captain Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
99. “Ya Ta!” - Hiro Nakamura, Heroes
100. “End Of Line” - The MCP, TRON

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1/6/2010 6:00 AM

http://news.bbc.co.uk

'Smartest' dog recognises more than 340 words

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1/3/2010 12:51 AM

http://www.crethiplethi.com/

The Basiji’s cult of self-destruction would be chilling in any country. In the context of the Iranian nuclear program, however, its obsession with martyrdom amounts to a lit fuse. Nowadays, Basiji are sent not into the desert, but rather into the laboratory. Basij students are encouraged to enroll in technical and scientific disciplines. According to a spokesperson for the Revolutionary Guard, the aim is to use the “technical factor” in order to augment “national security.”

What exactly does that mean? Consider that, in December 2001, former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani explained that “the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.” On the other hand, if Israel responded with its own nuclear weapons, it “will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” Rafsanjani thus spelled out a macabre cost-benefit analysis. It might not be possible to destroy Israel without suffering retaliation. But, for Islam, the level of damage Israel could inflict is bearable—only 100,000 or so additional martyrs for Islam.

And Rafsanjani is a member of the moderate, pragmatic wing of the Iranian Revolution; he believes that any conflict ought to have a “worthwhile” outcome. Ahmadinejad, by contrast, is predisposed toward apocalyptic thinking. In one of his first TV interviews after being elected president, he enthused: “Is there an art that is more beautiful, more divine, more eternal than the art of the martyr’s death?” In September 2005, he concluded his first speech before the United Nations by imploring God to bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam. He finances a research institute in Tehran whose sole purpose is to study, and, if possible, accelerate the coming of the imam. And, at a theology conference in November 2005, he stressed, “The most important task of our Revolution is to prepare the way for the return of the Twelfth Imam.”

A politics pursued in alliance with a supernatural force is necessarily unpredictable.Why should an Iranian president engage in pragmatic politics when his assumption is that, in three or four years, the savior will appear? If the messiah is coming, why compromise? That is why, up to now, Ahmadinejad has pursued confrontational policies with evident pleasure.

The history of the Basiji shows that we must expect monstrosities from the current Iranian regime. Already, what began in the early ‘80s with the clearing of minefields by human detonators has spread throughout the Middle East, as suicide bombing has become the terrorist tactic of choice. The motivational shows in the desert – with hired actors in the role of the hidden imam – have evolved into a showdown between a zealous Iranian president and the Western world. And the Basiji who once upon a time wandered the desert armed only with a walking stick is today working as a chemist in a uranium enrichment facility.

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12/25/2009 9:19 PM

http://www.forbes.com

How To Rise Fast At Work: A True Story

The wise moves that outpaced a wily and ambitious colleague.

This is a true story about two acquaintances of mine. One knew instinctively exactly how to get ahead in the workplace. The other thought he knew--and was dead wrong. Most of us would probably behave pretty much the way the latter did. I believe their experiences hold lessons for all of us.

The first of them, the successful one, I'll call Mark. Mark got a degree in finance from New York University's Stern School of Business in the spring of 2006 and landed a job as an analyst at a small investment firm in New York. Given the cutthroat atmosphere of his business school classes, Mark was fairly certain that his first foray into the working world of finance would be a high intensity, high-competition experience.

Though his organization was small, he realized that to rise within the ranks he would have to find some way to differentiate himself among his peers. He figured there were two traditional ways he could try to do so. He could strive to perform his tasks faster and better than his peers and hope to be recognized for doing a better job, or he could schmooze his way to the top by identifying the most important people in the organization and trying to win their favor.

However, he wasn't a self-promoter by nature, and he also wasn't sure he could outpace other people at the kind of work in Excel spreadsheets he'd be doing. He decided that before deciding which course to take, he'd need to learn all he could about the company he was working for.

From day one, Mark asked people questions about what they were working on, who they were working with and how they got their work done. It didn't matter if a person was junior or senior, administrative assistant or lead investor. He simply wanted to know what he could about what they did and the organization he was working for.

Once he had a clear sense of all of the moving parts within the company, he began to see ways its operations could be improved. Making those improvements lay outside his job description, but he believed it made sense to fix what he could easily fix, drawing on the understanding he was gathering of how the people in the organization operated.

At first the improvements Mark made were far from glamorous. In fact his peers derided him for wasting his time on actions they said would never increase his bonus. He began ordering lunch for the investment group's weekly meeting and making sure office supplies were ordered on time and in the right quantities. It was obvious he didn't mind pitching in where help was needed, and his supervisors began to notice his work ethic. They saw him making sure that people got the tools that they needed to do their jobs efficiently. And they saw everyone benefiting.

Without being a natural networker and without competing, Mark had begun networking organically. People appreciated what he did because it wasn't based on self-promotion and because it genuinely helped them.

Eventually, as Mark learned more about the needs of the organization, he realized that some of the changes that needed to be made would be easier if new tools and skills were used to complete certain tasks. Not one to let down the team, he began teaching himself new Excel functions and other software programs in the evenings. Soon he was an expert at Excel, the go-to person in his investment group and responsible for getting his peers up to speed on new techniques. In effect he was managing.

As one of very few people at the company who fully understood both internal administrative needs and external investor requirements, he began to be included in strategic meetings regarding compliance, new software and the streamlining of processes to make the organization as a whole more effective. And so a non-self-promoting, non-competing newbie found himself managing and training his peers. He was exceeding performance expectations for his role with the newly acquired skills and expertise and was being recognized as a strategic thinker and leader within the organization. He was promoted to senior analyst by the end of his first year and received a bonus 50% bigger than any of his peers got.

Mark achieved all this by seeking to know and assist the organization as a whole rather than by directly competing to promote himself at the expense of others. He helped everyone do their jobs better and thereby became a natural facilitator, expert and, finally, leader.

Meanwhile, Mark's co-worker Ted--whose name I have also changed--took a different, more traditional path. He worked like a maniac to try to show that he was better than Mark and all the other analysts.

When he started, he wasn't sure how talented the other analysts were, but he figured that if he stayed in the office later and spent less time on unimportant things like eating lunch, he would probably be able to do a better job than at least most of them. He kept an eye on what they worked on (except for that dunce Mark, who wasted time ordering lunches) and made sure to take note of how he could make a case for taking over some of their work.

He networked aggressively. He dropped in to see members of senior management in their offices to express his eagerness to take on more work. He made sure to mention tasks he had already completed and to let them know of relevant courses he had taken in college that likely qualified him for added responsibility.

Ted didn't know--or care--what anyone outside the investment team did. The senior managers were the people to impress, and his fellow analysts were the people to keep ahead of. He sometimes had a hard time getting the administrative team's help in closing trades, but he didn't let that stop him. In fact, he'd often mention his disappointment with administrative staffers at his interruptions--er, meetings--with senior managers.

By the time bonus season rolled around, Ted felt sure he'd be the first analyst promoted. After all, he was the fastest at what he did and had the closest relationships with senior managers. To his shock and disappointment, he was passed over for that first promotion. He received a bonus, but he got no more than most of the other analysts. What had happened? Had they somehow managed to be just as fast as him?

What Ted had failed to realize was that everyone hired as an analyst was talented and bright. They all got their jobs done, and they all did them very well. Sure, working harder and faster got him noticed, but only for doing more of the same.

Although Ted was learning to do his job more speedily, he wasn't learning to do anything else. At no point was he facilitating, managing or leading--activities that could recommend him for advancement. More important, he had been asking his managers for more responsibility rather than taking on responsibilities organically and showing that he could handle them.

In the classroom his approach would have worked well. Instead of interrupting management, he would have been regularly visiting professors during office hours. His focus on his assigned tasks above all else would have made him a star student with the best grades in the class. Mission accomplished.

At work, on the other hand, Ted was still a top performer at what he did, but he was a hamster on a wheel trying to stay ahead of all the other bright and capable employees. Even worse, he was always worried about new competition. He was caught in an unending cycle of stress.

Let's examine what Mark did right that set him apart from Ted--and from everyone else starting out at the company.

1. Understanding how things work. His first move when he began his job was to learn as much as he could about the organization he was working for. He was driven more by curiosity and a desire to comprehend what he had gotten himself into than by ambition to outperform his peers. As a result, he quickly got to know people and their roles, without conveying any sense that he was just trying to promote himself.

2. Knowing what everyone does and how they do it. By asking questions about others rather than selling himself, Mark came to know more about the organization than some members of senior management. As a result, he became a go-to person for figuring out the best ways to get things done.

Note: When you're not comfortable speaking with a higher-up you don't really know, a simple e-mail can do the trick. Introduce yourself and let the person know that you're new and trying to get a full grasp of the organization, and you'd just like a quick sentence or two about what each person does. This is likely to work best at small to medium-size organizations. At larger organizations, the company Intranet can often help you get a handle on things, though how they work on paper and how they work in practice can sometimes be very different. At the smallest organizations, simple observation is often enough for learning who does what and how.

3. Learning where gaps exist and conveying to others how to fill them. No one else in Mark's peer group took the time to learn much about the company beyond their own responsibilities. They were too busy competing (and in some cases schmoozing). Mark, having a sense of how everyone got their jobs done, he was able to make recommendations at meetings based on observations that he alone had been able to come up with. He wasn't psychic; he was just paying attention.

4. Identifying solutions to organizational problems and making quick fixes. Being privy to how things actually worked, Mark was able to identify problems and propose solutions. Most people had no idea that the problems even were problems. They were too busy within their own roles to notice. Mark's ability to propose solutions gave him an edge as a strategic thinker as he made quick, easy changes that were obvious to him as an observer but often not so obvious to those lost in their specific duties.

5. Being unafraid of unglamorous work, and pitching in where help is needed. Mark's path to success began with humbly ordering lunches. But that gave him a chance to spend a few minutes each week getting a sense of everyone's schedules and making conversation. Sure, remarks by his co-workers made him fear at first that he'd get pigeon-holed as the lunch guy, but his purposeful weekly access to senior management gave him a moment to mention any thoughts he had on the latest financial news. And anyway, ordering lunches was just one of many items on Mark's problem-solving agenda. It took only a few minutes, so it didn't keep him from his other work; it was easy to eventually delegate to someone else (making him look like more of a manager); and it established him as down-to-earth and thoughtful as well as bright, making him well-liked at all levels.

6. Identifying linkages, for himself and others. One benefit of knowing the inner workings of an organization is that you can see how the parts interact. Once you see that, you're equipped to facilitate interactions across functions and groups--and you've got an important tool of a strategizer and leader, who has to absorb the whole picture in a situation before he can make effective and appropriate decisions. Furthermore, understanding the linkages that affect your job function makes you more productive and effective without actually working any harder.

The somewhat accidental approach Mark took to his job is hardly the only way to achieve career advancement, but it does give the lie to the assumption that the best or only way ahead is the one most of us have pursued ever since the first grade.

Avril David is an energy and environment analyst for Project Performance Corporation, a global management consulting firm, and a freelance writer on topics related to careers, energy, climate policy and green business.

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12/23/2009 1:47 PM

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience

Female Ducks’ Twisty Tracts Defend Against Screwy Males

High-speed cameras document that a male Muscovy duck can fully extend his 20-centimeter penis in a third of second, says evolutionary biologist Patricia Brennan of Yale University (Watch the researcher’s video). That may be about all the time he has with a resisting female trying to escape him. Male Muscovy ducks rank among the waterfowl that often fail to take no for an answer.

 --

http://www.forbes.com

Why California Is Bad For Innovation

High costs and legislation are driving companies out of the Golden State.

It's now stupid to start an innovative business in California.

If, instead of Chamber of Commerce or government statistics, we look at U-Haul rates, we can see what's really happening on the left coast. As of July 31, the price for a 26-foot truck going from San Diego to Dallas is a steep $1,940 one-way. Business must be good in that direction. But to return on the same day, in the same truck, Dallas to San Diego, costs a mere $654. Nobody's returning to California.

--

http://www.washingtonpost.com

The vestigial tale
In our modern click-and-skim world, there's dwindling time and space for the expertly crafted narrative

There's endless talk in the news media about the next killer app. Maybe Twitter really will change the world. Maybe the next big thing will be just an algorithm, like Google's citation-ranking equation. But Smith is betting that there will still be a market, somehow, for what he does. Narrative isn't merely a technique for communicating; it's how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this.

They know that the story is the original killer app.

Media makeover

To understand the magic of narrative, you have to ponder the rise in Japan of "mobile phone novels." These are novels written on a cellphone keypad. The reader uploads the novel one cellphone screen at a time. The Japanese, always technophiles, find themselves reading their phones the way Westerners used to read the daily newspaper.

There are two ways to look at this situation: One is to make the electronic gadget the star of a heroic tale called The Changing Media. New gadgets can do anything! They can not only put you in touch with friends, they can store your photo album, tell you your longitude and latitude, and write fabulous novels. But another way of describing the situation is to say that you can't keep a good story down. The story, not the gadget, is what's irrepressible. So powerful is the story as a way of communicating that it will even sprout in a cellphone.

Dave Barry, humorist and best-selling young-adult novelist, says by e-mail: "You can't really read Twitters. I mean, I don't see anybody ever going to the beach with a big old mess of Twitters. Gotta have a plot. The big change from Jane Austen is that now the plot has to have really hot vampires."

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11/19/2009 11:22 AM

http://www.nytimes.com

The Wrong Side of History

Critics storm that health care reform is “a cruel hoax and a delusion.” Ads in 100 newspapers thunder that reform would mean “the beginning of socialized medicine.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.”

All dire — but also wrong. Those forecasts date not from this year, but from the battle over Medicare in the early 1960s. I pulled them from newspaper archives and other accounts.

Yet this year those same accusations are being recycled in an attempt to discredit the health reform proposals now before Congress. The heirs of those who opposed Medicare are conjuring the same bogymen — only this time they claim to be protecting Medicare.

Indeed, these same arguments we hear today against health reform were used even earlier, to attack President Franklin Roosevelt’s call for Social Security. It was denounced as a socialist program that would compete with private insurers and add to Americans’ tax burden so as to kill jobs.

Daniel Reed, a Republican representative from New York, predicted that with Social Security, Americans would come to feel “the lash of the dictator.” Senator Daniel Hastings, a Delaware Republican, declared that Social Security would “end the progress of a great country.”

John Taber, a Republican representative from New York, went further and said of Social Security: “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers.”

In hindsight, it seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? Social Security passed, and the republic survived.

Similar, ferocious hyperbole was unleashed on the proposal for Medicare. President John Kennedy and later President Lyndon Johnson pushed for a government health program for the elderly, but conservatives bitterly denounced the proposal as socialism, as a plan for bureaucrats to make medical decisions, as a means to ration health care.

The American Medical Association was vehement, with Dr. Donovan Ward, the head of the A.M.A. in 1965, declaring that “a deterioration in the quality of care is inescapable.” The president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went further and suggested that for doctors to cooperate with Medicare would be “complicity in evil.”

The Wall Street Journal warned darkly in editorials in 1965 that Medicare amounted to “politicking with a nation’s health.” It quoted a British surgeon as saying that in Britain, government health care was “crumbling to utter ruin” and suggested that the United States might be heading in the same direction.

“The basic concerns and arguments were the same” in 1935 against Social Security, in 1965 against Medicare, and today against universal coverage, said Nancy J. Altman, author of “The Battle for Social Security,” a history of the program. (The quotes against Social Security above were taken from that book.)

These days, the critics of Medicare have come around because it manifestly works. Life expectancy for people who have reached the age of 65 has risen significantly. America is no longer shamed by elderly Americans suffering for lack of medical care.

Yet although America’s elderly are now cared for, our children are not. A Johns Hopkins study found that hospitalized children who are uninsured are 60 percent more likely to die than those with insurance, presumably because they are less likely to get preventive care and to be taken to the doctor when sick. The study suggested that every year some 1,000 children may die as a consequence of lacking health insurance.

Why is it broadly accepted that the elderly should have universal health care, while it’s immensely controversial to seek universal coverage for children? What’s the difference — except that health care for children is far cheaper?

Granted, there are problems in the House and Senate bills — in particular, they falter on cost-containment. In the same way, there were many specific flaws in the Social Security and Medicare legislation, but, in retrospect, it’s also clear that they were major advances for our nation.

It’s now broadly apparent that those who opposed Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965 were wrong in their fears and tried to obstruct a historical tide. This year, the fate of health care will come down to a handful of members of Congress, including Senators Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu. If they flinch and health reform fails, they’ll be letting down their country at a crucial juncture. They’ll be on the wrong side of history.

--

http://www.ft.com/

Mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust

By Nouriel Roubini

Published: November 1 2009 18:44 | Last updated: November 1 2009 18:44

Since March there has been a massive rally in all sorts of risky assets – equities, oil, energy and commodity prices – a narrowing of high-yield and high-grade credit spreads, and an even bigger rally in emerging market asset classes (their stocks, bonds and currencies). At the same time, the dollar has weakened sharply , while government bond yields have gently increased but stayed low and stable.

This recovery in risky assets is in part driven by better economic fundamentals. We avoided a near depression and financial sector meltdown with a massive monetary, fiscal stimulus and bank bail-outs. Whether the recovery is V-shaped, as consensus believes, or U-shaped and anaemic as I have argued, asset prices should be moving gradually higher.

But while the US and global economy have begun a modest recovery, asset prices have gone through the roof since March in a major and synchronised rally. While asset prices were falling sharply in 2008, when the dollar was rallying, they have recovered sharply since March while the dollar is tanking. Risky asset prices have risen too much, too soon and too fast compared with macroeconomic fundamentals.

So what is behind this massive rally? Certainly it has been helped by a wave of liquidity from near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing. But a more important factor fuelling this asset bubble is the weakness of the US dollar, driven by the mother of all carry trades. The US dollar has become the major funding currency of carry trades as the Fed has kept interest rates on hold and is expected to do so for a long time. Investors who are shorting the US dollar to buy on a highly leveraged basis higher-yielding assets and other global assets are not just borrowing at zero interest rates in dollar terms; they are borrowing at very negative interest rates – as low as negative 10 or 20 per cent annualised – as the fall in the US dollar leads to massive capital gains on short dollar positions.

Let us sum up: traders are borrowing at negative 20 per cent rates to invest on a highly leveraged basis on a mass of risky global assets that are rising in price due to excess liquidity and a massive carry trade. Every investor who plays this risky game looks like a genius – even if they are just riding a huge bubble financed by a large negative cost of borrowing – as the total returns have been in the 50-70 per cent range since March.

People’s sense of the value at risk (VAR) of their aggregate portfolios ought, instead, to have been increasing due to a rising correlation of the risks between different asset classes, all of which are driven by this common monetary policy and the carry trade. In effect, it has become one big common trade – you short the dollar to buy any global risky assets.

Yet, at the same time, the perceived riskiness of individual asset classes is declining as volatility is diminished due to the Fed’s policy of buying everything in sight – witness its proposed $1,800bn (£1,000bn, €1,200bn) purchase of Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities (bonds guaranteed by a government-sponsored enterprise such as Fannie Mae) and agency debt. By effectively reducing the volatility of individual asset classes, making them behave the same way, there is now little diversification across markets – the VAR again looks low.

So the combined effect of the Fed policy of a zero Fed funds rate, quantitative easing and massive purchase of long-term debt instruments is seemingly making the world safe – for now – for the mother of all carry trades and mother of all highly leveraged global asset bubbles.

While this policy feeds the global asset bubble it is also feeding a new US asset bubble. Easy money, quantitative easing, credit easing and massive inflows of capital into the US via an accumulation of forex reserves by foreign central banks makes US fiscal deficits easier to fund and feeds the US equity and credit bubble. Finally, a weak dollar is good for US equities as it may lead to higher growth and makes the foreign currency profits of US corporations abroad greater in dollar terms.

The reckless US policy that is feeding these carry trades is forcing other countries to follow its easy monetary policy. Near-zero policy rates and quantitative easing were already in place in the UK, eurozone, Japan, Sweden and other advanced economies, but the dollar weakness is making this global monetary easing worse. Central banks in Asia and Latin America are worried about dollar weakness and are aggressively intervening to stop excessive currency appreciation. This is keeping short-term rates lower than is desirable. Central banks may also be forced to lower interest rates through domestic open market operations. Some central banks, concerned about the hot money driving up their currencies, as in Brazil, are imposing controls on capital inflows. Either way, the carry trade bubble will get worse: if there is no forex intervention and foreign currencies appreciate, the negative borrowing cost of the carry trade becomes more negative. If intervention or open market operations control currency appreciation, the ensuing domestic monetary easing feeds an asset bubble in these economies. So the perfectly correlated bubble across all global asset classes gets bigger by the day.

But one day this bubble will burst, leading to the biggest co-ordinated asset bust ever: if factors lead the dollar to reverse and suddenly appreciate – as was seen in previous reversals, such as the yen-funded carry trade – the leveraged carry trade will have to be suddenly closed as investors cover their dollar shorts. A stampede will occur as closing long leveraged risky asset positions across all asset classes funded by dollar shorts triggers a co-ordinated collapse of all those risky assets – equities, commodities, emerging market asset classes and credit instruments.

Why will these carry trades unravel? First, the dollar cannot fall to zero and at some point it will stabilise; when that happens the cost of borrowing in dollars will suddenly become zero, rather than highly negative, and the riskiness of a reversal of dollar movements would induce many to cover their shorts. Second, the Fed cannot suppress volatility forever – its $1,800bn purchase plan will be over by next spring. Third, if US growth surprises on the upside in the third and fourth quarters, markets may start to expect a Fed tightening to come sooner, not later. Fourth, there could be a flight from risk prompted by fear of a double dip recession or geopolitical risks, such as a military confrontation between the US/Israel and Iran. As in 2008, when such a rise in risk aversion was associated with a sharp appreciation of the dollar, as investors sought the safety of US Treasuries, this renewed risk aversion would trigger a dollar rally at a time when huge short dollar positions will have to be closed.

This unraveling may not occur for a while, as easy money and excessive global liquidity can push asset prices higher for a while. But the longer and bigger the carry trades and the larger the asset bubble, the bigger will be the ensuing asset bubble crash. The Fed and other policymakers seem unaware of the monster bubble they are creating. The longer they remain blind, the harder the markets will fall.

The writer is a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and chairman of Roubini Global Economics

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http://www.nytimes.com/

Nordic Countries Top 'Gender Equality' List

NEW YORK — Iceland and three other Scandinavian countries lead the world in gender equality, according to a report released Tuesday by the World Economic Forum.

The forum, a nonprofit group based in Switzerland, ranked countries according to how much they had reduced gender disparities based on economic participation, education, health and political empowerment, while attempting to strip out the effects of a country’s overall wealth.

Iceland, which has been rocked by a financial crisis, rose from fourth place a year ago to top the list. It was followed by Finland, Norway and Sweden. New Zealand came in fifth. Norway was ranked first last year.

The United States fell four spots, to 31st, behind Lithuania and ahead of Namibia. Yemen was ranked the lowest.

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10/28/2009 2:14 PM

http://www.csmonitor.com/

Islamic countries push a global 'blasphemy' law

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http://online.wsj.com

 Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics

Suppose for a minute—which is about 59 seconds too long, but that's for another column—that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

Good news, right? Maybe, but not if you're Al Gore or one of his little helpers.

The hose-in-the-sky approach to global warming is the brainchild of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years.

Could it work? Mr. Myhrvold and his associates think it might, and they're a smart bunch. Also smart are University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, whose delightful "SuperFreakonomics"—the sequel to their runaway 2005 bestseller "Freakonomics"—gives Mhyrvold and Co. pride of place in their lengthy chapter on global warming. Not surprisingly, global warming fanatics are experiencing a Pinatubo-like eruption of their own.

Mr. Gore, for instance, tells Messrs. Levitt and Dubner that the stratospheric sulfur solution is "nuts." Former Clinton administration official Joe Romm, who edits the Climate Progress blog, accuses the authors of "[pushing] global cooling myths" and "sheer illogic." The Union of Concerned Scientists faults the book for its "faulty statistics." Never to be outdone, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman scores "SuperFreakonomics" for "grossly [misrepresenting] other peoples' research, in both climate science and economics."

In fact, Messrs. Levitt and Dubner show every sign of being careful researchers, going so far as to send chapter drafts to their interviewees for comment prior to publication. Nor are they global warming "deniers," insofar as they acknowledge that temperatures have risen by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century.

But when it comes to the religion of global warming—the First Commandment of which is Thou Shalt Not Call It A Religion—Messrs. Levitt and Dubner are grievous sinners. They point out that belching, flatulent cows are adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all SUVs combined. They note that sea levels will probably not rise much more than 18 inches by 2100, "less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations." They observe that "not only is carbon plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon-dioxide levels don't necessarily mirror human activity." They quote Mr. Myhrvold as saying that Mr. Gore's doomsday scenarios "don't have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame."

More subversively, they suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another." In other words, the herd-of-independent-minds phenomenon happens to scientists too and isn't the sole province of painters, politicians and news anchors.

But perhaps their biggest sin, which is also the central point of the chapter, is pointing out that seemingly insurmountable problems often have cheap and simple solutions. Hence world hunger was largely conquered not by a massive effort at population control, but by the development of new and sturdier strains of wheat and rice. Hence infection and mortality rates in hospitals declined dramatically as doctors began to appreciate the need to wash their hands.

Hence, too, it may well be that global warming is best tackled with a variety of cheap fixes, if not by pumping SO2 into the stratosphere then perhaps by seeding more clouds over the ocean. Alternatively, as "SuperFreakonomics" suggests, we might be better off doing nothing until the state of technology can catch up to the scope of the problem.

All these suggestions are, of course, horrifying to global warmists, who'd much prefer to spend in excess of a trillion dollars annually for the sake of reconceiving civilization as we know it, including not just what we drive or eat but how many children we have. And little wonder: As Newsweek's Stefan Theil points out, "climate change is the greatest new public-spending project in decades." Who, being a professional climatologist or EPA regulator, wouldn't want a piece of that action?

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10/19/2009 1:58 PM

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/

 Ahmadinejad's theological foes

It is not often you find an email from a Grand Ayatollah in your inbox - especially not when the Ayatollah in question is a pivotal figure in one of the great dramas currently unfolding on the world stage.

Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri is one of Shia Islam's most respected theologians - he was a moving spirit behind the revolution which gave birth to an Islamic state in Iran 30 years ago, and at one stage he was designated to succeed Ayatollah Khomeini in the role of Iran's Supreme Leader.

The month after this summer's disputed presidential election he issued a fatwa condemning President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government.

But Mr Ahmadinejad belongs to a minority sect called the Hasteners; they believe that it is the duty of the faithful to prepare the way for the return of the Hidden Imam - or Mahdi - and perhaps even to create propitious conditions.

Professor Ansari says this has led to some eccentric behaviour by the president's entourage.

They have meals where they leave a place at the table in case the Imam appears, they have spent large amounts of money refurbishing a well at a shrine where it is thought the Imam may appear, and, Professor Ansari says, "they've even had fanciful notions of, when they write their cabinet proposals, taking a note and dropped it down the well so the imam can be aware of it".

Many Iranians find this kind of behaviour eccentric, and most orthodox clerics regard it as something akin to heresy. But beyond that it is accompanied by some inflammatory anti-clerical language.

Mehdi Khalaji, a Shia theologian now teaching in the United States, quotes a warning from one of the president's close aides; when the Hidden Imam returns, he said, "the first thing he does is to behead the clerics because... they've been corrupted by money and politics".

Whether clerical discontent with Mr Ahmadinejad will harden into real and effective political opposition is still very much an open question, but it does seem very likely that religion will play a central role in what now happens in Iran - just as it did during the country's last great political upheaval thirty years ago.

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10/9/2009 11:54 AM

 http://www.google.com/

 Report: Global Muslim population hits 1.57 billion

By ERIC GORSKI (AP) – 1 day ago

The global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly 1 in 4 people in the world practice Islam, according to a report Wednesday billed as the most comprehensive of its kind.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report provides a precise number for a population whose size has long has been subject to guesswork, with estimates ranging anywhere from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.

The project, three years in the making, also presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For instance, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined, and Ethiopia has nearly as many Muslims as Afghanistan.

"This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report," said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University who reviewed an advance copy.

Pew officials call the report the most thorough on the size and distribution of adherents of the world's second largest religion behind Christianity, which has an estimated 2.1 billion to 2.2 billion followers.

The arduous task of determining the Muslim populations in 232 countries and territories involved analyzing census reports, demographic studies and general population surveys, the report says. In cases where the data was a few years old, researchers projected 2009 numbers.

The report also sought to pinpoint the world's Sunni-Shiite breakdown, but difficulties arose because so few countries track sectarian affiliation, said Brian Grim, the project's senior researcher.

As a result, the Shiite numbers are not as precise; the report estimates that Shiites represent between 10 and 13 percent of the Muslim population, in line with or slightly lower than other studies. As much as 80 percent of the world's Shiite population lives in four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq.

The report provides further evidence that while the heart of Islam might beat in the Middle East, its greatest numbers lie in Asia: More than 60 percent of the world's Muslims live in Asia.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com

 The Pill makes women pick ‘dad’ over the ‘cad’

Oral contraceptives may also dampen your sex appeal, study suggests

The birth control pill may have done more than just help liberate women, it may also have changed “the laws of attraction” between the sexes, according to a new study.

10/5/2009 4:00 AM

 http://www.foxnews.com

It's 'Rape-Rape', Whoopi

Roman Polanski diabolically lured a 13-year-old child to a remote area where he knew she would be powerless. Whoopi Goldberg is wrong. The director committed a rape under every legal definition-- both here and in Europe.

This week, on ABC's "The View," co-host and comedian Whoopi Goldberg had the audacity to suggest that Roman Polanski's 1977 sexual assault on a 13-year old girl wasn't 'actual rape.'
 

Contrary to what Goldberg suggested, what happened to Polanski's victim was rape...and yes, it was in fact what she sophomorically referred to as 'rape-rape,' or what prosecutors properly call forcible rape. According to original police transcripts, Polanski's victim told investigators that she initially resisted him, but finally stopped because she was "afraid of him."

That's forcible rape.

Polanski deceived a 13-year old child by lying to her and telling her he wanted to interview her for a modeling job in Jack Nicholson's home, and once she was there alone with him he intimidated her from leaving and illegally gave her alcohol and part of a Quaalude drug. By the standard of every aforementioned European country and all definitions of sexual relations under the law in the United States, Polanski's actions constituted rape.

Roman Polanski diabolically lured a 13-year old child to a remote area where he knew she would be powerless. He used his mental and physical advantage over her to intoxicate and drug her and then sexually violate her in every possible way that the law prohibits.

He deserves to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

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http://www.nytimes.com

Census Data Show Recession-Driven Changes
A smaller share of Americans married, drove to work alone, owned their own home or moved to a new residence last year than the year before.

More lived in overcrowded housing. Property values declined. And fewer immigrants arrived, which meant that for the first time since the beginning of the decade, the total number of foreign-born people in the country did not grow.
 

The proportion of people lacking health insurance ranged from 4 percent in Massachusetts to 24 percent in Texas.

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9/16/2009 9:00 AM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

 US credit shrinks at Great Depression rate prompting fears of double-dip recession

Both bank credit and the M3 money supply in the United States have been contracting at rates comparable to the onset of the Great Depression since early summer, raising fears of a double-dip recession in 2010 and a slide into debt-deflation.

Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said US bank loans have fallen at an annual pace of almost 14pc in the three months to August (from $7,147bn to $6,886bn).

"There has been nothing like this in the USA since the 1930s," he said. "The rapid destruction of money balances is madness."

The M3 "broad" money supply, watched as an early warning signal for the economy a year or so later, has been falling at a 5pc annual rate.

Similar concerns have been raised by David Rosenberg, chief strategist at Gluskin Sheff, who said that over the four weeks up to August 24, bank credit shrank at an "epic" 9pc annual pace, the M2 money supply shrank at 12.2pc and M1 shrank at 6.5pc.

"For the first time in the post-WW2 [Second World War] era, we have deflation in credit, wages and rents and, from our lens, this is a toxic brew," he said.

It is unclear why the US Federal Reserve has allowed this to occur.

Chairman Ben Bernanke is an expert on the "credit channel" causes of depressions and has given eloquent speeches about the risks of deflation in the past.

He is not a monetary economist, however, and there are indications that the Fed has had to pare back its policy of quantitative easing (buying bonds) in order to reassure China and other foreign creditors that the US is not trying to devalue its debts by stealth monetisation.

Mr Congdon said a key reason for credit contraction is pressure on banks to raise their capital ratios. While this is well-advised in boom times, it makes matters worse in a downturn.

"The current drive to make banks less leveraged and safer is having the perverse consequence of destroying money balances," he said. "It strengthens the deflationary forces in the world economy. That increases the risks of a double-dip recession in 2010."

Referring to the debt-purge policy of US Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon in the early 1930s, he added: "The pressure on banks to de-risk and to de-leverage is the modern version of liquidationism: it is potentially just as dangerous."

US banks are cutting lending by around 1pc a month. A similar process is occurring in the eurozone, where private sector credit has been contracting and M3 has been flat for almost a year.

Mr Congdon said IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is wrong to argue that the history of financial crises shows that "speedy recovery" depends on "cleansing banks' balance sheets of toxic assets". "The message of all financial crises is that policy-makers' priority must be to stop the quantity of money falling and, ideally, to get it rising again," he said.

He predicted that the Federal Reserve and other central banks will be forced to engage in outright monetisation of government debt by next year, whatever they say now.

--

http://tehranbureau.com/nuclear/

 

Farsi provides a multi-dimensionality that allows its speakers to deny truth in a most truthful way.

Dispatch from Tehran | 10 Sept 2009

[TEHRAN BUREAU] Over the years, everyone has heard the chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” coming from the streets of Tehran, but those outside Iran never hear those chanting in the streets as they laugh and tease the organizers about the quality of the tea being served on the parade routes, or how after a while, the chant becomes all about how the chanters wish Iran was more like the United States. In Farsi, “Death to” takes enough of one’s breath that one has to take a second breath to utter “America.”

The brainwashing force of Farsi is so overwhelming that even our most eloquent poets and writers used it in code and with hesitation so as to not reveal all the powers to the uninitiated. Farsi and Iran are like trapped lovers who use the chains that bind them together in such a delicate way so as to not let non-native speakers see how one uses the other to describe the trappings that each feels.

Persians claim their language as the source of their strength, as the sweetness of their lives, and yet they also suffer from the power it imposes upon them. Iran has suffered much because Farsi provides a multi-dimensionality, a language that allows its speakers to deny truth in a most truthful way. Its speakers use the language to describe their ideals and pride themselves in achieving those ideals through lying about them.

One may think it simply as propaganda, but it is Farsi’s magical dimensions that allow propaganda to take on powers that other languages could only hope for. As recently as two years ago, the street chants in Tehran claimed, “Atomic energy is our undeniable right,” which seems simple enough. However, when repeated in Farsi the emphasis shifts to “our undeniable right” and the rest does not matter because the focus is on the “our… right” and a lot of people educated or not can be attracted to their “right.”

These days in Tehran and most large cities in Iran, the chants of “God is Great” — “Allah o Akbar” — is heard starting at 10 p.m. from many rooftops. It is in Arabic but the chanters have chosen well since it says to those who speak Farsi of the strength of our beliefs in our “rights” and has nothing to do with our religiosity. Since the ruling religious hierarchy cannot deny the chant or prohibit it, the religious elites undoubtedly shake in their hearts when they hear it or worse yet when they have to repeat it themselves, as this revolutionary chant has been turned against the teachers by the students.

Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini and President Ahmadinejad are two of the finest examples of how the use of Farsi can be the most powerful tool of public manipulation. One spoke and one speaks Farsi at a 5th or 6th grade level; both men made sure their native accents were not hidden or corrected; and, they both made sure their audiences heard of their humility, which can be done masterfully in Farsi and with great impact. Their use of nuance is almost zero. Nuances are for a different class of Farsi speakers who are not their audience. They combine their peaceful declaration with loud and hearty threats against foreign powers that are presented as the single source of misery of all Iranians.

These days, Farsi writers inside and outside Iran, pro and con, are at it again. They are writing to report the truth or maybe to cover up the truth. Farsi at its best is courteous and genteel. Native Farsi speakers who have been reading the articles and stories about Iran in recent weeks are often amazed at how this writer or that writer describes his point of view and then makes sure that it comes out as the only truth. They attack each other with respect and the chivalry of 17th century Europe. They write for an intelligentsia who has long forgotten Iran in the comfort of their villas in Tehran or southern California, and yet they write of the tears for the youth and deceit by the elders in power.

The power elite in Iran also write in Farsi but for a totally different audience. They write about the “Velvet revolution” in a way that makes a man think twice about his wife wearing velvet since it would mean being molested by a stranger and worse yet a foreigner. They write about righteousness and virtues as simply water for cleaning one’s hand and as a place to rest one’s head. And they write for the analysts at the foreign service offices of western countries hoping to manipulate them in ways that the poor analyst must know and suffer from by now.

What the power elite and their writers here have not yet figured out is that soon or later righteousness and virtuosity show their double-edges and then who knows even the “wretched of the earth,” as Frantz Fanon called them, or the Mostazafin, as the “Islamic Republic of Iran” calls them, will come to understand the multi-dimensionality of Farsi.

As they say here everywhere, “Ensha Allah,” which is the Arabic for “God willing,” but understood here in Farsi as “God Wanting!”

Copyright © 2009 Tehran Bureau

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http://beyondgrowth.net/

 

How Do I Stay Motivated? The Heuristics of Solving Life’s Little Problems

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9/2/2009 10:12 AM

 

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/

 

The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine

So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality."

If that 80 percent number rings a bell, it's because of the famous Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. And it happens to be a recurring theme in Good Enough products. You can think of it this way: 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment often delivers 80 percent of the value to consumers. That means you can drastically simplify a product or service in order to make it more accessible and still keep 80 percent of what users want—making it Good Enough—which is exactly what Kaiser did.

When asked why he thinks the Flip has succeeded where more powerful videocams—and even new Flip knockoffs from the likes of Sony—have failed, Pure Digital's Fleming-Wood has an interesting answer: "I think it's because we have a better product." What's odd is that executives at Sony and Canon would likely say the same thing—after all, their models have far more features and often produce sharper images. But Fleming-Wood is using a different definition of "better." He now defines quality entirely in terms of ease of use—how easy it is to shoot and share the video. "The one thing everyone wants to do with their footage is show it to someone else," he says.

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8/25/2009 12:29 PM

 

http://ow.ly/kFfp

 

The most common causes of death due to injury in the United States

The table is derived from the National Safety Council's data on accidents. There are four columns:

Column 1: Manner of injury
Column 2: Total number of deaths nationwide due to the manner of injury for the year 2000
Column 3: Odds of dying in one year due to the manner of injury [i.e. 1 in 46,901 chance of dying as a Pedestrian]
Column 4: Odds of dying over the course of a lifetime due to the manner of injury [i.e. 1 in 610 chance of dying as a Pedestrian]

For more interesting statistics visit danger.mongabay.com

 

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8/15/2009 2:34 AM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8199951.stm

Facial expressions 'not global'
East West differences in Emoticons
Emotion      West      East
'Happy'          :-)       (^_^)
'Sad'             :-(        (;_;) or (T_T)
'Surprise'       :-o       (o.o)

--

8/14/2009 3:59 PM

 

http://www.usnews.com/

 

Why a Housing Rebound Could Take 20 Years

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8/4/2009 3:12 AM

 

http://www.breitbart.com/

 

Prostitutes better than officials in China: survey

 

Prostitutes are considered more trustworthy in China than government officials and scientists, a recent survey of more than 3,000 respondents showed.

 

7/26/2009 5:36 AM

 

http://howto.wired.com/

 

Reinvent Yourself Online

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7/21/2009 10:33 AM

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine

 

The 25 Greatest Legal TV Shows

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7/18/2009 2:05 PM

http://www.jpost.com/

 'I wed Iranian girls before execution'

In a shocking and unprecedented interview, directly exposing the inhumanity of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's religious regime in Iran, a serving member of the paramilitary Basiji militia has told this reporter of his role in suppressing opposition street protests in recent weeks.

 He has also detailed aspects of his earlier service in the force, including his enforced participation in the rape of young Iranian girls prior to their execution.

The interview took place by telephone, and on condition of anonymity. It was arranged by a reliable source whose identity can also not be revealed.

Founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 as a "people's militia," the volunteer Basiji force is subordinate to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and intensely loyal to Khomeini's successor, Khamenei.

RELATED

• Rafsanjani: Clear up Iranian election doubts

The Basiji member, who is married with children, spoke soon after his release by the Iranian authorities from detention. He had been held for the "crime" of having set free two Iranian teenagers - a 13-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl - who had been arrested during the disturbances that have followed the disputed June presidential elections.

"There have been many other police and members of the security forces arrested because they have shown leniency toward the protesters out on the streets, or released them from custody without consulting our superiors," he said.

He pinned the blame for much of the most ruthless violence employed by the Iranian security apparatus against opposition protesters on what he called "imported security forces" - recruits, as young as 14 and 15, he said, who have been brought from small villages into the bigger cities where the protests have been centered.

"Fourteen and 15-year old boys are given so much power, which I am sorry to say they have abused," he said. "These kids do anything they please - forcing people to empty out their wallets, taking whatever they want from stores without paying, and touching young women inappropriately. The girls are so frightened that they remain quiet and let them do what they want."

These youngsters, and other "plainclothes vigilantes," were committing most of the crimes in the names of the regime, he said.

Asked about his own role in the brutal crackdowns on the protesters, whether he had been beaten demonstrators and whether he regretted his actions, he answered evasively.

"I did not attack any of the rioters - and even if I had, it is my duty to follow orders," he began. "I don't have any regrets," he went on, "except for when I worked as a prison guard during my adolescence."

Explaining how he had come to join the volunteer Basiji forces, he said his mother had taken him to them.

When he was 16, "my mother took me to a Basiji station and begged them to take me under their wing because I had no one and nothing foreseeable in my future. My father was martyred during the war in Iraq and she did not want me to get hooked on drugs and become a street thug. I had no choice," he said.

He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so "impressed my superiors" that, at 18, "I was given the 'honor' to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death."

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her "husband."

"I regret that, even though the marriages were legal," he said.

Why the regret, if the marriages were "legal?"

"Because," he went on, "I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.

"I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over," he said. "I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her."

Returning to the events of the last few weeks, and his decision to set free the two teenage detainees, he said he "honestly" did not know why he had released them, a decision that led to his own arrest, "but I think it was because they were so young. They looked like children and I knew what would happen to them if they weren't released."

He said that while a man is deemed "responsible for his own actions at 13, for a woman it is 9," and that it was freeing the 15-year-old girl that "really got me in trouble.

"I was not mistreated or really interrogated while being detained," he said. "I was put in a tiny room and left alone. It was hard being isolated, so I spent most of my time praying and thinking about my wife and kids."

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http://www.nytimes.com/

 French Workers Use Threat to Obtain Severance Pay

BORDEAUX, France (Reuters) — A group of French workers facing layoffs obtained extra money after threatening to blow up industrial equipment at their plant, labor union representatives said on Friday.

The workers, at JLG, a manufacturing company, were the third in France to make similar threats this month, after workers from Nortel, the telecommunications equipment maker, and New Fabris, a car parts maker.

JLG workers at three plants in southwestern France had been on strike for three weeks over a management plan to lay off 53 of them. After hearing news of the threats made at Nortel and New Fabris, they followed suit.

On Wednesday, the JLG workers placed four of the company’s products — large platform cranes with a total value estimated at $352,400 — in a car park and surrounded them with gas cylinders and kindling.

After talks that lasted well into Thursday night, management met their demand that laid-off workers receive 30,000 euros, or about $42,300, in compensation, and the strikers removed the gas cylinders and returned the cranes to the factory, said Christian Amadio, a JLG worker representative.

At Nortel, talks with management resumed, while workers at New Fabris are still threatening to blow up their factory.

Such threats signal a new escalation in tactics used by disgruntled French workers after episodes in which managers were detained by employees on company premises.

Authorities have used tough language to denounce such actions but have refrained from sending in the police to break up protests. France has a history of labor unrest, and the government wants to avoid an escalation of violence.

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http://finance.yahoo.com

 California sprouts 'green rush' from marijuana

California sprouts marijuana 'green rush' amid calls for legalization, taxation

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A drug deal plays out, California-style: A conservatively dressed courier drives a company-leased Smart Car to an apartment on a weekday afternoon. Erick Alvaro hands over a white paper bag to his 58-year-old customer, who inspects the bag to ensure everything he ordered over the phone is there.

An eighth-ounce of organic marijuana buds for treating his seasonal allergies? Check. An eighth of a different pot strain for insomnia? Check. THC-infused lozenges and tea bags? Check and check, with a free herb-laced cookie thrown in as a thank-you gift.

It's a $102 credit card transaction carried out with the practiced efficiency of a home-delivered pizza -- and with just about as much legal scrutiny.

More and more, having premium pot delivered to your door in California is not a crime. It is a legitimate business.

Marijuana has transformed California. Since the state became the first to legalize the drug for medicinal use, the weed the federal government puts in the same category as heroin and cocaine has become a major economic force.

No longer relegated to the underground, pot in California these days props up local economies, mints millionaires and feeds a thriving industry of startups designed to grow, market and distribute the drug.

Based on the quantity of marijuana authorities seized last year, the crop was worth an estimated $17 billion or more, dwarfing any other sector of the state's agricultural economy.

Experts say most of that marijuana is still sold as a recreational drug on the black market. But more recently the plant has put down deep financial roots in highly visible, taxpaying businesses:

Stores that sell high-tech marijuana growing equipment. Pot clubs that pay rent and hire workers. Marijuana themed magazines and food products. Chains of for-profit clinics with doctors who specialize in medical marijuana recommendations.

The plant's prominence does not come without costs, say some critics. Marijuana plantations in remote forests cause severe environmental damage. Indoor grow houses in some towns put rentals beyond the reach of students and young families. Rural counties with declining economies cannot attract new businesses because the available work force is caught up in the pot industry. Authorities link the drug to violent crime in otherwise quiet small towns.

"For those of us who are on the front lines, it's not about pot is bad in itself or drugs are bad," said Meredith Lintott, district attorney in Mendocino County, one of the country's top marijuana-producing regions.

"It's about the negative consequences on children. It's about the negative consequences on the environment."

Still, the sheer scale of the overall pot economy has some lawmakers pushing for broader legalization as a way to shore up the finances of a state that has teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. The state's top tax collector estimates that taxing pot like liquor could bring in more than $1.3 billion annually.

On Tuesday, Oakland will consider a measure to tax the city's four marijuana dispensaries, which the city auditor projects will ring up $17.5 million in sales in 2010. The city faces an $83 million budget shortfall, and expects the marijuana tax to raise $315,000.

Advocates point out that making pot legal would create millions if not billions of dollars more in indirect sales -- the ingredients used to make edible pot products, advertising, tourism and smoking paraphernalia.

With a recent poll showing more than half of Californians supporting legalization, pot advocates believe they will prevail. And they say other states will follow.

Tim Blake is the proprietor of a 145-acre spiritual retreat center which holds an annual marijuana bud-growing contest in the heart of Northern California's pot-growing country.

Politicians, he says, are "going to see the economic benefits, they're going to see the health benefits and they're going to jump on the bandwagon."

On a property flanked by vineyards, Mendocino County farmer Jim Hill grows marijuana for up to 20 patients, including himself and his wife. He believes passionately in marijuana's purported ability to treat the symptoms of diseases ranging from cancer to Alzheimer's; he says his wife suffers from a serotonin imbalance, and he uses the drug to treat digestive problems and intestinal cramping.

Hill's plants enjoy careful nurturing in a temperature-controlled greenhouse. On a recent spring day, his college-age son spread bat guano to fertilize two dozen 6-foot-tall plants.

Hill is 45 years old; he says he spent $10,000 to set up the garden. Patients receive their drugs free in exchange for helping with his crop.

"It's kind of like living on an apple orchard," Hill said. "You don't pay for an apple."

Though marijuana is cultivated throughout California, the most prized crops come from the forested mountains and hidden valleys of Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties -- the Emerald Triangle.

The economic impact of so much pot is difficult to gauge. Authorities say the largest grows are run by Mexican drug cartels that simply funnel money from forest-raised crops back into their own bank accounts.

Still, marijuana money from outdoor and indoor plots inevitably flows into local coffers. Marijuana increases residents' retail buying power by about $58 million countywide, according to a Mendocino County report. The county ranks 48th out of 58 counties in median income but, by counting pot proceeds, could jump as high as 18th.

Businesses benefit from mom-and-pop growers who cultivate pot to supplement their incomes and from marijuana plantation workers who descend on the Emerald Triangle from all over the country for the fall harvest. Pot "trimmers" can earn more than $40 per hour.

In Ukiah, the county's largest city, business owners say the extra cash is crucial. "I really don't think we would exist without it," says Nicole Martensen, 37, whose wine and garden shop is stocked with bottles from county vintners.

The skunk-like smell of marijuana hangs over the town of about 11,000 during the October harvest, when cash registers brim with $100 bills. Sometimes the wads of cash spent in Martensen's shop come dusted with pot.

But Ukiah banker Marty Lombardi says existing businesses cannot compete with pot industry wages for workers. Lombardi's bank does not make loans to anyone suspected of trying to fund a pot operation, but he said most growers do not need them.

"I don't think you or I have any sense for how much money is generated," he said.

Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman says medical marijuana operations that follow state and county laws will face no hassles from his department. His deputies left intact 154 marijuana grows they visited last year, he said

"If you're living in the boundaries, I'm not going to mess with you," Allman said.

Which is not to say that there is no legal risk to growing, selling or buying marijuana. Federal laws still apply, and pot dealings not deemed medicinal are considered criminal by the state.

Local, state and federal authorities pulled up 364,000 plants across Mendocino last year. And the state Department of Justice reported more than 16,000 felony arrests and nearly 58,000 misdemeanor arrests for marijuana offenses in 2007 -- the highest numbers in a decade.

Sparky Rose sits in the federal prison in Lompoc, serving a 37-month term. Law enforcement officials insist he is one of many sellers who have used the medical marijuana law as a guise for old-time drug dealing. Rose does not disagree, although he would like to think he helped some legitimate pot patients in the process.

A one-time Web designer, he started out in 2001 making $15 an hour as a "bud tender" working the counter at an Oakland club. Four years later, he was overseeing a dispensary chain with stores in seven cities, 283 employees and sales reaching $5 million a month.

That's not as much as it seems, he says. Much of the money went to pay salaries, to purchase equipment and to buy 200 pounds of marijuana each week.

Rose says he was making $500,000 a year before his 2006 arrest, a sum he considers fair given the chain's volume and the risk he assumed as the company's public face. Before opening a new location, he would meet with local officials and police to get their implicit OK.

"We operated out in the open, and the feds knew who we were and they let us do it for four years, so as time goes on you get this comfortable feeling," he says.

"While I was still in the business, a lot people would ask me, 'I'm thinking about starting a club, what advice do you have?' "And I'd say, 'The biggest warning is sooner or later, you will start to think it's legal.'"

Even people accustomed to buying marijuana over the counter are impressed when they visit the Farmacy, a dispensary-cum-New Age apothecary with three locations in Los Angeles. Decorated in soft beige and staffed by workers in lab coats, the Venice store sells organic toiletries, essential oils and incense along with 25 types of pot stored in glass jars, including strains such as Beverly Bubba and Third Eye.

Anyone can shop there, but to buy the cannabis-infused gelato, olive oil, soft drinks and other "edibles," customers must show a doctor's recommendation, have the information verified by the doctor's office and obtain a patient identification number for future visits.

During a two-hour span, the dozen or so customers who made a purchase all bought pot products and paid the 9.25 percent state sales tax on top of their purchases. The clubs, which are not supposed to turn a profit, call their transactions "donations."

Allen Siegel is 74; he is dying of cancer and wants to try smoking marijuana to ease his pain without knocking him out like prescription drugs do. So his wife, Ina, brought him to the Farmacy for his first visit as a legal pot patient.

"You go in there and they have so many choices," she says.

California's "green rush" was spurred by a voter-approved law 13 years ago that authorized patients with a doctor's recommendation to possess and cultivate marijuana for personal use. Although a dozen other states have adopted similar laws, California is the only one where privately owned pot shops have flourished.

Los Angeles County alone has more than 400 pot dispensaries and delivery services, nearly twice as many outlets as Amsterdam, the Netherlands capital whose coffee shops have for decades been synonymous with free-market marijuana.

Promoted as a way to shield people with AIDS, cancer and anorexia who use marijuana from prosecution, the 1996 Compassionate Use Act also permitted limited possession for "any other illness for which marijuana provides relief."

The broad language opened the door to doctors willing to recommend pot for nearly any ailment. In a survey of nearly 2,500 patients, longtime Berkeley medical marijuana advocate Dr. Tod Mikuriya found that almost three-quarters of the patients used the drug for pain relief or mental health issues.

Dispensaries began selling marijuana, although they were risking federal charges. Some operators have become less fearful since U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said this year that the Justice Department would not target pot operations following state laws, reducing the risk of random federal raids that existed under the Bush administration.

California's pot dispensaries now have more in common with a corner grocery than a speakeasy. They advertise freely, offering discount coupons and daily specials.

Justin Hartfield, a 25-year-old Web designer and business student, founded WeedMaps.com, where pot clubs and doctors who write medi-pot recommendations list their services and users post reviews. Hartfield says the year-old site brought in $20,000 this month, an amount he expects to double in August.

Hartfield exhibited at THC Expo, a two-day trade show at the Los Angeles Convention Center that attracted an estimated 35,000 attendees in June. There was hydroponic gardening equipment and bong vendors and bikini-clad models wearing leis made of fake marijuana leaves.

Like just about everyone else connected to the cannabis trade, Hartfield has a letter from a doctor that entitles him to buy medical marijuana from a dispensary. But he sees no point in pretending he is treating anything more than his taste for smoking weed.

"It is a joke. It's a legal way for me to get what I used to get on the street," he said.

He recalls telling the doctor who provided the referral that he suffered from insomnia and anxiety, though neither was true. As he signed the paperwork, the doctor "congratulated me like I was getting my degree from Harvard."

What would happen if marijuana was legal -- not just for medical uses, but for all uses?

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, wants the state to tax and regulate all pot as it does alcohol. State Board of Equalization chairwoman Betty Yee, a supporter, projects the law would generate $990 million annually through a $50-per-ounce fee for retailers and $392 million in sales taxes. (The state now collects $18 million each year in taxes on medical marijuana.)

The state would not start collecting taxes on marijuana under Ammiano's bill until the federal government lifts its restrictions on the drug.

That's not enough for pro-pot activists who want Californians to vote next year on a proposal that would allow adults to legally possess up to one ounce of pot and allow cities to sell and tax the drug.

"Local governments are malnourished and in need of revenue badly," said Aaron Smith, state policy director for the Marijuana Policy Project, which advocates legalization. "There's this multibillion-dollar industry that's the elephant in the room that they're not able to tap into."

Lintott, the Mendocino prosecutor, is not convinced that legalization would put an end to the underworld's marijuana operations. She argues that big-time growers would never bother filing tax returns. "Legalizing it isn't going to touch the big money," she says.

But others predict the black-market business model would fall apart.

Large-scale agri-businesses in California's Central Valley would dominate legal marijuana production as they already do bulk wine grapes, advocates argue. Pot prices would fall dramatically, forcing growers to abandon costly clandestine operations that authorities say trash the land and steal scarce water.

And legalization, supporters insist, would save state and local governments billions on police, court and prison costs.

But others survey California in 2009 and say the cannabis future is now. Richard Lee has parlayed a pair of Oakland dispensaries into a mini-empire that includes a marijuana lifestyle magazine, an "adult consumption" club, a starter plant nursery and a three-campus marijuana trade school. Oaksterdam University's main campus is a prominent fixture in revitalized downtown Oakland.

All without legalization.

"It's like here's reality, and here's the law," Lee says. "The culture has gone so far beyond the law, people have gotten used to being able to get quality product. They are not going to go back."

--

http://www.wired.com/

 Alt Text: Genius Strategies for Defanging Web’s Harshest Critics

One of the great things about the web is that it’s full of creative professionals and talented amateurs just bursting to exchange insight and experience with anyone looking to make comics, write stories, play music or just take their clothes off for money.

However, before you run out to seek their criticism, remember the main danger: They might criticize you. With this step-by-step guide, you should be able to shrug off the worst of their wisdom and continue on your personal artistic quest trajectory, no matter where it’s aimed.

1. Don’t wait!
Why bother actually completing something before you let people tell you how great it is? Your genius should be clear from a couple paragraphs, or a handful of rough sketches, or even a vague description of the kick-ass story you’re going to tell. Just explaining that you’re going to write the best story ever about a gender-bending vampire wizard should be enough for even the harshest critic to throw accolades your way.

2. Insist on constructive criticism
It’s important to distinguish between constructive criticism and mere insults. Here are some examples of venomous, unhelpful put-downs:

• You need to work on perspective and anatomy.
• Don’t use run-on sentences.
• Your story is just Harry Potter, except Harry’s a vampire who changes gender when he gets wet.

On the other hand, here’s some actual constructive criticism:

• I can’t believe you haven’t been published!
• You should write more of these right now!
• This is great!

3. Set your limits
It’s important to let people know what parts of your work you won’t change, so they won’t bother criticizing it. For instance, you might say: “I’m writing an original story about a Jebi knight named Lucas Starwalker who fights an evil imperial overlord named Darthon Vaderon who turns out to actually be his father. I’m not going to change the plot, the setting, the characters or the names, but aside from that let me know if there’s anything I can do to make my story even more awesome!”

4. Defend yourself
True artists will never respect you if you don’t defend your work against all comers. The proper response to any criticism is to carefully explain why they’re wrong and you’re right. If you can use logic and rhetoric to prove your work is perfect, then it is!

5. Consider the source
It’s possible that you’ll find your work analyzed by someone with genuine talent and years of experience. This is a stroke of luck for you, because you can safely ignore them. After all, they obviously consider you competition and will do anything to discourage you from horning in on their turf. You can also dismiss anyone who isn’t a professional, because if they’re so smart, why are they still stocking shelves at Best Buy? By process of elimination, you can conclude that your best critics are your grandmother and those motivational posters about how dreams are like eagles.

6. Aim for the minimum
If you can’t convince your critics that you’re amazing, you may have to fall back on a simple, irrefutable excuse: You weren’t trying very hard. Emphasize that you really didn’t put much time and energy into your effort and that you aren’t trying to make something that’s actually any good. With any luck, your critics will compromise and admit that your work is completely amazing considering how lazy and untalented you are.

7. The element of style
If all else fails, there’s one phrase that makes you immune to the criticism you asked for: “It’s my style.” Like the ultimate technique in every martial arts story you’ve written, there’s no way to counter it. Do your characters have limbs of inconsistent length that bend in anatomically unlikely ways? Do your faces look like a poorly applied temporary tattoo of a crayon sketch of a Naruto rip-off? Do your characters talk like someone ran World of Warcraft quest text through a LOLcats translator? Congratulations, you’ve invented your own style!

If you’ve followed the instructions here, it should be clear that you’re a genius who doesn’t need critical validation. If only you could convince the critics of that.

--

7/17/2009 10:37 PM

 http://www.guardian.co.uk

 Martin Amis: The end of Iran's ayatollahs?

In Shia eschatology the Mahdi will return during a period of great tribulation (during, say, a nuclear war), will deliver the faithful from injustice and oppression, and will then supervise the Day of Judgment. Not only Ahmadinejad but members of his cabinet have been giving the Hidden Imam "about four years" – well within the president's second term. And where has the Hidden Imam dwelt since the ninth century? In "occultation", wherever that may be. The Hidden Imam is at least intelligibly called the Lord of Time: he is 1,100 years old.

Rule number one: no theocracy can ever deploy nuclear arms. And Iran, we respectfully suggest, is not yet ready for the force that drives the sun. We all know what Ahmadinejad thinks of Israel (and we remember his Islamists' conference, or his goons' rodeo, in Tehran, on the historicity of the Holocaust). Yet this is what Ali Rafsanjani thinks of Israel – Rafsanjani, the old, much-jailed revolutionary chancer, a pragmatist and reformer, hugely worldly, hugely venal: "The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything", whereas a counterstrike on Iran will merely "harm" the Islamic world; "it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality". Indeed, given the Shia commitment to martyrdom, mutual assured destruction, as one Israeli official put it, "is not a deterrent. It's an incentive."

Nuclear weapons, it seems, were sent down here to furnish mankind with a succession of excruciating dilemmas. Until recently the mullahs' quest for the H-bomb seemed partly containable: the nuclear powers could give face to Tehran, and begin to scale back their arsenals towards the zero option. But now those powers include North Korea (already the land of the living dead); and the Islamic Republic, in any case, no longer seems appeasable. Equipped with weapons of fission or fusion, the supreme leader may delegate first use to Hezbollah, or to the Call of Islam, or to the Legion of the Pure. Or he may himself become the first suicide bomber to be gauged in megatons.

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http://iranpoliticsclub.net/

sex after death in islam

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124726981104525893.html

Inside the Iranian Crackdown

When the Unrest Flared, the Ayatollah's Enforcers Took to the Streets of Tehran With Batons and Zeal

For Mr. Moradani, the biggest shock during the election turmoil came in his personal life. He had recently gotten engaged to a young woman from a devout, conservative family. A week into the protests, he says, his fiancée called him with an ultimatum. If he didn't leave the Basij and stop supporting Mr. Ahmadinejad, he recalls her saying, she wouldn't marry him.

He told her that was impossible. "I suffered a real emotional blow," he says. "She said to me, 'Go beat other people's children then,' and 'I don't want to have anything to do with you,' and hung up on me."

She returned the ring he gave her, and hasn't returned his phone calls.

 "The opposition has even fooled my fiancée," he says.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8147534.stm

Snooping through the power socket

Power sockets can be used to eavesdrop on what people type on a computer.

Security researchers found that poor shielding on some keyboard cables means useful data can be leaked about each character typed.

By analysing the information leaking onto power circuits, the researchers could see what a target was typing.

The attack has been demonstrated to work at a distance of up to 15m, but refinement may mean it could work over much longer distances.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8147566.stm

Cats 'exploit' humans by purring
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http://www.gapingvoid.com/

 

Hugh MacLeod (right) became Internet-famous by drawing cartoons on the back of business cards and publishing them online at his Gaping Void blog. Along the way, he gained some valuable insights into marketing and creativity which he also happily shared with readers; that was enough to attract the attention of the Portfolio imprint at Penguin Group, which recently published MacLeod's first book, Ignore Everybody.

Now, one of MacLeod's friends (and inspirations) happens to be Seth Godin—if you've been reading GalleyCat long enough, you know we're right there with him on that—and back in April, MacLeod drew a version of the cover to Godin's Purple Cow (on a much bigger surface than a business card). "To me the book, as a totem, as an icon, represents a huge shift in thinking that came along, almost uninvited, back in the early 2000's," MacLeod emailed Godin shortly after. "The drawing represents [to me] my own ability to internalize it." By the end of the month, he was taking orders for limited-edition prints which he flew into New York City earlier this week to sign alongside Godin. The pre-order price for the prints was $495, but if you want one now, it'll set you back $1,100.

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http://www.online-publishers.org/?pg=activity

 

Apr09 May09 %Chg Commerce 13.3% 12.8% 3.8 Communications 26.4% 26.3% 0.4 Community 13.7% 14.5% 5.8 Content 41.3% 41.1% 0.5 Search 5.3% 5.3% -

 

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7/10/2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk

Iran protests: 'They have covered up the deaths'
This is an account by a doctor working in Tehran who says the death toll from the protests following Iran's disputed election is much higher than the official figure of 20. His account is published as part of the Guardian's project to trace those killed and detained during the unrest. The Guardian has been unable to independently verify his account
Thursday 9 July 2009 12.25 BST
 

Faces of those dead and detained in the protests. Photograph: guardian.co.uk
 

I have been working in a public hospital in Tehran over the last few weeks. The authorities are covering up the number of dead protesters and their causes of death.

The official statistic is 20 dead – that's wrong. In our hospital alone there were 38 riot deaths in the first week. Most died from gunshot wounds.
 

A colleague told me that in his hospital there were a further 36 gunshot casualties and 10 deaths. Four public hospitals admitted wounded protesters during the riots, but it is hard to know the total figures of dead. Other hospitals were prevented from helping. Basiji militiamen attacked doormen in one hospital for letting in wounded protesters. In the hospitals that were allowed to function, the basijis replaced the hospital admissions staff and took the IDs of wounded patients.
 

Medical staff are under huge pressure to cover up the injuries they treated; I know one doctor who killed themself.
 

If the patients died of gunshot wounds the basiji confiscated their bodies and told the families they had been "transferred" for organ donation. They removed the bullets and returned the bodies with a different postmortem report. By the second week the basiji were better organised and took the bodies directly from the streets. There were many dead the hospitals never saw.
 

As for the injuries, they speak for themselves. There were multiple points of gunshot impact – proving the authorities were shooting liberally. Their victims were indiscriminate.
 

Two pregnant women were shot – one through the spleen, she survived and the other died. For the latter, the authorities say a photograph of her circulating the internet had been taken in another country, but that's not correct. She was wounded, treated and died in Tehran. They shot her three times. One bullet penetrated the foetus's spine.
 

How can a doctor lie on his medical records after operating on a case like that?
 

Many of my friends and my cousin even (who was wounded) saw snipers up on the rooftops during the protests. They said these snipers were targeting people through their rifle lenses. The injuries we witnessed in hospital testify to this. One 32-year-old patient had gunshot impact entering the sub-umbilical region with an exit wound on the thigh, which proves the bullet came from above.
 

Many protesters also saw foreign basiji; they were yelling "Arab" as they attacked us. They were not speaking Persian. We do not know who these fighters were.
 

Together with the basiji on the bikes, wearing civilian clothing – these were the violent ones. Others were young conscript boys, mostly from the provinces, wielding rubber anti-riot batons and Palestinian scarves. They made jokes as though they didn't really understand what they were doing. But their leaders were different, they looked you in the eye and they knew you didn't support them. You felt like a permanent target.
 

From what I have seen and heard, this medical cover-up has been happening all over the country. But unofficially, medical staff report dead in Isfahan, in Shiraz, in many places. Like here, the authorities are making sure the hospitals don't reveal the numbers.
 

And they want the people to keep quiet, too.
 

Even in the south of Tehran, among families of the martyrs from the Iran/Iraq war, the old revolutionaries, people don't agree with this violence. In the hospitals they tell us they don't believe in Ahmadinejad any more but are forced to pretend otherwise because they are employed by the state.
 

Whoever you are in Iran and whatever you do, it is easy to doubt yourself. Many of us who witnessed this state aggression, watch Iranian news and listen to the authorities and start to question what we saw. The bias is so great you begin to feel isolated, question what you witnessed.
 

At night, the basiji swept the riot zones and cleared away evidence. They want us to think nothing happened. They want us to be blind.
 

Now it seems Michael Jackson's death has made the world forget Iran.
 

But the number of disappeared continues to increase here. First they were taken by the police and basiji during the protests – and now in the house raids that happen night after night. It is getting harder and harder to protest, no matter how many ways we invent to show our frustration.
 

Between 10pm and 10.30pm some Mousavi supporters still stand on their roofs to yell "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest). In 1979, the revolutionaries did the same and claimed they could see Khomenei on the moon to guide them.
 

Now we are not so superstitious, but the darkness is overwhelming. There are fewer voices every night.
 

The authorities are tracking everybody. They are confiscating mobile phones for contact details, they are tracing computer IDs of people who used Twitter or Facebook. I have friends who have been arrested – people who had just come from Europe to work for a couple of weeks and got caught up in the violence. It is all such a mess. We haven't heard from most of them.
 

Prison is a question of luck. If you get arrested by the basiji and taken to a basiji centre – that's the worst. The basiji are not supposed to have centres of their own, they are meant to deliver to the prisons, but they have their own rooms – and that's the most dangerous place to be.
 

Then there's Evin prison. I have one cousin who was taken there for the last student uprising. There is a huge empty room where they ask you to identify protesters. If they sense you are afraid, they force you into confessing anything and identifying anybody. It's not so much what you say as the fact they debased you.
 

Most protesters are moved from prison to prison, so they become untraceable.

Knowing the cover-up in the hospitals, I worry many protesters might be "untraceable" forever.

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http://tehranbureau.com/blood/

My friend, a 26-year-old student, was on the streets last week. She’s now home with a broken arm and a broken leg. And the only reason she’s home and not at the morgue is because she had a deodorant spray in her bag.

“I saw hell right before my eyes last week,” she told me. “You can never, ever imagine the sight of a huge man beating you to death.”

Fighting on the streets is now useless, as the military might behind those who orchestrated this charade is just too strong, and their mercy non-existent. They will not hesitate to kill more people, to arrest more dissidents, to take out the eyes and break the backs of more young people.

But despite all this, the claims of the mainstream media are once again irrelevant. This “regime” is not “counting its last days,” nor is it going to evaporate. Ahmadinejad will be the president. Ayatollah Khamenei will be the Supreme Leader. Everything will return to business as usual in Islamic — notice the absence of “republic” — Iran.

June 19, 2009 will be the anniversary of this newly established state.

Why the June 19th, and not the 12th? It will not be the day of fraud we will always remember, but the day the supreme leader of the country stood up on the most sacred platform of the Islamic state — Friday Prayers — and cemented that fraud; approved of it; and sentenced us protesters to death and silence.

I am 25-years-old, and until that Friday, I always believed the man we call the “Supreme Leader” knew what he was doing. He gave a preposterous speech after the chain murders nearly a decade ago calling the victims “insignificant folks.” I took it in and thought he had to do it so as not to widen suspicion of the regime’s involvement. He gave a terrible speech after the attacks on students 11 years ago and though I couldn’t contain my anger, I kept quiet. He silenced the parliament members who wrote a historic bill on print media. And I only scowled. He silenced them again during the widespread fraud that took place during the seventh parliamentary elections, and I shut my mouth. I may have had VERY STRONG reservations about the operations he was running, but I thought that in the end, he was on the side of his people. But no more.

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http://news51.blogspot.com

Train Versus Tornado

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7/5/2009 6:34 PM

http://ow.ly/gvOH

30 Ways to Lose a Job on Twitter

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com

A Coup Manual: What We Should Know About Iran's Election

The foreign media and western states are confused and puzzled as to how to interpret the Iranian election on June 12th. Over the past few days I've been speaking with many journalists in Tehran who normally go there for one or two weeks on assignment. Many of them, initially, believed that Ahmadinejad's declared re-election was similar in nature to his first term election in 2005. Meaning that he had successfully mobilized his base of poor people and conservatives and that the reformists and Iranian middle class had, once again, lost the election. But recent development tells us that this is not the real story.

So, what are the sources of confusion? What went wrong and why are people angry and un-accepting of the results? Here are some essential questions that one might ask in order to fully understand the issues at hand:

Was the Iranian election rigged?

No doubt it was. There are many signs that indicate a very organized fraud, which has been in the works for many months.

It's inconceivable that Ahmadinejad could have won 24 millions votes. How could he when he had only received just over 5 million in the first round of the 2005 election? In the second round he gained 16 million and that was simply because he was running against Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was very unpopular at the time, a man that was rumored to have corruption in his family, rumors that became etched in the memory of the Iranian people. There was even a saying that "anybody could beat Hashemi in the second round". At that time, even Ahmadineajds's second position in the first round was so controversial that he was accused of an organized fraud led by Iran's militia forces, Basijis, and the Revolutionary Guard. Now, without any change in Iran's demography, he received, in some places, figures of twenty times more votes than he did four years ago.

During the past four years, Ahmadinejad's economic policies have increased inflation from approximately 11 percent to 25 percent, more than double. The effects of such policies have been a hard reality for millions of Iranians. He is the only president in Iran who has not gained the support of Iran's middle class and elite. Although his government spent billions of dollars on propaganda, he remained widely criticized by reformists, experts, civil society activists and even some conservatives. On the other hand, Mousavi (Iran's prime minister at the time of war with Iraq 1980-1988) is very well respected and popular in the society.

Iranian people know him as a man of integrity, a politician who managed the war economy quite thoughtfully. The overwhelming support for Mousavi by the Iranian middle class, the political elite, reformists and millions of people was contagious even amongst part of the conservative base (also known as Ahmadinejad's base). Mousavi drew crowds of more than 50,000 to his rallies over the past three months in small and large cities alike, not just in Tehran. So a landslide victory seemed like a joke.

When did the suspicion start?

On election night, Mousavi received a call from the Ministry of Interior telling him of his victory. Meanwhile, a committee, which included the Minister of Interior himself and two of his deputies, announced different results. They declared Ahmadinejad as Iran's President elect faster than anyone could imagine. While the election was still in progress a news agency, known to strongly support Ahmadineajd, had already written about his landslide victory. It was as if they knew in advance. In less than a few hours the authorities began announcing the results by the millions. Everybody who is familiar with Iran's bureaucracy knows that it's just impossible to have possibly counted the ballots this fast. The voting process is not computerized but totaled by hand and therefore it takes quite a bit of time, particularly with voter turnout being at a record high. So it was obvious that the results were not based on actual votes. Also, like many countries including the United States, Iran is a very diverse country. Candidates naturally have more support in some provinces than in others, like their hometown for example. It's impossible that a candidate could win by a same margin in every single province as Ahmadinejad, allegedly, has. This is numerically improbable and does not make sense to anybody. The results of this election make a mockery of the Iranian voting system and their history as a democracy.

Is it a coup?

It might not seem a classic coup. But there are indications that the fraud did not happen just on the actual Election Day. Even if 90 percent of the people voted reformists, it would never have been reflected in the ballot counts. It's just impossible. Let's review different segments of the game and then you call it whatever you want:

1. Before the elections, Ahmadinejad's supporters, major news agencies and radical newspapers, predicted a landslide victory. They even mentioned a plausible win by 60 percent! An alarming and odd a prediction in a country where one cannot even predict the price of a tomato, or an onion, from one day to the next.

2. The results were announced too quickly to be true. It was as if they already knew what the numbers were going to be. So it seems that the authorities didn't even have to bother to actually count the ballots for results.

3. On Election Day, the police were ready for the huge presence of protesters in the major cities. They were fully armed and well equipped with anti-riot gear. What was supposed to happen? Why were they so prepared?

4. A few hours after the results were announced, and even with all of the complaints, the Iranian Supreme Leader announced Ahmadinejad as the next president, and asked all of the other candidates to cooperate with the winner. Why such a rush?

5. Dozens of prominent reformist politicians and journalists were systematically arrested within 48 hours of the announcement of the presidency. Forces were organized, knowing who to arrest and where to go without legitimate reason. But this game could not afford prominent political figures to potentially play leadership roles against the outcome.

6. On Election Day SMS services were cut off followed by cell phone reception the day after. Reformists websites were blocked as well, which forced a disconnect between surprised reformists and their supporters. Everything happened very quickly. It's been part of the plan to be swift.

7. A top-down pressure began. Mousavi and Karrubi were placed immediately under unofficial house arrest. There were told that it was for their own security. Simultaneously, some of the major religious figures from the office of the Supreme leader, and reportedly, some of the other officials in power pressured Mousavi to accept the results.

8. The next day Ahmadinejad's supporters, many of whom were armed with cold arms, rallied in one of the squares in Tehran in a show of power.

9. At the same time, the spontaneous, and unexpected massive protests began. (Which was not expected on such a scale (because Iranians know how the police and the government can go wild and brutal).

Ahmadinejad called it a rebellion. It was a necessary label for justifying the police action taken to stop the protesters. The protests were peaceful, but the police themselves, started to destroy cars setting the scene for confrontation.

10. Now, you put together the above pieces and tell me what you would call it.

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7/5/2009 2:41 PM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

How the Iranian Election Was Stolen

There is, perhaps, no greater potential for evil than the power of priests speaking in the name of God.

With this power, one Iranian Ayatollah, Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi -- the spiritual leader of President Ahmadinejad -- seems to have stolen the Iranian election, to have justified the now-ongoing arrests of reformers, and to be trying to eliminate such democracy in Iran as now exists.

According to an open letter of early June by a group of employees who work on elections in the Interior Ministry -- after May polls showed that Ahmadinejad would lose the election -- Yazdi gave the Interior Ministry employees a Fatwa, a religious degree, authorizing the changing of votes.

The Ayatollah told them: "If someone is elected the president and hurts the Islamic values . . . it is against Islam to vote for that person." After harshly criticizing the other candidates (Mousavi, Karroubi, and Rezaie) he went on: "You should throw away those who are unqualified, both morally and lawfully."

The letter reported that the elections' supervisors subsequently became "happy and energetic for having obtained the religious Fatwa to use any trick for changing the vote and began immediately to develop plans for it." (The letter indicated that the same thing had been done in March 2006 to help fundamentalists allied with Ahmadinejad in that election. But when the Interior Minister at that time, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, reported these irregularities to the Supreme Leader, he was fired by President Ahmadinejad.)

Among other things, the election supervisors reduced the number of voting stations, increased the number of mobile voting stations, reduced the number of eligible voters, insisted that vote-containing boxes must have two official seals, and printed 12,000,000 more ballots than were necessary.

Yazdi has been called the most conservative and influential cleric in Qom. He espouses complete isolation from the West and proclaims nonliteral interpretations of the Koran to be heretical. He is said to have great influence with the Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji paramilitary force. In 1997, he is said to have encouraged them to use any means, including violence, to stop reform agitation. In 2006, he said to use atomic bombs had religious legitimacy. Above all, he would like to eliminate the democratic element in the Iranian system.

Now, following four years of appointments made by President Ahmadinejad, Yazdi has many loyal supporters in the Government, including the head of the election commission.

A perfect political storm has arisen in Iran. Ironically, May polls showing that democracy might prevail in Iran have created conditions that could lead to the loss of such democracy as exists in Iran.

A weird president, mentored by a fundamentalist Ayatollah, may now use ongoing arrests to eliminate, politically if not physically, his reform opposition and then govern by repression. Recent unconfirmed reports suggest that Mohammad Asgari, an interior ministry official who had reportedly leaked evidence that the elections were rigged, has been killed in a suspicious car accident in Tehran.

Nonviolent opposition is the only answer. And protests are, after all, widespread and not only in Tehran. They have spread to Isfahan, Ahwaz, Shiraz, Gorgan, Tabriz, Rasht, Babol, Mashhad, Zahedan, Qazvin, Sari, Karaj, Tabriz, Shahsavar, Orumieh, Bandar Abbas, Arak, and Birjend. Many of these cities do not have riot police. The revolutionary guards and the Basiji have to be dispatched to many sites -- and an order to crack down everywhere could be more than the authorities would dare.

The Iranian reform movement is trying to seize the high ground, to avoid violence, and to appeal to the forces of repression not to use force. With the world watching, and with so many new techniques of communication, it may be that the reformers can give the authorities a run for their money. But it will take an awful lot of Iranian courage and ingenuity to make it work.

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4/22/2009 9:50 AM

Can the Oil Shock Alone Explain the Financial Crisis?

http://business.theatlantic.com

Can the Oil Shock Alone Explain the Financial Crisis?
Yes. That's the astonishing conclusion of a paper presented at the Brookings Institution that I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around. The author, economist James Hamilton, can hardly believe the conclusions of his economic model, himself (I've got company), but the findings are remarkable, nonetheless.

Hamilton went back to 2003, when crude oil was around $30 a gallon and forecast what an oil shock like the one we experienced in 2007-08 (when oil peaked around $140) would do to GDP. He graphed the result through the end of 2008 and, lo and behold, it was damn close to actual GDP. As though there were no such thing as a collaterized debt obgligation in the first place! Here's the graph (the orange dotted line is Hamilton's projection given oil prices; the black line is actual GDP):
 

Perhaps you'll join me in thinking: Huh? Are we really to believe that this whole thing was caused by oil shocks? I mean, it certainly makes you appreciate the mess Detroit is in, but really. How anti-climactic. It makes this crisis seem so ... 1970s.

What about real estate, subprime mortgages and defaults? Hamilton says the housing industry had been tightening up long before the recession -- "subtracting 0.94% from the average annual GDP growth rate over 2006:Q4-2007:Q3." And housing is factored into Hamilton's analysis. It was just one of a handful of multipliers that always turn down during oil shocks.

The Real Time Economics Blog at WSJ moves the theory forward with a pretty interesting bit of revisionist history. The grand retelling goes something like this. Cheap gasoline from the 1990s into this decade encouraged families to set up their homes farther from the cities where they worked. But as the price of gas began to increase, it put a big strain of these families' commutes. With gas rising from $2 to $4, the price of these long drives doubled, straining those families' most expensive payments, namely: mortgages. When families realized they could not afford their exurban commutes, they sold their homes for a big loss. Voila: Their mortgage crisis became a bank crisis and the rest is our living history.

Hamilton concludes.

Eventually, the declines in income and house prices set mortgage delinquency rates beyond a threshold at which the overall solvency of the financial system itself came to be questioned, and the modest recession of 2007:Q4-2008:Q3 turned into a ferocious downturn in 2008:Q4.

My head's still spinning a bit, but it's interesting to think about the political consequences of a report like this being mainstreamed. If the idea somehow stuck that an oil shock was responsible for the financial crisis, it could be a significant catalyzer for the push toward energy reform. Today we're seeing a great national movement to change Wall Street because the general consensus is that Wall Street caused this crisis. Whether Hamilton's theory is wacko or brilliant, just imagine what a national movement to revolutionize America's energy consumption would look like. What if we had oil parties instead of tea parties, demanding more government investment in alternative fuels and subsidies for green technologies. That would really be something.

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1/23/2009 5:16 PM

http://www.forbes.com/

How To Market To The Modern Mom

Tips for tugging those $2 trillion purse strings.

U.S. moms control the purse strings at home--to the tune of $2.1 trillion per year, roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Italy, the seventh largest economy in the world.

But for all their efforts, marketers could do a better job reaching this audience. According to a recent survey of 3,500 American moms by BSM Media, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,-based marketing firm that targets the mother demographic, 65% feel that they are "underserved" by advertisers--either because the mom-focused ads don't resonate or because the ads aren't aimed at moms at all.

Strike the right nerve, though, and there's a pile of money to be made, even in a rough economy.

In Pictures: Eight Ways To Market To The Modern Mom

In Pictures: 12 Innovative Marketing Techniques

Successfully targeting the mom segment means communicating with them in their lingo, according to Nancy Lowman LaBadie, an executive vice president at Marina Maher Communications, a public relations agency that has handled many of Procter & Gamble's female-focused products, like Secret deodorant, Dawn dish soap and Clairol hair color. "I think companies who learn [that language], understand it and connect with it will reap the rewards," she says.

How to connect? Start by knowing where moms mingle--and, increasingly, that means online. According to the recent BSM Media survey, 71% of moms use the Internet to get product information.

Comment On This Story

By contrast, only about 20% of mothers comb newspaper ads. The action happens at social networks like Maya's Mom and Café Mom and at blogging sites like BlogHer.

Hint: Don't just rely on banner ads; moms want to engage in a conversation. Better to blog--and do it with a sense of purpose. "Don't just blast as many bloggers as you can find with press releases," says Maria Bailey, founder of BSM Media. "Moms are all about relationships, so if you want to approach them, make sure to start with a personal note."

Video blogs, like newbaby.com, let you upload videos featuring mothers using your product free of charge, similar to YouTube; the site boasts 500,000 views per month and 10 to 15 videos watched per visit, according to Bailey's research.

While they've taken awhile to gain traction, podcasts have become an increasingly effective way to push products to more moms.

According to BSM Media, 85% of American moms now have mp3 players. And moms ride in their cars (a convenient place for listening to podcasts) far more than any other demographic.

The key to making hay with moms in any marketing medium, especially when it comes to high-tech items like cameras and computers, is clearly communicating the benefit of the device. "Making that technology understandable and approachable is beneficial to the consumer," says Karen Cage, a spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard.

To boost sales, the company recently launched 10 videos on how to take digital pictures of, say, darting children. Another reason you want hammer home your product's value proposition: Two out of three moms plan to eliminate purchases that are not absolutely necessary in 2009, according to a recent study by Allen & Gerritsen, a Watertown, Mass.-based advertising agency.

But then, product specs will only get you so far with moms. What they really want is an experience. "In order to convince the modern mom to try a new product or service, marketers need to work with them, not just throw ads at them," says Bailey.

Example: Rather than inundate moms with horsepower figures, last year General Motors (nyse: GM - news - people ) chauffeured some 75 moms in its cars for a weekend in Newport, R.I., in conjunction with a weekly podcast called Manic Mommies (produced by two moms).

"We recognize that we don't always do a really good job via advertising or providing a comfortable dealer experience [to women and moms]," says Christopher Barger, director of global communications technology for General Motors. "We have been looking at how we can use [online] social media to improve our efforts there."

If you're lucky enough to have a few extra marketing bucks lying around, work the celebrity mom angle. Finding a familiar face to pitch your product is an expensive but effective strategy.

Last year, talk show host Kelly Ripa, a mother of three, became the face of Electrolux kitchen appliances by demonstrating how fast-heating ovens and microwaves help modern moms stay on top of their family, work and social lives. Desperate Housewife Marcia Cross, mother of twin daughters, is slated to become the new face of Mott's apple sauce in March.

Finally, recognize that moms engage in a lot of groupthink--about everything from dining and relationships to finance and careers. About 55% of those surveyed by BSM Media said they relied on recommendations from friends and family when making purchases for the home; 64% do it when they buy things for the children.

Your best bet: Identify the key influencers in the community (through the PTA, social networks and blogs) and get them to host a party to promote your product. Videogame maker Nintendo recently did just this when it selected eight "ambassador moms" to hold parties promoting its Wii gaming system.

Just because a market is massive doesn't mean you don't need a smart approach to attack it.

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1/24/2009 8:40 PM

 

http://en.wikipedia.org

 

Computation tree logic (CTL) is a branching-time logic, meaning that its model of time is a tree-like structure in which the future is not determined; there are different paths in the future, any one of which might be an actual path that is realised.

 

Check this out for symbolism on logic

 

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1/25/2009 5:58 PM

http://lifehacker.com

Five Best People-Search Engines

Need to do a little online detective work? Track down anyone from long lost schoolmates to the new friend whose number you've lost with this assortment of powerful people-search engines. Photo by Byrne7214.

Earlier this week we asked you to share which search engines you use to find people. The votes have been tallied, and now we're back with the five most popular people-search engines.

 

Pipl is tenacious people-search engine. Pipl's claim to fame is the depths to which it can plumb the "deep web" to find information. When you search for a person using Pipl, you're not limited to a simple white pages search. Pipl scours databases and indexes that standard search engines normally don't touch. If it's there to be found, Pipl returns all manner of things about the person you're searching for, including blog entires, photos, publications, donations on public record, profiles on social and business networking sites, and other overlooked sources. Pipl supports searching by name, username, phone number, and email.

 

 

Specialized search engines you say? Heresy! Many readers eschewed fancy people-search engines—many of which often incorporate Google results into their own—preferring instead to get their hands dirty at the source. With more and more people cultivating an online presence, it's easier than ever to find people with broader search engines like Google. One of Google's strongpoints is that you can use additional search parameters that are unavailable at the other search engines. For example, it's impossible to search for "John Smith classic car restoration" to find an old car-obsessed friend of yours when all you can type in is Last Name, First Name. Additionally, Google can sometimes find incredibly obscure references to a person. (I once tracked down an old classmate through a single reference on an out of date softball team roster found through Google.)

 

 

Facebook is principally a social network, but its the first stop for many people searchers due to its widespread popularity. By Facebook's count, 150 million active users frequent the site, about a third of which are in the United States. Even if you take those numbers with a grain of salt, that's still an enormous number of people who have put themselves out there to be found. Therein lies the strength of looking for someone on Facebook: By joining the service, Facebook users have essentially put up a big sign that says, "Find me!"

 

 

Spock is another people-search engine that relies on multiple sources and aggregation to cull as much information as it can about a subject. In addition to indexing information from various news sites and social networks, Spock has a variety of notifications options available. Like 123people (below), Spock supports email notifications of changes to a person search, but you can also subscribe to an RSS feed for your search.

 

 

123people has a broad reach, delving into blogs and public profiles to increase your chances of finding who you're looking for. 123people is a strong people-search engine, but one of the best pieces of functionality available to 123people searchers is its email notification feature, which sends out an email alert whenever the results of a specific search changes. It's a little heavy on the stalk-factor (though in a strange way not all that different from Facebook's newsfeed), but it saves you from wasting your time with fruitless return searches.

 

you might wanna add [www.yasni.com] [www.linkedin.com] and [martin.atkins.me.uk]

 

[zabasearch.com] and [www.lexisnexis.com] are also great engines - but lexisnexis is a pay site- but can typically be used in Library Computers in your neighborhood.

 

Most people who are looking for someone are willing to pay for the service. That's why you find them teasing you with a superficial phone number and address search. Pipl really only skims the surface of the so-called "deep web." If you want to get more serious about finding someone, Intelius and Zaba cross correlate your utilities bills and public records. Those sites can find your phone numbers and addresses of every residence you've ever paid utilities on as well as the names of any relatives that might have claimed to be a relative of yours (think ex-spouses).

Lexisnexis is the Great Grand Godfather of private search engines. They cross correlate all the above with every newspaper and magazine ever written. If you have already used the pay services of Intellius and still can't find someone, use LexisNexis. You won't be disappointed.

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1/16/2009 11:49 PM

 

http://edition.cnn.com/

 

Top Saudi cleric: Ok for young girls to wed

(CNN) -- The debate over the controversial practice of child marriage in Saudi Arabia was pushed back into the spotlight this week, with the kingdom's top cleric saying that it's OK for girls as young as 10 to wed.

 

"It is incorrect to say that it's not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger," Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, the kingdom's grand mufti, said in remarks quoted Wednesday in the regional Al-Hayat newspaper. "A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her."

The issue of child marriage has been a hot-button topic in the deeply conservative kingdom in recent weeks.

In December, Saudi judge Sheikh Habib Abdallah al-Habib refused to annul the marriage of an 8-year-old girl to a 47-year-old man.

The judge rejected a petition from the girl's mother, whose lawyer said the marriage was arranged by her father to settle a debt with "a close friend." The judge required the girl's husband to sign a pledge that he would not have sex with her until she reaches puberty.

Al-Sheikh was asked during a lecture Monday about parents forcing their underage daughters to marry.

"We hear a lot in the media about the marriage of underage girls," he said, according to the newspaper. "We should know that Shariah law has not brought injustice to women."

Don't Miss

• Saudi judge refuses to annul marriage of girl, 8

Christoph Wilcke, a Saudi Arabia researcher for Human Rights Watch, recently told CNN that his organization has heard many other cases of child marriages.

"We've been hearing about these types of cases once every four or five months because the Saudi public is now able to express this kind of anger, especially so when girls are traded off to older men," Wilcke said.

Wilcke explained that while Saudi ministries may make decisions designed to protect children, "It is still the religious establishment that holds sway in the courts, and in many realms beyond the court."

Last month, Zuhair al-Harithi, a spokesman for the Saudi government-run Human Rights Commission, said his organization is fighting against child marriages.

"The Human Rights Commission opposes child marriages in Saudi Arabia," al-Harithi said. "Child marriages violate international agreements that have been signed by Saudi Arabia and should not be allowed." He added that his organization has been able to intervene and stop at least one child marriage from taking place.

Wajeha al-Huwaider, co-founder of the Society of Defending Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia, told CNN in December that achieving human rights in the kingdom means standing against those who want to "keep us backward and in the dark ages."

She said the marriages cause girls to "lose their sense of security and safety. Also, it destroys their feeling of being loved and nurtured. It causes them a lifetime of psychological problems and severe depression."

The Saudi Ministry of Justice has not made any public comment on the issue.

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1/17/2009 3:25 PM

 

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

 

awesome pics

 

Sources and Resources

• Decayed Yet Haunting Beautiful Flickr Pool
• Urban Decay Flickr Pool
• Urban Fragments Flickr Pool
• Industrial Decay
• Urban Exploration
• Some Urban Decay Flickr Pool
• Abandoned Flickr Pool
• Urban and Rural Photography on Deviant Art
• Urban LIFE in Metropolis Flickr Group

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• 60 Beautiful Examples Of Night Photography
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• 45 Beautiful Motion Blur Photos

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1/13/2009 11:37 AM

http://flowingdata.com

Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis

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http://www.marketwatch.com

Notion of fast U.S. recovery falls flat at parley

At annual meeting, economists see little chance recession will end in `09

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - The idea that the U.S. economy is going to recover in the next six months is given little credence at a gathering of top academic economists here over the weekend.

A pickup sometime after June is still the Federal Reserve's quasi-official forecast. And leading institutional forecasters surveyed by the Blue Chip Economic Indicators are optimistic.

But that forecast seemed woefully out of touch to many experts who spoke at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association.

"People are getting nervous," said Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The actions by the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department have driven home the point that policy makers are at their wits' end.

"We don't know what to do. It's really a throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-the-problem strategy. It is hard to argue with it in the middle of the crisis, but you can bet everyone will 10 years from now," said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

The Fed has indeed thrown the kitchen sink at the financial-market crisis, expanding its balance sheet by $1 trillion, to little obvious effect.

The Treasury Department's management of the $700 billion rescue plan for the financial markets has seemed capricious.

And it may just be the first of several rounds of life preservers for the shattered sector, experts said.

Despite all these efforts, the U.S. economy, hit by an oil shock, a credit crunch and the global downturn, seems to be on a steep slide.

Some argue that the recession has just begun, despite the formal ruling by the business-cycle-dating committee that it began in December 2007.

Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, said the recession began only in mid-September when Lehman Brothers collapsed.

"We are in a horrible mess. I believe it is very young and it is going to be long and deep," he said.

Even in the first quarter of 2010, the economy will likely be weak enough to need macro stimulus, he said.

Martin Feldstein, the prominent Harvard University economist, said there was no longer any basis for believing the recovery could start in the third quarter.

"I think we'll be lucky if by this time next year we see the economy hit the bottom and start turning up," Feldstein said.

"In terms of the level of activity, the end of 2009 is going to look lower than it is today," he said.

Former Clinton economic adviser Laura Tyson said it is too speculative to predict a turnaround.

"The slide may stop, but coming out [of the downturn] will not come until later," she said.

"It is very hard to predict when the situation will turn around," she said.

The downturn has become "self-reinforcing downward-spiral effects going on - from the housing market to the credit market to the real economy and back to the housing market," she said.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson came under constant criticism for his handling of the financial-market crisis.

Rogoff, the former IMF chief economist, said Paulson's policy was similar to the "Wheel of Fortune" game show. Some companies spun the wheel and got $300 billion bailouts. Others spun it and got nothing.

This just added to market insecurity and uncertainty, he said.

Rogoff said the U.S. is "running right along the tracks" of past financial crises in developing countries.

Based on experience, the U.S. housing-market collapse and stock-market weakness should continue until 2010, he said.

The root of the crisis remains the financial sector, Rogoff said. "We're going to be seeing second and third bailouts of the big banks," he said.

The experts generally supported the Fed's unconventional monetary-policy moves to expand its balance sheet and try to shore up asset markets.

The Fed has quietly shifted its policy from supporting institutions to trying to get non-functioning markets back on track, Blinder said.

The central bank will start buying mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae (FNM:

Soon, he said, the Fed will start buying consumer loans.

The Fed is likely to continue to add markets and could start buying municipal securities, he said.

But Rogoff said he was worried that these programs were simply keeping the financial sector on life support and did not seem to curing the underlying problems.

The Fed programs seem to amount to "temporizing," he said.

In 2009, commercial real estate, private equity and hedge funds will suffer, he said.

And the "behemoths" of the financial sector are not really viable, he said.

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1/5/2009 3:16 PM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Holes give edge to new MoD armour

Scientists from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) have devised an ultra-hard vehicle armour to protect military personnel.

Details of the steel armour, called Super Bainite, were outlined during a seminar at the University of Cambridge.

Unexpectedly, the MoD team has given the armour a protective advantage by introducing an array of holes.

According to scientist Professor Peter Brown, these perforations help deflect incoming projectiles.

"I wouldn't like to have been the first person to have suggested that," said Professor Brown, from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down in Wiltshire.

He explained: "You shouldn't think of them as holes, you should think of them as edges. When a bullet hits an edge, it gets deflected, and turns from a sharp projectile into a blunt fragment - which is much easier to stop. It doubles the ballistic performance and halves the weight."

The armour plates have performed well in ballistic testing at the Ministry of Defence's firing ranges.

Certain heat treatments alter the fine-scale structure of steel, creating a "phase" known as bainite - which has been known about since the 1930s.

But the process, developed by DSTL scientists in collaboration with steelmaker Corus, allows the alloy to be produced quickly and cost effectively.

Super Bainite develops its exceptional strength through a new low-temperature process called "isothermal hardening".

The steel is heated to 1,000C, cooled to about 200C and then held at this temperature for a period of time before cooling to room temperature. Initially, the team held the steel at about 200C for just over two weeks to achieve the right ballistic protection.

However, this was too slow for the process to be commercialised. The researchers subsequently reduced the heat treatment time to eight hours by transforming the steel at 250C instead of 200C.

Importantly, the work gives the UK an indigenous armour steel manufacturing capability, benefitting industry.

Professor Brown also gave details of other current materials research with potential applications in armour.

An industrial process called "Kolsterising" (developed by the firm Bodycote) is able to increase the surface hardness of stainless steel to twice that of Super Bainite while maintaining its ductility - the extent to which a material can be deformed without fracturing.

"It's as hard as a ceramic and as ductile as a metal. It re-defines, really, what steel is capable of," he said.

Professor Brown was speaking at the recent Horizon seminar held at the University of Cambridge.

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1/10/2009 11:44 PM

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk

Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches

Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.

Though Google says it is in the forefront of green computing, its search engine generates high levels of CO2 because of the way it operates. When you type in a Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to several competing against each other.

It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from whichever produces the answer fastest. The system minimises delays but raises energy consumption. Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.

Wissner-Gross has submitted his research for publication by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and has also set up a website www.CO2stats.com. “Google are very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy,” he said.

Google said: “We are among the most efficient of all internet search providers.”

Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO2 emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.

A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing director of carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO2 emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour, he says. of CO2 Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use).

Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian.

“It’s not an unreasonable comparison,” said Liam Newcombe, an expert on data centres at the British Computer Society. “It tells us how much energy westerners use on entertainment versus the energy poverty in some countries.”

Though energy consumption by computers is growing - and the rate of growth is increasing - Newcombe argues that what matters most is the type of usage.

If your internet use is in place of more energy-intensive activities, such as driving your car to the shops, that’s good. But if it is adding activities and energy consumption that would not otherwise happen, that may pose problems.

Newcombe cites Second Life and Twitter, a rapidly growing website whose 3m users post millions of messages a month. Last week Stephen Fry, the TV presenter, was posting “tweets” from New Zealand, imparting such vital information as “Arrived in Queenstown. Hurrah. Full of bungy jumping and ‘activewear’ shops”, and “Honestly. NZ weather makes UK look stable and clement”.

Jonathan Ross was Twittering even more, with posts such as “Am going to muck out the pigs. It will be cold, but I’m not the type to go on about it” and “Am now back indoors and have put on fleecy tracksuit and two pairs of socks”. Ross also made various “tweets” trying to ascertain whether Jeremy Clarkson was a Twitter user or not. Yesterday the Top Gear presenter cleared up the matter, saying: “I am not a twit. And Jonathan Ross is.”

Such internet phenomena are not simply fun and hot air, Newcombe warns: the boom in such services has a carbon cost.

1/12/2009 3:24 PM

http://www.independent.co.uk

Does the credit crunch have a silver lining for literature?

A quarter-century ago, a Britain of dole queues, urban riots and political venom also saw the rise of a great generation of novelists. Boyd Tonkin asks if this slump might also have a literary lining of silver

Friday, 9 January 2009

Margaret Thatcher celebrates on election night in 1987

It hardly sounds like the prelude to a literary revolution. Under a hard-as-nails free-market government, old industries sicken and die at a pandemic rate. Unemployment rockets; inflation spikes as well. As public spending plummets, riots break out on decrepit city streets. Rancour and rage dominate the public realm, twisted up another notch when a skin-saving foreign war polarises an already fractured nation. To cap it all, a long-planned final battle with union power culminates in the mother of all mining strikes.

What else happened in Britain in the first half of the 1980s? Well, literary fiction – for a couple of decades, a dowdy old aunt among the arts – suddenly bred a generation of spellbinders and seducers. When Anthony Burgess lost the Booker Prize in 1980 (with Earthly Powers) and Salman Rushdie won in 1981 (with Midnight's Children), a fusty coterie game all at once began to feel like a thrilling battle of the giants. Two years later, Granta magazine logged its ascendant stars and – in its first list of "Best of Young British Novelists", set an agenda for attention and appeal that has, staggeringly, lasted a full quarter-century: Rushdie, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Rose Tremain – the last a hugely popular winner of the 2008 Orange Prize.

On the high street, a former WH Smith executive called Tim Waterstone plunged some get-lost money into – of all things – classy upmarket bookshops, just as the retail world froze. Did they fly? They soared. Culture hounds who, a few years previously would have burned "modern British novels" for warmth while they queued to catch the new Scorsese or Bertolucci or see The Clash, haunted the faux-library charms of the new chain in search of excitement from new arrivals or – with JG Ballard and others – resurrected greats.

Some advances for literary fiction sped – unsustainably – to the height of a Dynasty hair-do. By the time that the first light fingers of a service-led recovery began to dawn, in the metropolis at least, it felt as if half the fans of Martin Amis's Money (1984) not only wanted to read him but to be him as well.

As recovery took hold, new publishing houses made their entrances, committed to innovation and – in a few cases – destined to triumph. Bloomsbury and Serpent's Tail both launched in 1986. Within a few years, the musty tumbler of publisher's sherry had blossomed into a scintillating, post-colonial glass of New World fizz. Vision, ambition, even sometimes avant-garde experiment, for once raised a British cheer.

Sequels always disappoint, we know. Within and beyond books, things have changed beyond hope of rewind. The cluster of talent codified by Bill Buford at Granta largely existed already, but alone and – often – isolated. If each had their own style and story, together they opened British fiction to a wide and interwoven world. You can't step into that river twice. Tim Waterstone saw the abysmal state of British book retailing, and knew that a swelling band of younger, educated readers might heal it. And, if the North limped, the South strode, with graduate-rich county towns and suburbs full of buyers prepared to give something original – and, for the first time, over-hyped – a try.

Even in the iron years of Thatcherism, vital booster-fuel to serious writers came from protected allies such as public-service broadcasting: Channel 4 began in 1982. In no sense did recession – and the social tension it fostered – make the 1980s BritFiction boom. All the same, the sense of grave and urgent times did open readers' minds to new choices of style and story - which these writers deployed so well.

So could hard times once again not cause but coincide with high achievement? Few factors at work today quite match the conditions of the Eighties fiction upsurge. Waterstone's, now a centralised retail machine, scrambles to make it through the slump along with every other business. Advances have plummeted, with agents obliged to accept ever-thriftier deals from those publishers who still dare to bite.

Even before this downturn, sales of literary fiction had fallen away. Few talents who combined large ambition and broad appeal had come through to match the millennial cluster that gave us David Mitchell, Sarah Waters and Zadie Smith. By and large, the class of '83 still rules at the tills and in the headlines. Whatever their gifts, that exposes a failure to replenish the stock.

One strong view suggests that, mostly, tough conditions will mean safe choices: tried and trusted recipes, even beyond the obvious genre boxes. This week's Costa First Novel Award has gone to Sadie Jones's somewhat McEwanesque tale of class and corruption in the postwar suburbs, The Outcast. No big change there.

Where could the silver lining lurk? Might the flight of big – or even middling – money from literary publishing prompt a quest for bolder choices and wider horizons from authors who know that their finely-finessed debut now stands no chance of reaching the Richard-and-Judy sofa or the Waterstone's front table? If slimmer cheques and smaller expectations force some novelists to give up altogether, surely they might inspire others to thumb their noses at a deep-frozen marketplace and go – as it were – for broke.

The cliché of the decade demands that web culture zooms in to rescue every wheezing ambulance-case in the arts and media. Certainly, the kind of maverick publishing and magazine production that made a plucky showing in the hard British winters of the early Eighties migrated online years ago. Sites such as 3:AM Magazine keep faith with the old little-review tradition of avant-garde provocation and seditious literary cheek.

Any would-be Kafka or Kerouac can bypass the sluggish routine of print entirely. Many more will try. Yet the critical jury on e-literature still has very little solid evidence to consider. Even after years of activity in a climate of back-slapping boosterism about digital art, where are the masterworks that started, or stayed, online? Rather, the cyber-critics have effectively done their print ancestors' old job, charging into battle for the overlooked visionaries and the unsung avant-garde – who write for print. The current bloggers' passion for Paul Griffiths's Let Me Tell You – a novella composed solely of the words that Ophelia speaks in Hamlet – shows the current state of play. Do virtual arbiters still prefer the whiff of paper?

The authors and publishers I asked of course see the fragile future through different sorts of lens. No one proposes that lean years will lead novelists (still less publishers) to snub the market, dump all material aspirations and pursue a dream of perfection. Yet some at least sense a chance that emptier pockets might bring fuller minds. As for favoured genres, much escapist pulp and feelgood schmaltz flourished in the eventful Eighties, and will no doubt do so again. Celebrity titles also began to shout then: the same genre, having pampered publishers though good times, will now be expected to cosset them through bad.

But new marvels, and new gifts, will come to light. And even corporate publishers will find that, to make that quirky, innovative literary fiction reach the whole gamut of its potential readers, they will have to act like small-press guerrillas. Every ambitious writer will need the internet – from Facebook to Amazon – to tell the world about their brilliance, to transmit tasters across cyberspace, and to flog the product. Even if that remains an ink-on-paper book, just like we read in 1981.

That year, when Brixton and Toxteth burned, IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands was elected an MP and died, the SDP split Labour (and Charles and Di wed to give us a comfort break), felt as apocalyptic as any since the Blitz. Yet, in the free state of fiction, a mid-thirties writer who had tanked with his debut published a second novel, Midnight's Children. As we brace for the worst, we should look for the best.

Safety or audacity? Writers and publishers on the prospects for fiction in a slump

Simon Prosser

Publisher (Hamish Hamilton)

In terms of fiction writing, I think there will be two very different responses to the downturn in the market (which is around 12 per cent year on year and likely to worsen). The first and most obvious reaction will be for some writers to try to tailor their books all the more neatly to a perception of what the market demands... But I think there will be a second and more exciting response, which is for writers to think that since the chances of being published successfully in the mass market are even tougher, they may as well take the chance to write exactly what they want to write.

Pete Ayrton

Publisher (Serpent's Tail)

Avant-garde fiction thrives where writers do not expect to live off their writing either because the publishing industry cannot pay the advances writers need to live from... or because they are paid by universities to teach creative writing... Neither condition applies in the UK where writers (often under the influence of agents) will stick even closer to the conventional as mainstream publishers cut their staff, their lists and their advances.

Geoff Dyer

Novelist & critic

Anyone who has an eye on the market is not a writer but a whore. Nothing wrong with being a whore, of course – just don't try to make out you're a writer. Writers sometimes talk of pressure from their publishers to do this or that in order to be more commercial. Nine times out of ten this is sophistry and cowardice... I have this existential conception of writing not as a career but as a back-against-the wall option, the thing you turn to when you've got no other way of making a mark on the world. In those circumstances, whether or not you're going to be adequately recompensed is irrelevant.

Carole Welch

Publisher (Sceptre)

These haven't been great times for literary fiction lately anyway, so in that sense the recession... will probably just reinforce existing trends... I can't really see lowered material expectations... making writers bolder. I can't speak for writers, but I'd say most of them want as many readers for their books as possible, so are unlikely to be avant-garde and experimental unless they believe that's the way to greater sales... I also can't imagine any publisher turning down a novel like David Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas' now on the grounds that in a recession readers would find it too structurally innovative. But I do think publishers will be less inclined than ever to take a chance on a novel that is seen as bleak and depressing, or a novel that might be written with great skill but doesn't have something about it to make it stand out from the crowd.

Gordon Burn

Novelist & critic

It would be encouraging to think that maybe even just a handful of the thousands being laid off... might be encouraged to take time to stop and reflect on their experience, rather then being goaded into the hopeless task of chasing after jobs that... no longer exist. [In the 1980s recession], 'Frieze' with Hirst, Hume, Sarah Lucas etc happened. They are sometimes seen as Thatcher's children – single-minded, aspirational, entrepreneurial. But if the slump could spark a similar from-the-ground-up invigoration of the publishing scene in this country, still run by an Oxbridge-dominated, and largely monocultural establishment, that would be wonderful to see.

Tom McCarthy

Novelist & critic

I expect the recession will accelerate an already well-established pattern: mainstream publishers will concentrate on promoting non-fiction by television presenters and commercial fiction by creative-writing graduates (which should never have been confused with literature in the first place). People wanting to engage seriously in literature will have to look to other arenas: the art world and its publication networks, for example – at least until their work has found a large enough audience to make it commercially attractive to bigger houses. While this may be bad news for writers' bank balances, it's not necessarily a bad thing for literature, which has always "deterritorialised" itself, had to detour beyond its own boundaries, in order to be reinvigorated. The internet has produced some excellent criticism and debate around literature, but I've yet to see any good "primary" writing on there.

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1/13/2009 9:08 AM

http://www.squidoo.com

want to make money online – this gal may be doing just that.

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1/2/2009 2:46 PM

http://news.yahoo.com/

The meaning of the 'Oval' Office

Kirkland, Wash. – The precedent for oval rooms in American affairs of state can be traced to George Washington. He modified chambers in the President's House in Philadelphia with bowed ends so that guests at formal receptions could all stand equidistant to the president. It was a symbolic expression of democracy.

While the current Oval Office goes back to President Franklin Roosevelt, the White House's first Oval Office was occupied by William Howard Taft in 1909. He avoided the rectangular room used by Theodore Roosevelt, relocated the presidential office to a central position in the West Wing, and opted for the oval.

The repositioning of the president's office signified the central position of the presidency. But here's the funny thing about ovals, or, in geometric terms, ellipses: Unlike circles, which are defined by a single center, ovals are defined by two key points, each, appropriately, called a "focus."

A focal point is a two-way juncture – a spot not only of radiance, but also convergence, the position that "takes the heat." Leaders often deserve the glare of public criticism. But we should also remember that they are not aliens who've arrived by spaceships. They are us.

Yet during elections, undue hope blazes forth from ardent supporters. They project their light onto the candidates whose every action is a petition to their anonymous authority. The candidates reflect that focused light back as their own. The electorate, seeing hope and power as uniquely beyond themselves, get caught in a spell of their own making. Everything seems to revolve around the president.

But the seat of power, the Oval Office, has that other, unseen focal point, as if to indicate a room with two "centers" of responsibility. Could that be our spot in the room? Democracy, after all, is self-government. When the spell of the campaign is inevitably broken, we awake to learn anew the lesson of projecting all hopes and responsibilities, and the cost of not taking our position.

Currently, our greatest surplus is in difficulties, with an ever-growing list of designated villains – predatory lenders, oil companies, polluters, illegal immigrants, politicians, Iran, China, greedy CEOs, car companies, and so on.

Maybe saints are rarer in many of these groups, but that fact alone does not exonerate the rest of us as victimized innocents. Either we are completely passive dependents, or else we share responsibility in shaping the world. And with responsibility comes a share of the blame.

The candidates hold the public accountable at their own peril. They can have our vote if they don't make us look too hard at ourselves. If they propose programs and bailouts as painless as possible, treating symptoms rather than root causes, then we can remain safe in our freedoms, free to point, free of blame.

Democracy is a work in progress. Its imperfections mirror our blind spots. Each age has its blind spots, exposed and magnified mostly through history's lens. The same presidential house in Philadelphia that employed the beautiful symbolism of democracy also had slave quarters. Can we be certain that contemporary life has transcended any remaining counterfeits and abuses of freedom? And if not, then can we be certain that such abuses are not fertilizing the roots of our overgrown difficulties?

Perhaps there is wisdom in calling it the Oval Office. The word "ellipse" derives from a Greek root meaning "defect" and "falling short," as in not being a perfect circle. "Oval" comes from the Latin ovum, "egg," – birth and new beginnings, a place where our greatest aspirations might hatch and take wings.

President-elect Obama will soon occupy the desk at one of the Oval Office's focal points. He campaigned emphasizing the word "we." Like all presidents, his power will have its limits. Like all presidents, he will need our help. We, too, must exercise rightful government, even in the privacy of our daily thoughts and actions. By doing so, we make the move along with the new president, confident there is also a spot reserved for the American people in the room with two centers.

• David Arzouman is an artist, composer, writer, and educator who's developing a new art school in Tokyo.

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1/4/2009 12:09 AM

http://bhc3.wordpress.com/

A Blog Is Your Stake in the Ground

But blogs are the professional’s curriculum vitae. They are a standing record of strong thin king about a subject.

My own experience is that if you blog, every so often you pop out a signature piece. The kind of post that resonates with others and establishes your position in your field. These blog posts receive a lot of views, get linked to and turn up in Google searches. When you get one of these, congratulations! You have successfully put your flag in the ground for your field.

Tweets don’t do that. Tweets create a tapestry of someone, they foster ambient awareness. This has value in its own right. But they’re not vehicles for heavier thinking. They don’t demonstrate your capacity to size up an issue or idea and bring it home.

I know this is definitely early adopter stuff. The number of professionals spending time tweeting and blogging is still limited. But I suspect this is going to happen:

Those who can work blogging and some twittering into their regular activities are going to earn more money and get promoted faster.

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12/31/2008 8:34 AM

http://adjix.com/hxcp

How Much Money Do Bloggers Make Blogging?

Archive for Blogging for Dollars

Written on January 2nd, 2009 at 12:01 am by Darren Rowse

How Much Money Do Bloggers Make Blogging?

Blogging for Dollars 13 comments

Over the last two months I’ve had a sidebar poll running here at ProBlogger that asked readers to tell us how much their blog earned in October of 2008.
This is an annual poll that we’ve run for a number of years now so it is always interesting to see the results.
As usual - the poll […]

Written on December 18th, 2008 at 12:12 am by Darren Rowse

Increase Amazon Sales with Best Seller and Popular Product Lists

Affiliate Programs, Blogging for Dollars 22 comments

This week we’ve been looking at a variety of techniques to help you increase your blogs earnings in the lead up to Christmas.
Today I want to share 2 similar techniques that I’ve used in the last week that is a big part of tripling my Amazon earnings for the month of December - best seller […]

Written on December 3rd, 2008 at 12:12 am by Darren Rowse

Can you REALLY Make Money Blogging?

Blogging for Dollars 98 comments

Every now and again I get an email from a ProBlogger reader excitedly telling me that they’re about quit their jobs to become full time bloggers. More often than not they are new bloggers who for one reason or another have it in their minds that blogging for money is a quick and easy thing […]

Written on December 1st, 2008 at 12:12 am by Darren Rowse

How Much Money Did You Earn from Blogging in October 2008?

Blogging for Dollars, Reader Questions 104 comments

It’s time for another annual poll here at ProBlogger - this one asking readers how much they earned in October 2008? I’ve run this poll a number of times over the last couple of years and the results are always interesting.
Just to qualify it - I’m asking about ALL blogging revenue that you can tie […]

Written on November 11th, 2008 at 08:11 am by Darren Rowse

How to Find Advertisers for Your Blog

Advertising, Blogging for Dollars 71 comments

In this video Gary Vaynerchuk answers how to monetize your blog or video blog with a practical illustration.

Of course you need to have at least some traffic to pull in advertisers - but once you do, if the advertisers are not coming to you yet - go to them.
PS: this actually works. When I started […]

Written on October 29th, 2008 at 06:10 am by Darren Rowse

How Bloggers Make Money Online without Blogging [POLL RESULTS]

Blogging for Dollars, Reader Questions 49 comments

Last month I ran a poll here at ProBlogger which asked readers if they make money online from sources other than blogging.
The result was almost completely split with 1022 of the 2053 people who responded saying Yes and 1031 saying no.

Some of the comments on the launch post of this poll revealed some of the […]

Written on August 30th, 2008 at 12:08 am by Darren Rowse

10 Ways to Make Money BECAUSE of Your Blog

Blogging for Dollars 86 comments

What if I told you that there’s a way to make money as a result of your blog where you don’t need to have a single ad on your blog, where you don’t have to run any affiliate programs and where you don’t have to write any paid reviews?

Would you be interested?
Image by iDream_in_Infrared
Much is […]

Written on August 8th, 2008 at 10:08 am by Darren Rowse

8 Jobs for Bloggers

Blogging for Dollars 21 comments

If you’re looking for a job as a blogger then the ProBlogger Blog Job Boards have seen 8 new jobs advertised in just the last 3 days. Actually there’s more than that - because some of the ads are for more than one blogger and one has already been filled.

Here’s the latest batch:

Editor and cross-blog […]

Written on June 23rd, 2008 at 12:06 am by Daniel Scocco

When Should I Put Advertising on My Blog?

Blogging for Dollars 78 comments

In this post Daniel Scocco answers to a question by Warren:

I started a blog about Professional Lifestyle a little over a month ago. It already has gotten 16,000 visits, has almost 100 subscribers and has a google page rank of 4 (somehow). Should I put up advertisements at this early stage?
Ah, the ever controversial question […]

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12/30/2008 12:16 PM

http://adjix.com/j8x5

Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For

Reputation management is essential to both individuals and companies. The more popular your brand is, the more critical it will be to keep tabs on it and the more time it will consume out of your day. If you work at a startup and no one has heard of your brand, or if you’re an individual who has just started blogging, these tools are still useful to you.

If, on the other hand, you’re brand new to social media and aren’t known by many people, then these free tools might be a better place to start.

You should consider paid services if you are unable to manage and keep your pulse on your online reputation. Also, paid services help you analyze and understand the magnitude and sentiment of conversations around your brand, which would take you even longer if you did it manually. Services start out at a minimal price of $1 for individual bloggers and shoot up over $100,000 for large enterprises. If you are considering using a paid service, select the one that best matches your current situation and scale up as your requirements grow.

How to Begin

You need to decide if you want software for tracking conversations or if you want to pay a vendor for consulting and reporting. You might want all three. The difference is the amount of labor you’ll have to expense versus the amount of money you’ll want to spend.

Companies should bring all stakeholders involved in this type of a decision to the table before selecting a vendor to use. The key for success is to figure out what groups within your company can benefit from this type of information. The obvious groups would be in marketing research, public relations, advertising, and then executives, who will not only have to sign-off on this initiative, but are most concerned with how their corporate brand is being portrayed in the media (new/traditional).

Depending on the service you are considering, you may have to select keywords (with pay per keyword/phrase services), so that you can track your competitors, your own products or personal brands within your company. Once you have buy-in and one or more people as dedicated resources to either use the vendor’s software or analyze and communicate their reports and strategies across the business, you are ready to select a vendor.

I recommend the top ten vendors listed below (in no specific order):

1. Buzzlogic

Buzzlogic offers the “BuzzLogic Insights” application, where you can discover, engage and assess influencers in your industry. You get a collaborative dashboard, which provides you with insight into whose blogging about you and allows you to share this data within your company. There are also watch lists for tracking specific bloggers, blogger profile lists, and social maps (see who links to who).

They divide their services into two major buckets: marketers and PR people. Marketers gain product feedback, understand brand perception and receive monthly readership statistics. PR people are able to build relationships with influential bloggers, discover new influencers and track products that matter to them.

2. Radian6

 

Radian6 offers a solution, where you can setup certain keywords to monitor on a dashboard, automatically track the keywords on blogs, image sharing sites and microblogging sites, and then have it report back to you with an analysis of the results. Data is captured in real-time as discovered and delivered to dashboard analysis widgets.

The solution covers all forms of social media including blogs, top video and image sharing sites, forums, opinion sites, mainstream online media and emerging media like Twitter. Conversational dynamics are constantly tallied to track the viral nature of each post.

3. TNS Cymfony

TNS Cymfony offers the Orchestra Platform, which is built on a Natural Language Processing engine that automatically identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks important people, places, companies and topics for you.

The platform is able to decipher between different media sources, such as traditional media and social media. Cymfony’s differentiation is that their engine dissects articles, paragraphs and sentences to determine who and what is being talked about, whether something or someone is a key focus or a passing reference, and how the various entities mentioned relate to one another.

4. Nielsen

Nielsen offers Buzzmetrics, which will supply you with key brand health metrics and consumer commentary from all consumer-generated media. They also have ThreatTracker, which alerts of real-time online reputation threats and gives you a scorecard to show you how you’re doing relative to the competition.

Nielsen has a very strong brand name as the world’s leading provider of marketing information, audience measurement, and media products and services. Pete Blackshaw, father of consumer-generated media, is one of the leaders in charge of this powerful service.

5. Trackur

Trackur offers a monitoring plan for individuals ($18 per month), companies ($88), enterprises ($197) and agencies (N/A). Like many of the other services mentioned, Trackur works around your keywords and then organizes the results for you in the form of a Dashboard. Depending on the package, you’ll be able to save more keyword searches and have more frequent updates to your Dashboard.

Trackur was built by one of the leading experts in reputation management, Andy Beal, which gives the service some added credibility.

6. Brands Eye

Brands Eye offers reputation management packages for bloggers ($1 per month), small businesses ($95) and enterprises ($350). The tool tracks every online mention of your brand, giving you a score that accurately reflects the state of your reputation over time. Part of the differentiation is that you can actually tag mentions of your brand and rank them in terms of a number of pre-determined criteria.

Like many of the other services, you are paying for keywords that you can track. The frequency of how many times you receive updates grows depending on how big your package is.

7. Reputation Defender

Reputation Defender offers four different services, including MyChild (starting at $14.95 per month), MyReputation ($14.95), MyPrivacy ($9.95) and MyEdge ($99). MyChild scours the Internet for all references to your child or teen by name, screen name or social network profile and reports back to you. MyReputation allows you to review everything that is available to you online, and MyPrivacy allows you to remove your personal information from people search databases, such as Pipl and Peek You.

Finally, MyEdge is a solution for owning your Google results. All of these services scale in size depending on your need and how much money you want to spend.

8. Sentiment Metrics

Sentiment Metrics has a reputation management tool that, just like the other services mentioned, helps you monitor what is being said about you, your brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. The reports you’ll receive by using this software focus on sentiment (it’s in the name), which tells you if the mention is positive, negative or neutral.

The reports have nice visual graphs and you can break them down by gender, age groups and location. One of the big differentiators and benefits of using this service is that you get email alerts sent to you whenever you have bad press.

9. Visible Technologies

Visible Technologies offers two different services. The first is TruCast, which is a comprehensive solution for social media analysis and participation used by enterprises who want to track, analyze and participate in social media communities. The differentiation here is that you can comment on blogs and forums directly from the tool they provide.

The second is TruView, which protects and promotes reputations online. This service is similar to Reputation Defender’s MyEdge in how it helps you take ownership of your Google results by ensuring there is positive and relevant content at the top of search engines for your brand name.

 

Cision offers the Cision Social Media service, which claims to monitor over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites. One of the main benefits, just like Nielsen Buzzmetrics, is that these companies have been monitoring and measuring traditional media sites for decades, so they can provide a more comprehensive solution across the board.

Cision’s product is unique in that it offers 24/7 buzz reporting. Their service is powered by Radian6, which is mentioned above. They also have a Dashboard and daily reports, just like the other services, where they tell you what’s going on with your brand twice a day through email.

Final Thoughts

Depending on your work schedule, business needs, how popular your brand name is and how much money you want to invest in reputation management, any of these services may be of great assistance to you. And using a fee-based reputation management service, in combination with a number of free services, is a wise decision. Most of the services above aren’t real-time, so subscribing to Google alerts and Twitter feeds is still very important for monitoring your brand.

The sooner you get ahold of what people are saying about your brand and plan how you will respond and manage those relationships, the more successful you will be in social media. This area is still relatively new and no company has gotten it 100% right yet. The complicated part of monitoring a brand in a social world is that humans are needed (human error). Some posts are sarcastic or others are using brands as examples to illustrate a bigger idea and these tools may respond differently.

Now we get to see which vendors use their own services to monitor their brand names. Let’s see who comments on this post

Interested in more resources? Check these out:

- “Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation”

- “HOW TO: Build Your Online Brand”

- “10 Ways Personal Branding Can Save You From Getting Fired”

- “Twitter, Facebook, Digg: Can You Join Too Many Social Networks?”

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12/28/2008 10:29 PM

http://apnews.myway.com

NEW YORK (AP) - Investors are preparing to close out the last three trading days of 2008 with Wall Street's worst performance since Herbert Hoover was president.

The ongoing recession and global economic shock pummeled stocks this year, with the Dow Jones industrial average slumping 36.2 percent. That's the biggest drop since 1931 when the Great Depression sent stocks reeling 40.6 percent.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index is set to record the biggest drop since its creation in 1957. The index of America's biggest companies is down 40.9 percent for the year.

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http://www.chrisbrogan.com/

How to Start Speaking at Events

 

 

One day, I wasn’t a speaker at conferences, and then I was. And then a little while later, I was a paid speaker. And now, I’m a decently paid speaker. Some day, I hope to be a really well-paid speaker. It’s not a bad way to make a few pesos, if only to fund all the crazy research I like to do all the time. (Also nice that it pays for the occasional bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats -strawberry flavor- for my kids, too.) If you’re interested in speaking at events, I have some ideas on how you might get that going.

You might first ask yourself what your goal might be. Are you speaking to further establish yourself and your company as thought leaders? Are you trying to pitch some amazing product? Are you hoping to share the learnings found in your awesome book (available for 24.95 from O’Reilly Publishing)? That’s a good first thing to know: your goal. But after that, my advice is fairly the same.

How to Start Speaking at Events

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