Ctrl-V   -    Reality Check.  Reality Check Mate!

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.chrisbrogan.com

Here’s a freebie: if I were an author looking to get the most out of the social web (and I am), I’d do something along the lines of what I’m about to share. Your mileage may vary, but here’s a decent approximation of the things I’d do. Please feel free to share liberally. Just link back to An Author’s Plan for Social Media Efforts, please.

An Author’s Plan for Social Media

1. Set up a URL for the book, and/or maybe one for your name. Need help finding a URL? I use Ajaxwhois.com for simple effort in searching.
2. Set up a blog. If you want it free and super fast, WordPress or Tumblr. I’d recommend getting hosting like Bloghost.me.
3. On the blog, write about interesting things that pertain to the book, but don’t just promote the book over and over again. In fact, blow people away by promoting their blogs and their books, if they’re related a bit.
4. Start an email newsletter. It’s amazing how much MORE responsive email lists are than any other online medium.
5. Have a blog post that’s a list of all the places one might buy your book. I did this for both Trust Agents and building blocks.)
6. Consider recording a video trailer for your book. Here’s one from Scott Sigler (YouTube), for his horror thriller, Contagious.
7. Build a Facebook fan page for the book or for bonus points, build one around the topic the book covers, and only lightly promote the book via the page.
8. Join Twitter under your name, not your book’s name, and use Twitter Search to find people who talk about the subjects your book covers.
9. When people talk about your book, good or bad, thank them with a reply. Connect to people frequently. It’s amazing how many authors I rave about on Twitter and how few actually respond. Mind you, the BIGGEST authors always respond (paradox?)
10. Use Google Blogsearch and Alltop to find the people who’d likely write about the subject matter your book covers. Get commenting on their blog posts but NOT mentioning your book. Get to know them. Leave USEFUL comments, with no blatant URL back to your book.
11. Work with your publisher for a blogger outreach project. See if you can do a giveaway project with a few bloggers (here’s a book giveaway project I did for Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years book).
12. Offer to write guest posts on blogs that make sense as places where potential buyers might be. Do everything you can to make the post match the content of the person’s site and not your goals. But do link to your book.
13. Ask around for radio or TV contacts via the social web and LinkedIn. You never know.
14. Come up with interesting reasons to get people to buy bulk orders. If you’re a speaker, waive your fee (or part of it) in exchange for sales of hundreds of books. (And spread those purchases around to more than one bookselling company.) In those giveaways, do something to promote links back to your site and/or your post. Giveaways are one time: Google Juice is much longer lasting.
15. Whenever someone writes a review on their blog, thank them with a comment, and maybe 1 tweet, but don’t drown them in tweets pointing people to the review. It just never comes off as useful.
16. Ask gently for Amazon and other distribution site reviews. They certainly do help the buying process. And don’t ask often.
17. Do everything you can to be gracious and thankful to your readers. Your audience is so much more important than you in this equation, as there are more of them than there are of you.
18. Start showing up at face to face events, where it makes sense, including tweetups. If there’s not a local tweetup, start one.
19. And with all things, treat people like you’d want them to treat your parents (provided you had a great relationship with at least one of them).

This sounds like a lot of steps. It is. But this is how people are finding success. Should this be the publicist’s job? Not even a little bit. The publicist has his or her own methodology. The author will always be the best advocate for his or her own work. Never put your marketing success in the hands of someone else. Always bring your best efforts into the mix and you’ll find your best reward on your time and effort.

You might have found other ways to be successful with various online and social media tools. By all means, please share with us here. What’s your experience been with promoting your work using the social web?

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http://www.usnews.com

 

Why Voters Will Get a Lot Angrier

If you think this is a political revolution, just wait a couple of years.

Tea Partiers and status-quo destroyers are ecstatic at the spectacle of Washington bums—sorry, incumbents—being thrown from the parapets they've held for decades. Party swapper Arlen Specter will be heading home after 30 years in the Senate, bounced in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary by a relative newcomer, Joe Sestak. Republican stalwart Bob Bennett of Utah is departing from the Senate too, a victim of the insider status that used to count as an asset. In the Kentucky primary, Republican voters stiffed their party's anointed candidate and instead elected bomb thrower Rand Paul. "I have a message from the Tea Party," Paul roared. "We've come to take our government back."

Insurgent voters seem likely to produce a lot more upsets by election time in November, as disgust with Washington mushrooms into electoral revolt. But the reformers sent to "take government back" might end up wishing they had left it in the hands of those stale Congressional lifers.

Voter outrage in 2012 or 2014 could make the quarrels of 2010 seem like a Victorian debating society. It's a matter of simple math. Within the next few years, government leaders will be forced to make some of the most painful decisions in decades. The U.S. government now spends something like $1 trillion more per year than it takes in, borrowing the difference. With the national debt approaching dangerous proportions, this must end, or else the mighty United States will end up hamstrung like Greece, begging its creditors for forbearance. And there's no way to spare middle-class voters the pain this is going to cause.

Slogans make the problem sound simple, but Tea Partiers heading to Washington will quickly discover that solutions don't fit in the palm of one's hand. Shrink government? Okay, good start. Medicare, Social Security, and veterans benefits account for about 35 percent of all federal spending, a percentage that's going up. So cutting payments to Baby Boomers and veterans will save a lot of money. Medicaid, food stamps, and other aid to the unfortunate accounts for another 20 percent or so, and not all of those people vote, so maybe you could cut that altogether. National defense accounts for 20 percent of federal spending, and you might conclude that fears of terrorism are overblown, allowing some cuts there. Foreign aid, federal AIDS research, safety inspectors, and all those government agencies account for less than 25 percent of all spending, so maybe nobody will notice if you take that down.

Voters are cranky now because the economy stinks, unemployment is high, Washington is out of touch, and the usual Beltway dickering for political advantage does nothing to improve the nation's fortunes. But amid this discontent, Washington is still giving voters a free ride by offering services and subsidies that will have to be paid for in the future—by the same people who are recipients of the largesse today. When that bill comes due, Washington will have no choice but to ask taxpayers for more, give them less, and try to explain why sacrifices are suddenly necessary. The winners in November will be the incumbents when that earthquake hits. They want to take government back? They can have it.

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http://www.cbsnews.com

 

The Tea Party's Got Issues to Work Through - Boy, Do They

Not all people who identify themselves as Tea Partiers are ethnocentric wingnuts who get their information about the world spoon-fed to them by televised talking heads. But apologists for this movement are going to have a hard time explaining away the fact that a sizable minority qualify for that very description.

The latest CBS News/New York Times poll presents a picture of an aging cohort of pessimistic white folks, rattled by economic and cultural changes which have rocked their increasingly Twitter-fied, multicultural and multi-polar world (one led by a charismatic black guy who can swoosh 3 pointers with the best of them.) And their unhappiness with the verdict of the 2008 presidential election has led them down the rabbit hole.

Judge the poll data for yourself but for me the clincher was the birther issue. An astounding thirty percent of the people who identified themselves as tea partiers still believe that President Obama was born in another country, while another 29% still don't know. Don't know? I'm not sure which is worse: being paranoid delusional or potentially paranoid delusional but too lazy to find out the facts.

Everything else flows from this bogus controversy. It so happens that I have it on good authority that the birthers were dropped off on Planet Earth from an asteroid penal colony near the farthest rung of Saturn. Prove it, you say? Au contraire; first they prove they're not from outer space and then perhaps I'll reassess my suspicion. Yes, that's how insane it is.

Some other gems:

• 75% don't believe that the president shares the values of most Americans. Fascinating. I'd pay money to sit down with these folks to learn more about their belief system. They must think of Obama as something of a cross between Eldridge Cleaver and a Maoist Mao-Mao. As for the over-achieving, doting wife and those ridiculously cute kids? Obvious stage props to divert attention from the revolutionary hordes massing on the other side of the Rio Grande.
• 88% say the economic stimulus has had no impact on the economy. Two possibilities here. Either they aren't paying attention or they the tea partiers are so ideologically blinkered that it really doesn't matter what the facts are. By any measure except one - jobs - the economy is demonstrably stronger than it was when George W. Bush left the White House. We can argue about economic theory but data remain immune from ideology and they are beyond contestation.
• 92% say that Obama is moving the country toward socialism. I'll wager two means of production and one Saul Alinsky union card that most of these folks never read Das Kapital and wouldn't know a Hegelian dialectic from the man in the moon. Obama, a bourgeois intellectual who has surrounded himself with mainstays of corporate capitalism, has a plan to take us to the socialist paradise? Yeah, and I suppose the New York Mets are a lock to win the World Series this year.
• 54% identify as belonging to the GOP while 41% claim to be Independents. Just 5% are Democrats. This isn't surprising. Nor is it any shock to learn that 57% have a favorable view of George W. Bush. It apparently did not register that the Great Recession began under Dubya's watch (as did the haphazard Wall Street bailout.)
• Asked what they liked least about Obama, 19% simply don't like him. Another 11% say he is turning the U.S. more toward socialism, and 10% mentioned health care reforms. (9% said he was dishonest.) I'm not sure how far to extrapolate but 89% of these folks are white and a majority feel that too much has been made of the problems facing blacks.

At least they're being honest.

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More from the Poll:

Tea Party Supporters: Who They Are and What They Believe
Most Tea Partiers Believe Too Much Made of Problems Facing Blacks
Tea Partiers View Palin, Beck and Bush Favorably
Tea Party Activists Small but Passionate Group
"Birther" Myth Persists Among Tea Partiers, All Americans
Most Tea Party Supporters Say Their Taxes Are Fair

Read the Complete Poll on Who They Are (PDF)
Read the Complete Poll on What They Believe (PDF)

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http://www.thedailybeast.com

 

Facts have an inconvenient way of asserting themselves in a democracy as raucous as ours; and facts, in the end, catch up with even the greatest of newspapers. And so it came to pass that the Times took a closer look at the men and women who comprise the Tea Party movement. And what do you know: 37 percent have college or postgraduate degrees (compared with the national adult average of 25 percent), and 20 percent have a household income greater than $100,000 (compared with a national average of 14 percent).

What’s more, 75 percent are older than 45, suggesting that Tea Partiers are not unthinking hotheads, but have had many years’ experience of national politics—and, inevitably, a fond memory of an America that wasn’t so steeped in entitlements. Maybe that’s why they oppose Obamacare with such eye-catching vim.

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5/9/2010 1:02 PM

 

http://www.csmonitor.com/

 

Tea partyers generally well-off

Meanwhile, a bevy of new polls paint tea partyers as class-conscious, and overall wealthier and better educated than the average American.

"Looking at polling data on the early folks involved in tea party movement, you saw clusters of people with relatively less past political participation, with very strong anti-tax, anti-government views, but also very strong pro-gun rights positions," says Professor Franklin.

For many Democrats, the tea party represents a time machine trip "back to the bad old days," as Peter Gelzinis of the Boston Herald recently put it.

"The latest CBS News/New York Times poll presents a picture of an aging cohort of pessimistic white folks, rattled by economic and cultural changes which have rocked their increasingly Twitter-fied, multicultural and multi-polar world (one led by a charismatic black guy who can swoosh 3 pointers with the best of them)," writes Charles Cooper at CBS News. "And their unhappiness with the verdict of the 2008 presidential election has led them down the rabbit hole."

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5/5/2010 9:53 PM

 

http://www.cnbc.com/id/36897497

 

Greek Wealth Is Everywhere but Tax Forms

In the wealthy, northern suburbs of this city, where summer temperatures often hit the high 90s, just 324 residents checked the box on their tax returns admitting that they owned pools.

 

So tax investigators studied satellite photos of the area — a sprawling collection of expensive villas tucked behind tall gates — and came back with a decidedly different number: 16,974 pools.

Whatever the reason, Kostas Bakouris, the president of the Greek arm of the anticorruption organization Transparency International, said that Greeks were constantly facing the lure of petty corruption. “If they go to the mechanic, it is one price without a receipt and quite a bit more with it,” Mr. Bakouris said.

He said his own sister had recently told him that she was uncomfortable asking her doctor for a receipt. “I said that’s crazy,” he said. “But still, that feeling is out there.”

Various studies have concluded that Greece’s shadow economy represented 20 to 30 percent of its gross domestic product. Friedrich Schneider, the chairman of the economics department at Johannes Kepler University of Linz, studies Europe’s shadow economies; he said that Greece’s was at 25 percent last year and estimated that it would rise to 25.2 percent in 2010. For comparison, the United States’ was put at 7.8 percent.

The Finance Ministry believes that the new tax laws, which also increased the weight on income and value-added taxes, have laid the legal groundwork for better enforcement. In the past, the tax code gave many categories of workers special status. Entire professions were allowed to file a set income. For instance, newsstand owners could simply claim that they earned an income of 12,000 euros (about $15,900) and no questions were asked.

Now, most of these exceptions have been eliminated and the tax code has been simplified. It also offers various incentives to make people collect receipts — an important step, officials say, in shrinking the off-the-books economy.

In addition, the tax department is being reorganized so that regional offices will have far less autonomy.

Mr. Plaskovitis said that tax collectors had already begun using technology to crosscheck claims and that they had taken steps like asking luxury car dealerships for list of their clients. A lot of Greeks, he said, listed luxury cars as company cars, a practice that would be challenged in the future. “We do not believe you need a Porsche to sell Coca-Cola,” he said.

Soon, Mr. Plaskovitis said, people will see results. “In the coming weeks,” he said, “we are going to be closing down companies, restaurants and doctors’ offices because they have not paid taxes.”

But how fast progress will come is an open question. The changes have provoked protests and deep resentment in some circles. For instance, the president of the union for doctors who work in state hospitals, Stathis Tsoukalos, 60, calls the loss of a special tax status for his doctors wrongheaded and unfair. He contended that the special low tax rate was given to make up for the fact that doctors received very low pay.

Speaking of the doctors in the Kolonaki neighborhood who claimed small incomes, he said, they may have just opened their practices or bought real estate there with help from their parents.

Whether the country’s tax collectors are up to the task is also unclear. Many Greeks say tax collectors have a reputation for being among the easiest officials to bribe. Some say tax troubles are usually solved in a three way split: You pay a third of what you owe to the government, a third to the collector and a third remains in your pocket.

 

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http://www.crafted.com.au/

 

Apples attack on Adobe Flash, its all about online video.

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5/5/2010 9:11 AM

 

http://www.boston.com/

 

awesome pics of the oil disaster

 

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5/1/2010 7:14 AM

 

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org

 

Most people know about the individual mandate in the new health care bill, but the bill contained another mandate that could be far more costly.

A few wording changes to the tax code’s section 6041 regarding 1099 reporting were slipped into the 2000-page health legislation. The changes will force millions of businesses to issue hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of additional IRS Form 1099s every year. It appears to be a costly, anti-business nightmare.

Under current law, businesses are required to issue 1099s in a limited set of situations, such as when paying outside consultants. The health care bill includes a vast expansion in this information reporting requirement in an attempt to raise revenue for an increasingly rapacious Congress.

In a recent summary, tax information firm RIA notes the types of transactions covered by the new 1099 rules:

The 2010 Health Care Act adds “amounts in consideration for property” (Code Sec. 6041(a) as amended by 2010 Health Care Act §9006(b)(1)) and “gross proceeds” (Code Sec. 6041(a) as amended by 2010 Health Care Act §9006(b)(2)) to the pre-2010 Health Care Act categories of payments for which an information return to IRS will be required if the $600 aggregate payment threshold is met in a tax year for any one payee. Thus, Congress says that for payments made after 2011, the term “payments” includes gross proceeds paid in consideration for property or services.

Basically, businesses will have to issue 1099s whenever they do more than $600 of business with another entity in a year. For the $14 trillion U.S. economy, that’s a hell of a lot of 1099s. When a business buys a $1,000 used car, it will have to gather information on the seller and mail 1099s to the seller and the IRS. When a small shop owner pays her rent, she will have to send a 1099 to the landlord and IRS. Recipients of the vast flood of these forms will have to match them with existing accounting records. There will be huge numbers of errors and mismatches, which will probably generate many costly battles with the IRS.

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4/30/2010 6:59 PM

http://www.latimes.com

Life has never been so good for our species

Sure, the future looks gloomy if you focus on environmental problems or world hunger, but in many ways, things have never been better for us.

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4/25/2010 3:35 PM

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2251669/

The Tea Party's Toxic Take on History

You hear them say, for instance, that we live under "tyranny" because one side lost a health care vote in an elected legislative body. And that, in all seriousness, the president is a communist. For many Tea Party members, the word is not just a vile epithet; it's a realistic political description. Check out this clip in which Tea Party "celebrity" spokeswoman Victoria Jackson flatly tells a flummoxed Fox News host, "The president's a communist." When the host (the Fox host!) starts to object, she responds that Glenn Beck has taught her that progressive is a code word for communist. (Time to put that ugly hammer and sickle logo inside the "O" on your I-hate-Obama T.P. protest sign!)

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4/17/2010 7:23 AM

 

http://www.marketwatch.com/

 

At its current price, Google shares are trading about 19.7 times estimated earnings for the next four quarters. That's about 37% below the stock's average forward P/E ratio over the last five years, according to relative valuation data from Thomson Reuters.

 

More hiring, marketing

Google said Thursday it had hired aggressively in the first quarter, adding that its total costs and expenses rose to $4.3 billion from $3.6 billion in the same period a year earlier.

The company hired 786 employees in the period, bringing its total to 20,621 at the end of March and marking its largest quarterly increase in staffing in two years. "We expect to continue hiring aggressively throughout the year," Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said during a conference call with analysts.

"Every time I can find another engineer to add to the Chrome OS platform, I'm going to hire him," Pichette said, referring to Google's operating system software. The company also suggested it might be spending more on marketing to build its user base.

Google's rate of paid clicks, or the number of times users clicked on advertisements to generate revenue, rose 15% from the year-earlier quarter. It had posted 13% growth in paid clicks in the prior fourth-quarter report. Analysts had been looking for first-quarter paid-click growth in the range of 12% to 14%.

Meanwhile, the prices paid for those clicks to Google in the first quarter rose 7% from the year-earlier quarter but were down 4% from the sequentially previous quarter.

Google's vice president of product management, Susan Wojcicki, said the dip in prices, or average cost per click, was due in part to an expansion into more obscure search keywords, which can draw fewer bids from advertisers. "Long term, that's good," Wojcicki added, as it presents more future opportunities.

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4/15/2010 11:20 AM

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/

 

China’s March Property Prices Jump a Record 11.7%

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3/29/2010 6:19 AM

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/

 

Tea Party activism is not about political dissent - It's about vile, storm trooper sound bites

Palin is such a fighter and great American that she quit on her stool as governor of Alaska because there was more money to be made in the other 49 states, shouting about death panels and health care and "European socialism" and writing unreadable books. In so many ways, she is a perfect media darling for our times. She doesn't scrawl graffiti, she thinks in it.

 

Sometimes you probably find yourself wondering just how much you have to hate this President before you love America enough.

 

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http://www.nytimes.com

 

Hobby or Necessity?

If you think this latest Israeli-American flap was just the same-old-same-old tiff over settlements, then you’re clearly not paying attention — which is how I’d describe a lot of Israelis, Arabs and American Jews today.

This tiff actually reflects a tectonic shift that has taken place beneath the surface of Israel-U.S. relations. I’d summarize it like this: In the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for Israel — has gone from being a necessity to a hobby. And in the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for America — has gone from being a hobby to a necessity. Therein lies the problem.

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http://www.frumforum.com/waterloo

 

Waterloo

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

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3/29/2010 1:05 AM

 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

 

Can ‘No’ Revive the Republicans?

The excessive rhetoric of House Minority Leader John Boehner, who called the bill “Armageddon,” will leave Republicans looking silly as the law’s various provisions are quietly implemented, and affordable health care becomes as natural to people as Social Security and Medicare have become.

The Republicans have become the Party of No in another sense. Having been the party of initiative since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, they are back to their more accustomed role as the party of reaction. The change can probably be dated back to the 2004 election, when Bush failed to privatize Social Security or maybe even in 2003 when electoral pressure pushed him into introducing the Prescription Drug Subsidy (a pork laden monster as you’d expect from Bush, but still an expansion of the welfare state).

The shift is certainly evident when you compare Obama’s first year in office with Clinton’s. Clinton was introducing policies demanded by the Republicans and their response (the Contract with America) was that he wasn’t doing nearly enough. Now, the Republicans have nothing of their own to offer, except more tax cuts (and, I guess, more torture).

The most surprising critic of this approach, however, was the former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. “It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster,” he lamented at his site FrumForum. “Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But: (1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November — by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs. (2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.”

In this pessimism, Frum was part of a sizeable minority of conservatives. But in the rest of the column, he crossed a Rubicon of sorts. “At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration,” Frum explains. “No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo — just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.”

The result of this blind ambition?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or — more exactly — with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother? I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters — but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead …

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Frum’s cri de coeur got rave reviews, albeit not from the intended audience.

Here’s Bill Barol at Huffington Post: “Last night was more than a legislative moment. It was also, and the implications of this will be deeper and broader than any legislation, a political one. (God help me, this is a part of the argument David Frum made yesterday.) Had the administration been turned back on health care it would have been crippled, probably irreversibly, in its ability to do big things in the areas that still need big things done: Energy, jobs and immigration, to pick just three.”

“Frum seemed to be picking up on exactly what I, and others, have been arguing: the midterm elections in 2010 are likely above all else to be a function of the state of the economy, which, as Frum notes, may actually be looking better by November,” adds
Joshua Tucker at Salon. “They will also … be a function of President Obama’s approval ratings, which have held relatively steady at around 50 percent for months, despite all the supposed angst in the country since then over health care reform.”

Jonathan Chait at the New Republic thinks Frum is spot on: “The Republican strategy of total opposition instead forced the Democrats into an all-or-nothing choice of passing a comprehensive bill or collapsing into catastrophic defeat. (Republicans tried desperately to convince them that letting the bill die was their best political strategy, but Democrats wisely rejected this awful advice.) Let me be clear: I’m glad they did it. I’m willing to accept higher Democratic losses in exchange for a health care bill that really solves the pathologies of the health care market. The Republican strategy was an audacious gamble, and it could have worked, but it came up empty. Thank goodness.”

Joe Gandelman at the Moderate Voice thinks Frum shows a good grasp of Republican history: “Political parties have kept power by only appealing to true believers, but coalition building which requires some consensus and compromise has proven to be the enduring and politically endearing course, (go back and read how Ronald Reagan upset many conservatives: Reagan is categorized as a ‘moderate’ by one historian due to his willingness to work with the opposition and compromise to achieve his broader goals).”

“Folks, if you want to know why bipartisanship failed, don’t look to Democrats,” writes Justin Gardner at Donklephant, naming the names that Frum left out. “Look to Boehner. Look to Palin. Look to Rush. Look to Hannity. Look to McConnell. Look to Beck. Look to Fox News. Look to the Tea Party.” He continues:

Democrats came to the table ready to deal. What they weren’t ready to do is develop a health care bill that was based almost solely on Republican economic philosophies. Still, they askewd a public option, even when their base was crying foul and demanding it. But Republicans made the political calculation that defeating the legislation was more important.

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http://www.nytimes.com/

 

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

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3/27/2010 11:21 PM

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com

 

Above water?

DESPITE RECENT, tentative signs of stabilization, the housing market remains fragile, and that translates into insecurity or outright hardship for millions of Americans. Twenty-four percent of all homeowners with mortgages are "underwater," meaning that they owe more on the residence than it is worth. For those borrowers who are unemployed, this situation is especially devastating: They can't tap equity to deal with expenses, and they often can't sell if a job offer requires them to move. In many cases, it's cheaper to walk away and let the bank foreclose than to keep up monthly payments.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, faces a clamor for relief. But if there were an easy solution to the foreclosure crisis, someone would have found it already. Loan modifications remain the best option, but targeting them to just the right population so as to avoid rewarding irresponsible behavior is a lot easier said than done. Small wonder that the administration's signature program, the Treasury Department's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), provided permanent payment relief to only 116,000 of 1.7 million potentially eligible cases through January.

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3/26/2010 10:21 PM

http://hbr.org/

Defend Your Research: Imitation Is More Valuable Than Innovation

The finding: Imitation is underappreciated. It can be more important to business growth than innovation is. Imitation is not mindless repetition; it’s an intelligent search for cause and effect.

The study: Oded Shenkar exhaustively reviewed research on major business-model innovations and on breakthroughs in eight scientific and academic disciplines, ranging from history to neuroscience. In all cases, he found imitation to be a primary source of progress, even though that progress often went unrecognized by executives and scholars. He also discovered that good imitation is difficult and requires intelligence and imagination.

The challenge: Can copying ideas be even more valuable than inventing something new? Is imitation really so hard that it can be considered a skill? Professor Shenkar, defend your research.
 

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http://www.wired.com

 

Google’s Traffic Is Giant, Which Is Why It Should be Your ISP

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3/17/2010 3:25 PM

 

http://www.wired.com/

 

Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

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http://jakonrath.blogspot.com

 

Monday, March 08, 2010

Whoa There, Ebook Writer

 

If you've been reading my blog lately, you know I've sold over 30,000 self-published ebooks on Kindle. Today it's 9:15am on March 8, and I've already sold 1322 ebooks this month.

I've gone from paying my mortgage every month on Kindle ebooks, to paying almost all of my monthly bills.

Numbers don't lie. But numbers also mean very little until significance is attached to them. It's easy to misinterpret my numbers and draw hasty conclusions.

Let's look at some truths, followed by some misconceptions.

1. More people are buying ereaders and ebooks. And the number will keep going up and up. This is true. While no one knows if ereaders will ever reach the same saturation as iPod or BluRay, it's safe to assume that as time goes on, ereaders will become better, cheaper, and more adopted by the general public.

2. Cheaper books sell better than expensive books. I'm frankly shocked not a single big publisher has released an ebook for $2.99. Value isn't about list price and royalty percentage. The true value of a book should be how much it earns in royalties. And selling 10,000 copies of a $1.99 book earns more than selling 1500 copies of a $9.99 book.

3. Ebooks make it easier for writers to reach readers. This is very true. Agents and editors--once gatekeepers, blessing the few with publication and snubbing the masses as inferior--are no longer as relevant as they once were, and unless they adapt, their relevance will continue to diminish.

4. Joe Konrath is doing well selling ebooks. And he's going to do even better as time goes on.

So far, everything I've said is true and hard to argue against. But if the amount of emails I've been getting lately is any indicator, many writers are drawing on these four facts and tailoring them to fit their individual dreams.

1. Writers no longer need an agent. Easy there, Smokey. I never said that. I never even hinted at that. Right now, in March of 2010, agents are essential if you want to be a full time fiction writer. Yes, they shop manuscripts to publishers, but they also do a lot more than that. First and foremost, they do have a pretty good instinct for vetting manuscripts, and separating the wheat from the chaff. If your manuscript isn't good enough to land an agent, how can you be sure it's good enough to be a successful self-published ebook?

2. Writers no longer need publishers. Right now I've got 12 ebooks and story collections on Kindle, and by the end of the year I'll make over $40k. But I made over $40k on Whiskey Sour, my first novel, by signing with a large publisher. Print is still the way to make the most money and reach the most readers. I don't see that going away anytime soon.

3. Print publishing is impossible to break into, so don't even bother. Wrong. You should try. You should try very hard. There is no reward in success without failure coming first. Sending out queries and getting rejections are more than rites of passage. They're learning experiences. And for fiction writers, I believe they're essential learning experiences to have.

4. I can sell a lot of ebooks like Joe Konrath. That's the seductive thing about numbers. You look at them and think, "I can do that too." Well, maybe you can. But chances are, you can't. No offense meant. You might be a better writer than I am. You might be a better marketer. But I'm pretty lucky to have these numbers. I also have a pretty solid platform I've built up over the last eight years.

Here's my advice: Keep aiming high.

As a fiction writer, your goal should be to find a great agent who can sell your book to a great publisher.

If you can't find an agent, perhaps you should rewrite the manuscript. Or begin working on the next one.

 

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3/14/2010 5:28 PM

 

http://www.barryeisler.com

 

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Paper Earthworks and Digital Tides

Don't be misled by the self-serving narratives Amazon and Macmillan have advanced following their recent eBooks battle. Amazon's narrative is "We're Pro-Consumer;" Macmillan (and paper publishers in general) counter with "We're Anti-Monopoly." Neither of these narratives is untrue, but neither addresses the real cause of this war.

What's happening is this. Amazon is doing everything it can to speed the transition to eBooks because, in a digital world, Amazon's costs of shipping and storage essentially disappear. Paper publishers are doing everything they can to slow the transition to eBooks because, in a digital world, paper publishers' high hardback margins essentially disappear.

 

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http://www.latimes.com

 

Unemployment tops 20% in eight California counties

The state's jobless rate of 12.5% in January was its worst on record and fifth-highest in the nation.

For many California areas, unemployment rates moved persistently higher in January, indicating that the national economic recovery hasn't yet translated into jobs for the Golden State.

New county-by-county figures released by the state Wednesday showed that in eight counties, more than 1 in 5 people were out of work. Moreover, revised numbers for last year show that fewer people were employed than was previously believed.

The state was one of five, along with Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, that reached their highest unemployment rates since the government began keeping track in 1976, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. California's was 12.5% in January, up from 12.3% in December.

 

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http://www.pcmag.com

 

15 Windows Utilities You Can't Live Without

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http://www.pbs.org

Early Feminist Cartoons

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http://www.wired.com

 

Mach 6 Cruise Missile, Ready for Prime Time?

This spring, the Air Force was preparing for a groundbreaking test of the X-51 WaveRider, a hypersonic cruise missile that would reach speeds of up to Mach 6. But it looks like the WaveRider’s debut flight will have to wait while some technical issues are addressed.

Boeing spokeswoman Christina Kelly confirmed to Danger Room that the test would have to be rescheduled. “We don’t have a firm date,” she said. “It’s going to happen, but it’s just going move to the right.”

The X-51 program is a collaboration between Boeing Phantom Works and engine maker Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne to develop a new class of cruise missile that can reach targets much, much faster than current designs. As this Air Force video explains, the X-51 employs scramjet propulsion: It collects air from the atmosphere to mix and burn with its fuel, but unlike a jet, it doesn’t rely on a turbine to do the compression work.

Hypersonic flight was once considered too extreme for an air-breathing vehicle to handle in a controlled way. But as Danger Room’s Noah Schachtman explained in Popular Mechanics a few years back, the X-51’s unique shape uses the shockwaves created by hypersonic flight to create lift, and compress the air to mix with its fuel.

If the concept works, It fits neatly with the military’s “prompt global strike” concept. The idea is to develop a new class of conventional weapon that can reach distant targets — say, a weapon of mass destruction, or an enemy command post — and hit it in a hurry. But a conventionally armed ICBM or submarine-launched ballistic missile might not be the ideal solution: You don’t want your global strike mission to be mistaken for a nuclear attack.

Testing the X-51 is a fairly complex thing. First, a B-52 has to carry the WaveRider up to 50,000 feet, and then drop it away. A solid rocket booster will then accelerate the aircraft to about Mach 4.5. After the booster drops, the scramjet is supposed to ignite, taking the WaveRider up to Mach 6.

Lt. Col. Todd Venema, director of the Hypersonic Combined Test Force, said in this Air Force news item that the flight test would push the altitude limit for the B-52. And tracking the flight will also require some orchestration. “Telemetry has to be relayed to the Naval Air Station at Pt. Magu to a control room with about 35 people, all watching the various telemetry,” he said. “So there will be a lot of team work aspects to the whole project.”

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http://www.wired.com

Half-Cocked? Hermaphrochickens Challenge Gender Identity

Chicken sex doesn’t work like ours. No, not that sex — but the process by which an embryo becomes a recognizably male or female animal.

Unlike mammals, it’s not hormones that dictate a chicken’s sex. It’s fundamental property of the cells themselves. But this only became apparent when biologists investigated several odd chickens that were half male and half female, as if a line were drawn down the center of their bodies.

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3/10/2010 11:47 AM

http://springwise.com/

Extreme sports such as bungee-jumping from the Macau Tower may well be enough to satisfy the adrenaline needs of the majority of premium thrill-seekers. Those still wishing for more, however, have a new alternative: they can pay to be kidnapped, without warning, by French Ultime Réalité.

"Kidnapping", "Manhunt" and "Go-Fast Adventure" are all among the standard services Ultime Réalité offers, but it's open to special requests. Through the company's simulated kidnapping packages, for instance, the participant is abducted without warning—after leaving a restaurant, say, or in the supermarket parking lot. Paying "victims" are then bound, gagged and imprisoned for four or 10 hours (depending on the scenario they choose), allowing them to experience the terror of the real thing. Additional elements such as ransom, escapes and helicopter chases can also be involved. Manhunt packages, meanwhile, can last either one or two days, with the option to play the role of either hunter or prey. Then there's the Go-Fast Adventure, where participants take the role of a drug dealer smuggling cargo on the high seas. Finally, a recently added "extreme" package allows clients to wake up on an autopsy table in a morgue, surrounded by corpses and body bags. Pricing on a basic kidnap package is EUR 900.

Website: www.ultimerealite.fr

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3/9/2010 12:07 PM

http://news.bbc.co.uk

Nanometre 'fuses' for high-performance batteries

Minuscule tubes coated with a chemical fuel can act as a power source with 100 times more electrical power by weight than conventional batteries.

As these nano-scale "fuses" burn, they drive an electrical current along their length at staggering speeds.

The never-before-seen phenomenon could lead to a raft of energy applications.

Researchers reporting in Nature Materials say that unlike normal batteries, the nanotubes never lose their stored energy if left to sit.

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3/1/2010 7:52 AM

 http://www.ehow.com/

How to use PUBLISHERS LUNCH to find an agent
This will explain how to use PUBLISHERS LUNCH, a free emailed newsletter, to find an agent for your manuscript.

THE industry rag for publishing is PUBLISHERS LUNCH. It is filled with articles, facts, deals, and dollar amounts.

Instructions
Things You'll Need:
• A finished manuscript
• email

1. Step 1
You need to sign up for this free email newsletter. There is a pay version if you want and in every newsletter they will suggest that you invest. I don't. I'm too poor. You decide. Here's where you sign up:
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com

2. Step 2
After you get your newsletter, here's how you dig.

This example is an actual excerpt: Sandy Lu of the Vanguard Literary Agency is joining Lori Perkins at the L. Perkins Agency as an associate agent.

Alert! Alert! New agents need new clients! First, Google Sandy's "old" agency and find out what she did. Is she interested in your genre? If yes, it's gold, baby, gold.

3. Step 3
Now, Google her new agency, find the address, check the agency's submission requirements, and query. Tell her where you found her name. You will sound 'Oh, so in the know,' because you'll sound like a professional, like you take your craft seriously. When you 'name drop' PL in your query, you establish your professionalism. Why? How does that work?

If you wanted to build cars and sell them, it would be best to know something about the car industry, right? Would you want to work with an automobile manufacture who didn't know what a FORD was? What models are selling? What's the latest trend? How much are they selling for? Agents prefer to work with authors who know something about the publishing industry, and Publishers Lunch, PL, will teach you in bite-sized bits. True, some of it is as dry as toast, but there's gold in them there hills. When you mention PL, you've said, "I care enough to learn." And you should care, you should learn. Never stop.

4. Step 4
Also read the 'deal section.' It'll teach you who the biggest selling agents are because their names pop up over and over. PL always gives a one to two sentence description of the manuscript that has sold. These give great insight on how to craft an 'elevator pitch.' Is your pitch as good, as sharp, as clear?

Query well, query often. (Did you check the submission requirements?) Good luck, happy hunting, and keep writing.

Tips & Warnings
• ALWAYS check the agent's submission requirements!
 

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http://www.guardian.co.uk

Ten rules for writing fiction
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts
 

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2/23/2010 10:07 AM

http://www.pbs.org

Ahmadinejad's import mania

by HAMID FAROKHNIA in Tehran

20 Feb 2010 22:38

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

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

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

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2/17/2010 10:08 AM

http://news.bbc.co.uk

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

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1/19/2010 12:04 PM

http://www.nytimes.com

Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left

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

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

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http://gizmodo.com/

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

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

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http://www.nytimes.com/

The Tel Aviv Cluster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1/16/2010 7:43 AM

http://online.wsj.com/

The Death of the Slush Pile

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

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk

America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1/9/2010 10:48 AM

http://finance.yahoo.com/

Contrarian Investor Sees Economic Crash in China

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

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

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http://www.wired.com/geekdad

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

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

--

1/6/2010 6:00 AM

http://news.bbc.co.uk

'Smartest' dog recognises more than 340 words

--

1/3/2010 12:51 AM

http://www.crethiplethi.com/

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

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

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

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

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

--

12/25/2009 9:19 PM

http://www.forbes.com

How To Rise Fast At Work: A True Story

The wise moves that outpaced a wily and ambitious colleague.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

12/23/2009 1:47 PM

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience

Female Ducks’ Twisty Tracts Defend Against Screwy Males

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

 --

http://www.forbes.com

Why California Is Bad For Innovation

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

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

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

--

http://www.washingtonpost.com

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

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

They know that the story is the original killer app.

Media makeover

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

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

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

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11/19/2009 11:22 AM

http://www.nytimes.com

The Wrong Side of History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

http://www.ft.com/

Mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust

By Nouriel Roubini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

http://www.nytimes.com/

Nordic Countries Top 'Gender Equality' List

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

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

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

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

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10/28/2009 2:14 PM

http://www.csmonitor.com/

Islamic countries push a global 'blasphemy' law

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http://online.wsj.com

 Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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10/19/2009 1:58 PM

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/

 Ahmadinejad's theological foes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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10/9/2009 11:54 AM

 http://www.google.com/

 Report: Global Muslim population hits 1.57 billion

By ERIC GORSKI (AP) – 1 day ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com

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

Oral contraceptives may also dampen your sex appeal, study suggests

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

10/5/2009 4:00 AM

 http://www.foxnews.com

It's 'Rape-Rape', Whoopi

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

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

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

That's forcible rape.

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

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

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

--

http://www.nytimes.com

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

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

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

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9/16/2009 9:00 AM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

http://tehranbureau.com/nuclear/

 

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

Dispatch from Tehran | 10 Sept 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2009 Tehran Bureau

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http://beyondgrowth.net/

 

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

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9/2/2009 10:12 AM

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

--

 

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

 

--

8/15/2009 2:34 AM

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

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

--

8/14/2009 3:59 PM

 

http://www.usnews.com/

 

Why a Housing Rebound Could Take 20 Years

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8/4/2009 3:12 AM

 

http://www.breitbart.com/

 

Prostitutes better than officials in China: survey

 

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

 

7/26/2009 5:36 AM

 

http://howto.wired.com/

 

Reinvent Yourself Online

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7/21/2009 10:33 AM

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine

 

The 25 Greatest Legal TV Shows

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7/18/2009 2:05 PM

http://www.jpost.com/

 'I wed Iranian girls before execution'

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

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

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

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

RELATED

• Rafsanjani: Clear up Iranian election doubts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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.

--

http://finance.yahoo.com

 California sprouts 'green rush' from marijuana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All without legalization.

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

--

http://www.wired.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

7/17/2009 10:37 PM

 http://www.guardian.co.uk

 Martin Amis: The end of Iran's ayatollahs?

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

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

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

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http://iranpoliticsclub.net/

sex after death in islam

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

Inside the Iranian Crackdown

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

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

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

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

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

--

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.

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

 

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

 

--

 

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.

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http://news51.blogspot.com

Train Versus Tornado

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7/5/2009 6:34 PM

http://ow.ly/gvOH

30 Ways to Lose a Job on Twitter

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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

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

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

Was the Iranian election rigged?

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

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

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

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

When did the suspicion start?

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

Is it a coup?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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7/5/2009 2:41 PM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

How the Iranian Election Was Stolen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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4/22/2009 9:50 AM

Can the Oil Shock Alone Explain the Financial Crisis?

http://business.theatlantic.com

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

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

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

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

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

Hamilton concludes.

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

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

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1/23/2009 5:16 PM

http://www.forbes.com/

How To Market To The Modern Mom

Tips for tugging those $2 trillion purse strings.

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

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

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

In Pictures: Eight Ways To Market To The Modern Mom

In Pictures: 12 Innovative Marketing Techniques

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1/24/2009 8:40 PM

 

http://en.wikipedia.org

 

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

 

Check this out for symbolism on logic

 

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1/25/2009 5:58 PM

http://lifehacker.com

Five Best People-Search Engines

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

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

 

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

 

 

Specialized search engines you say? Heresy! Many readers eschewed fancy people-search engines—many of which often incorporate Google results into their own—preferring instead to get their hands dirty at the source. With more and more people cultivating an online presence, it's easier than ever to find people with broader search engines like Google. One of