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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.

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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)

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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."

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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.

--

http://iranpoliticsclub.net/

sex after death in islam

--

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.

--

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.
--

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.

--

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% -

 

--

 

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.

--

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.

--

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.

--

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.

--

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.

---

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.

--

 

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

 

--

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.

--

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.

--

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

Related posts

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• The Beauty Of Street Photography
• 60 Beautiful Examples Of Night Photography
• 60 Stunning Underwater Photos
• 35 Beautiful Examples Of Rain Photography
• 45 Beautiful Motion Blur Photos

--

1/13/2009 11:37 AM

http://flowingdata.com

Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis

--

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.

--

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.

--

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

Blog Your Speech - My first presentation at a conference was Content Networks are the New Blogs. I gave it at BarCamp Boston. I think it went smashingly, but if you want to know for sure, ask Christopher S. Penn. He was there. That’s where we founded PodCamp. Before I stepped on stage (in this case, it’s BarCamp, so the barrier to speaking is pretty low), I looked for support about the blog post, to see if it fit my potential audience.

Since then, I still use the technique. I write about the types of speeches I hope to give. It works all the time. I often hear from various verticals with an association meeting who want to better understand something I brought up in a blog post, or they’ll ask me to further customize something to a specific industry. In both cases, I love the opportunity. It’s a great way to find new places to speak.

Make Friends - It never hurts to actually know some conference organizers. I didn’t know Rick Calvert well before speaking at the first BlogWorld Expo, but I met him and Patti Hosking at Gnomedex and that made it easier to be invited to speak.

Showing up at conferences and having decent conversations with people makes it a bit easier to start speaking at events, because then people come to realize and appreciate the kinds of things you’re about, and might want to know more about your ability to speak on a stage.

Shoot Video- So, you might not have put this one together, but you don’t have to attend a conference to speak. You can just set up your video camera or the iSight in your laptop, and shoot your own speech. Videobloggers do it all the time. Or haven’t you ever watched Gary Vaynerchuk?

Now, if you get to speak at an event, at all costs, try to get some video capture of it. Why? Because it means that people will get the chance to see you in action. And that brings me to my next point .

Have a Speaking Page

One of the best things I ever did was build a speaking page, which contains a few elements for you to get a better sense of what I can do for your organization:

• It starts with a two paragraph overview of who I am and what I talk about.
• It goes right into sample speaking topics, which are write-ups of presentations I’ve given. (These make it really easy for someone to envision how to use me at their event.)
• Next comes some sample video presentations (see why I told you to shoot video?). These have proven really helpful to me.
• I then follow with the laundry list of places crazy enough to have had me speak there.
• Next to last, but vital are testimonials, which give others the chance to brag about you.
• And finally, I give people an email address where to contact me.

Having a speaking page has given me lots in the way of evidence that I’m doing okay when it comes to presenting.

Social Proof

I also use my LinkedIn profile to get recommendations from people who’ve seen me speak, and I list professional speaker as one of my “jobs” on the site. Further, if I’m going to an event, I blog about the event at least once before attending, and I use Twitter a lot at the event so that it’s not unknown that I’m speaking yet again.

This is all under the realm of social proof. When people see you in the role of speaker, they better understand how you’re going to help, and what you’re going to deliver. The more they see proof of how you’ve delivered, the more they’ll be interested in hiring you for the next gig.

How to Get Paid to Speak

Ask.

Okay, that’s step 1, and believe me it’s not that easy. We don’t pay speakers for my New Marketing Summit, and I couldn’t pay for speakers at Video on the Net. Lots of shows can’t afford to pay for speakers, but those are just the shows you know about. There are very deserving and interesting shows out there that do pay a speaker’s fee, and that do want a paid professional speaker who will deliver quite a lot of value back to their attendees for that money.

One way to see who might potentially pay is to see what they charge for admission. If the price is high, there’s likely a little budget for speaking fees.

**Note: The opportunity to speak at certain places, even for free, sometimes outweighs a fee.

Don’t discount a speaking opportunity because it doesn’t pay. Some places even charge for speaking, as part of a larger sponsorship or exhibitor’s package. That doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities and value in speaking there. Instead, it means that you have to have a conversion plan in mind to transform your efforts as a speaker into business downstream.

Other Things to Consider

Have a good About page on your website. People want to know about the person they’re considering for a slot in their show. Make sure you’re timely in responding to requests for information (which I’m horrible at, but people have been nice to me). Do what you can to make your presentation worth their time, let alone their money.

And above all else, start somewhere. I’ve done some rough analysis, and it turns out that exactly 100% of speakers I’ve met at conferences all started by speaking.

The Bonus Round

If you want to learn more about what I think makes a top shelf presentation, I’m going to cover that in my free newsletter, which is different than my blog content. That’ll come out by the end of the week, so if you’re interested in more, subscribe for free.

What do you think? Did I miss anything? What else would you tell folks who want to start speaking at events? How did you get your start? What else can I answer for you?

And what do you think makes a speaker into a rockstar?

 

 

 

 

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12/27/2008 10:52 AM

http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

Structured Procrastination

 

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.

Another example is book order forms. I write this in June. In October, I will teach a class on Epistemology. The book order forms are already overdue at the book store. It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.) I get almost daily reminders from the department secretary, students sometimes ask me what we will be reading, and the unfilled order form sits right in the middle of my desk, right under the wrapping from the sandwich I ate last Wednesday. This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things. But in fact, the book store is plenty busy with forms already filed by non-procrastinators. I can get mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need to order popular well-known books from efficient publishers. I will accept some other, apparently more important, task sometime between now and, say, August 1st. Then my psyche will feel comfortable about filling out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.

The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?

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12/26/2008 11:51 PM

 

http://www.nytimes.com/

 

No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’

 

DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.

In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.

“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.

Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.

The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.

Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.

“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”

There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.

The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.

The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.

Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011.

The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.

“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.

Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”

Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met “green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. “When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way,” he said.

In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.

“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.

Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.

The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.

Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.

“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”

There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.

The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.

The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.

Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011.

The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.

“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.

Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”

Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met “green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. “When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way,” he said.

Inside, a passive home does have a slightly different gestalt from conventional houses, just as an electric car drives differently from its gas-using cousin. There is a kind of spaceship-like uniformity of air and temperature. The air from outside all goes through HEPA filters before entering the rooms. The cement floor of the basement isn’t cold. The walls and the air are basically the same temperature.

Look closer and there are technical differences: When the windows are swung open, you see their layers of glass and gas, as well as the elaborate seals around the edges. A small, grated duct near the ceiling in the living room brings in clean air. In the basement there is no furnace, but instead what looks like a giant Styrofoam cooler, containing the heat exchanger.

Passive houses need no human tinkering, but most architects put in a switch with three settings, which can be turned down for vacations, or up to circulate air for a party (though you can also just open the windows). “We’ve found it’s very important to people that they feel they can influence the system,” Mr. Hasper said.

The houses may be too radical for those who treasure an experience like drinking hot chocolate in a cold kitchen. But not for others. “I grew up in a great old house that was always 10 degrees too cold, so I knew I wanted to make something different,” said Georg W. Zielke, who built his first passive house here, for his family, in 2003 and now designs no other kinds of buildings.

In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.

But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.

Moreover, the kinds of home construction popular in the United States are more difficult to adapt to the standard: residential buildings tend not to have built-in ventilation systems of any kind, and sliding windows are hard to seal.

Dr. Feist’s original passive house — a boxy white building with four apartments — looks like the science project that it was intended to be. But new passive houses come in many shapes and styles. The Passivhaus Institut, which he founded a decade ago, continues to conduct research, teaches architects, and tests homes to make sure they meet standards. It now has affiliates in Britain and the United States.

Still, there are challenges to broader adoption even in Europe.

Because a successful passive house requires the interplay of the building, the sun and the climate, architects need to be careful about site selection. Passive-house heating might not work in a shady valley in Switzerland, or on an urban street with no south-facing wall. Researchers are looking into whether the concept will work in warmer climates — where a heat exchanger could be used in reverse, to keep cool air in and warm air out.

And those who want passive-house mansions may be disappointed. Compact shapes are simpler to seal, while sprawling homes are difficult to insulate and heat.

Most passive houses allow about 500 square feet per person, a comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr. Hasper said people who wanted thousands of square feet per person should look for another design.

“Anyone who feels they need that much space to live,” he said, “well, that’s a different discussion.”

--

http://news.bbc.co.uk

 

Collect life lessons as you pass go

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monopoly should really only take about an hour and a half, says retired fireman and tournament player Alan Farrell.

 

"The main rule that tends to get ignored is the auction. If you land on a property and don't want it, it goes to auction. That's what tends to slow things down and put a lot of people off. If you don't get houses built it will go on forever."
 

'You'll give me Bow Street for The Strand? OK'

 

--

12/26/2008 10:57 AM

 

http://search.techrepublic.com.com

 

100 Resources for

Science Fiction

Awesome!  Check this out in detail!

 

--

http://news.yahoo.com

The Economy Needs a Painful Period of Adjustment

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http://techdirt.com/

Record Labels Learning They Have Little Leverage On YouTube

from the well,-look-at-that... dept

Over the weekend, the story made the rounds about Warner Music's dispute with Google over getting money from YouTube videos. As we discussed in our post on the topic, it seemed like Warner had very little leverage here: Google has no legal responsibility to pay anything, and removing the videos from YouTube seemed a lot more likely to harm Warner Music and its artists than Google. As noted by some folks, for many kids these days, YouTube is how they find and listen to music these days. Forcing your songs off YouTube would be like demanding their removal from the radio twenty years ago.

Yet, more details are coming out on this story, and it appears that both Warner Music and Google may recognize Warner Music's precarious position here. In fact, it appears that it wasn't Warner Music that demanded its music be taken down. Instead, reports are coming out saying that Warner instead went to Google with higher monetary demands, and it was Google's response to start pulling the music down, to demonstrate to Warner Music that YouTube is a lot more valuable to Warner Music than Warner Music is to YouTube (a lesson that Warner Music execs desperately need to learn).

Warner Music's response, apparently, has been to try to pretend it has some leverage, supposedly leaking a somewhat questionable story that it, and other major record labels, are preparing to launch a "Hulu for music." However, as Greg Sandoval notes in the News.com link in the paragraph above, this seems like little more than idle speculation by the labels. They had talked about this months ago, and have done nothing since. Instead, it was a bluff by the record labels in a weak attempt to convince Google that it needs to play ball or face competition. Google is likely to call the bluff -- because Google still recognizes what the record labels seem to have trouble recognizing. The power of YouTube isn't in having a site that plays videos, it's in the audience -- and you don't recreate that overnight.

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http://techdirt.com/blog.php

Internet Company Valuations Now Below Their Lows From Last Bubble Burst

from the in-case-you-didn't-realize-how-big-the-financial-crisis-has-been dept

I doubt there's anyone out there who would claim that the dot com bubble bursting was a bigger deal than the current global financial restructuring that's been going on. However, plenty of people (myself included) have suggested that internet companies are more isolated from the root causes of the mess this time around -- and that's almost undeniably true. Last time, a lot of the trouble came directly from overvalued internet companies. This time, it's had little, if anything, to do with internet companies. However, apparently some are noticing that the valuations of 50 or so top internet companies have dipped below their lowest point from when the dot com bubble popped. Of course, in the aggregate, that's rather meaningless. Each of the companies looked at have different circumstances. Besides, the current global financial mess means that no one's really sure how to value anything, meaning that current valuations of pretty much any stock should probably be taken with a huge grain of salt.

--

12/22/2008 8:12 AM

http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/

Becoming Credible

Tom Wanek believes credibility can be “purchased” by risking one or more of six currencies. The more you put at risk, the more believable your message.

Currencies that Buy Credibility:

1. Material Wealth
Of the six currencies, we see material wealth risked most frequently in money-back guarantees and statements like, “Find a lower price anywhere and we’ll refund the difference plus 10 percent.” Can you think of a better way to increase credibility by increasing the customer’s perception of your risk?

2. Time & Energy    
Are you in a business that provides an in-home service? Imagine the power of an ad that says, “If we’re not there when we promised, we do the job for free. Unlike other companies, we would never waste your time, then ask you to pay for ours.” Variations of this classic example of risking time and energy to increase credibility have been used by the Clockworks group to build a number of America’s most successful in-home service franchises. How else might you risk time and energy to increase credibility?

3. Opportunity
Ladies, when a man claims to love you but continues to date other women, is his statement credible? A self-imposed restriction on opportunity – dating you exclusively – adds credibility to his statement, does it not? Likewise, the manufacturer who gives access to just one retailer in an area is perceived as committed to that retailer’s success. Is there a way your business might risk opportunity to strengthen credibility?

4. Power & Control
The original purpose of Amazon.com was to sell books. But by choosing to allow visitors to write negative reviews, they increased the credibility of the positive reviews and quickly became one of the internet giants. Likewise, your company can gain power by giving it away and you can increase your credibility by giving up control. How many ways might you do this?

5. Reputation & Prestige
In a report released two weeks ago by CNN/Opinion Research, George W. Bush had an approval rating of just 24 percent. In a press conference held the following week, the President said he regretted saying he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" and that he had urged the Iraqi insurgents in 2003, “bring ‘em on.” He said he was sorry such language made the world believe he was “not a man of peace.” By putting his prestige at risk and eating a slice of humble pie, George W. Bush regained some of his lost credibility, don’t you think?

6. Safety and Well-Being
You're 12 years old. Your stepfather says he loves you as much as if you were his own, but you’re not sure you believe him. But when you fall through the ice while skating on a frozen lake your stepfather dives through the hole into the freezing water to rescue you. Do you believe him now? 

The president of Lifelock, an identity-theft protection program, runs ads that say, “My name is Todd Davis. My social security number is 457-55-5462. So why publish my social security number? Because I’m absolutely confident LifeLock is protecting my good name and personal information, just like it will yours. And we guarantee our service up to $1 million dollars.” By risking his personal well-being through the publication of his Social Security number and risking his company’s material wealth by reimbursing up to $1 million in identity-theft losses, Todd Davis has built Lifelock into the dominant player in its category. Are you beginning to see how embracing risk increases credibility?

--

http://stupidevilbastard.com

Self-Illustrating Logical Fallacies

These Self-Illustrating Logical Fallacies are just too good to pass up. Many thanks to the author and I hope he or she doesn’t mind my taking liberties reproducing them here.

I’ll let them speak for themselves, but you may have to think about some of these a little:

1. Begging the question, or petitio principii, is the most common type of fallacy because it is the one that occurs most frequently.

2. A bad set of options is either a false dichotomy or a true dichotomy.

3. You should never label an argument as a slippery slope argument, because next thing you know, you’re going to be calling all arguments that and where will it end?

4. Special pleading is the only type of logical fallacy that is not fallacious. This is because it is “special.”

5. If you don’t know what argumentum ad hominem is, you’re an idiot.

6. An appeal to authority constitutes a logically sound claim. Even the Pope agrees, and he knows a lot of things.

7. There’s nothing wrong with a hasty generalization. After all, most of my friends believe that.

8. Saying I provided a false analogy is like me saying you’re just plain wrong.

9. A non-sequitur conclusion is one which does not follow from the premises, therefore the premises must be wrong.

10. Argumentum ad logicam is a fallacy, so it always leads to a false conclusion.

11. Amphibolies will deceive the foolish, because that is their nature.

12. You can’t accuse someone of the fallacy of equivocation without being guilty of using “equivocation” yourself. See?

13. If I am affirming the consequent, then I am committing a logical fallacy. I am committing a logical fallacy, thus I must be affirming the consequent.

14. If I am denying the antecedent then I am committing a logical fallacy. I am not denying the antecedent, therefore I am not committing a logical fallacy.

15. My fallacy of composition is comprised of sensible words, so naturally it is a sensible statement.

16. A fallacy of division is nonsense, therefore it is comprised of nonsensical words.

17. You better damn well believe that I never resort to an appeal to force.

18. Is your inquiry a loaded question or a stupid one?

19. People who object to a straw man are simply prejudiced against the noble straw people.

20. A non causa pro causa argument is made by nitwits, therefore it is this type of argument that is the cause of human nitwitism.

21. A lot of people know that an argumentum ad populum is valid, especially in this democracy we live in. They can’t all be wrong.

22. Ignoratio elenchi must be a rather popular fallacy, since sociological studies have shown that people tend to think emotionally rather than rationally.

23. My own arguments, by virtue of coming from me, can never really constitute a true “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

24. How can you say a claim is guilty of reification? Where is the empirical evidence for reification? Show me something solid I can hold in my hand, else there is no reason to believe you.

--

 12/14/2008 12:12 PM

http://www.theregister.co.uk

Take this example from a quality British broadsheet.

One journalist on the paper lamented that:

...it's becoming all too clear at The Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centred on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in.

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