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AREA 47
You Need A New Search EngineOr Different Query Words.Try adding either "naked" or "duck" to your search terms.
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| "128 - 0UR credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny. ——— 129 - IT IS thus with most of us: we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay. ——— 130 - THE people we meet are the playwrights and stage managers of our lives: they cast us in a role, and we play it whether we will or not. It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words. ——— 131 - THE readiness to praise others indicates a desire for excellence and perhaps an ability to realize it." ——— ERIC HOFFER, from The Passionate State Of Mind |
| TruthPics | Aliens Cause Global Warming | PhysOrg | Roger Ebert | Daypop | Drudge | Froogle | gapingvoid | Gizmodo | Google | Google News | KK's Cool Tools | Seth's Blog | WordLab |
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Version: 01/25/2010
Hit Counter:
Harv Griffin author of BLUES DELUXE, COURTNEY, Technical Writing and TWO SCOOPS OF NEW
eMail: hg47@a47.info (Please spark my interest on the subject line of the eMail, or I may never read your message. My response to Spam tends to be Select All, Delete All.)
Noah couldn't tell Howard Hughes: "No, you can't store your piss in little glass bottles!"
Phil couldn't tell John Lennon: "No, we don't need more reverb, and besides, the song sucks!"
But you can tell me.
Tools & Treasures:
Salon.com on Global WarmingThanks to the Times of London for naming Climate Debate Daily as one of the five top eco-news sites on the internet.
Unusual Business Ideas That WorkUncommon Business is a blog about people who make money online selling unusual, strange and sometimes bizarre things or provide curious services. This isn’t “One Hundred And One Ideas For Your Homebased Business” – only real, working businesses with URLs provided, so you can do further investigation on your own. Just the Stats!
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Gallup Poll On Demand is $95 for a full year. For $95, you will enjoy exclusive access to ...
('Nuff said.) Top-100 essential downloads of free software & freeware for Windows XP So you say you want to research global warming? Plastics Technology's Extensive Article Library 1. pineapple upside down pedro 69'ing and your girl takes a fat shit in your mouth. my girl pulled a pineapple upside down pedro on me last night the difference between “ingenious” and “un-genius.” A. H. Almaa- His book Facets of Unity talks about the essence of people and things: interconnectedness and love.
http://www.imdb.com/ - if you like movies, this is the site for you! (Welcome to the Internet Movie Database, the biggest, best, most award-winning movie site on the planet.)
"A one-stop shopping website for fans and foes of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton" - Roll Call - LINK The best public restroom ever. I mean it.
physics & science & space news · FLIRT Online - San Diego - dating service and interactive magazine. FLIRT stands for 'Find Love In Real Time'. · San Diego Singles Party Calendar - San Diego - meet up to 300 singles at 4-5 parties a week. · San Diego Singles Personals Page - San Diego - event announcements, FAQ listings, and ideas for places to go and see. · Singles In San Diego - San Diego - provides a way to meet people, make friends, dance and date for those over 30. · Matchmaking Services
Nick Szabo's Essays, Papers, and Concise Tutorials http://www.shirky.com/ - Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet - Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open Source
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READY. FIRE! AIM!
1/25/2010 7:12 AM
Publishing Stats
1/9/2010 1:24 PM
Other Twitter News:
1/9/2010 11:34 AM
My 2010 New Year's Resolution: Find a Publisher for my Science Fiction novel TIME TRAVEL JUST ISN'T POLITICALLY CORRECT. hg47
11/3/2009 3:52 PM
Attention Twitter ASCII Artists
10/10/2009 1:48 PM
The Changing Cultural Character
of Twitter
5:50 AM
SuperTweet Gallery
Twitter ASCII Art
Here are some of my SuperTweets, created using alternate-characters in Twitter. They are formatted for the standard Twitter web page in Firefox at default and +1 text sizes. They do not display properly on all devices.
hg47
6/28/2009 5:53 PM
A friend of mine at work lived in Iraq until a few
years ago. His wife is Iranian. (He only admits to having one wife). He
is dismissive of the whole idea of voting in the Middle East. He classes
Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei in the same category as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein:
both nut-jobs. Last time he voted (in Iraq) armed thugs threatened him
with death if he didn’t vote for the candidate of their choice.
6/9/2009 2:57 AM
My Fave Twits, circa 6/9/2009: http://twitter.com/advancedscience http://twitter.com/AnAmericanOmen http://twitter.com/BakeMyFish/ http://twitter.com/blankwhitewall http://twitter.com/BonedaddyKing http://twitter.com/ColleenLindsay http://twitter.com/doyouzooloo http://twitter.com/duffmcduffee http://twitter.com/edwardboches http://twitter.com/expectwonderful http://twitter.com/GuysDoMeAFavor http://twitter.com/JessicaGottlieb http://twitter.com/JosephBTreaster http://twitter.com/MariaParkinson http://twitter.com/Mark_Braunstein http://twitter.com/MIWomensForum http://twitter.com/moonstruckmania http://twitter.com/nomad_chicken http://twitter.com/norisakitten http://twitter.com/peterfletcher http://twitter.com/PowerHungryFilm http://twitter.com/rainesmaker http://twitter.com/sconstantine http://twitter.com/secrettweet http://twitter.com/TracyOConnor http://twitter.com/TruckerDesiree http://twitter.com/vincereardon http://twitter.com/wildchildeditor http://twitter.com/wildmonkeysects http://twitter.com/willingthrall
4/12/2009 3:32 AM
I keep breaking my home page.
You know those Tweets that go:
I just updated my webpage with new articles;
Well my Tweet would go:
Just threw out a third of my latest updates.
Well, hell, if Twitter can lose 3 days of my updates, can't I lose a few articles without feeling badly? hg47
3/8/2009
2/19/2009 4:26 AM
Welcome to my World (Incoming TweetStream)
My Fave Twits, Circa 2/19/2009, in no particular order:
http://twitter.com/thesilverhand http://twitter.com/waxingpoetic75 http://twitter.com/nomad_chicken http://twitter.com/marinemajor http://twitter.com/vincereardon http://twitter.com/christinelu http://twitter.com/stevenimmons http://twitter.com/katlogictalk http://twitter.com/BarbaraUechi http://twitter.com/Colleen_Lindsay http://twitter.com/peterfletcher http://twitter.com/Twit_Traffic http://twitter.com/deniPath4Change http://twitter.com/JerryBroughton http://twitter.com/lyndajohnson http://twitter.com/RobReevesStudio http://twitter.com/doyouzooloo http://twitter.com/barcelonaphotos http://twitter.com/MariaParkinson http://twitter.com/compulsivereade http://twitter.com/TruckerDesiree http://twitter.com/BonedaddyKing http://twitter.com/TerenceSmelser http://twitter.com/GiveAndHelpUp http://twitter.com/digitalfemme http://twitter.com/davidbadash http://twitter.com/Aquentminister http://twitter.com/expectwonderful http://twitter.com/kidsnovelistzs http://twitter.com/melissaruth http://twitter.com/norisaxnouvelle http://twitter.com/PowerHungryFilm http://twitter.com/susankildahl http://twitter.com/wildchildeditor http://twitter.com/rainesmaker http://twitter.com/duffmcduffee hg47
1/29/2009 7:04 PM
I’ve read of Twitter horror stories about people
losing 80% of the their followers overnight, through some Ghost in the
Machine.
1/28/2009 12:14 AM
Tweet Less, DM More
9:48 AM
Follow More, Tweet Less
11/28/2008 10:15 AM
Identified still 2 more TweetTypes & added them to the list below. hg47
11/26/2008 8:14 AM
Identified 2 more TweetTypes & added them to the list below.
Mobasoft on Twitter has an animated picture. It animates like the favicon on my home page. What's interesting is that the miniature of the picture animates on everyone's page when they follow him! It's probably an animated gif. I'm not sure I could drink that much coffee. hg47
11/25/2008 3:28 AM
I've been messing around with Twitter for about a week. Too soon to tell if it's useful, or just a time sink. But I have to admit that it is addictive and fun. I get the appeal.
I've identified most of the major TweetTypes:
TweetType1 = regular conversation with friends TweetType2 = news feed TweetType3 = Here I Am, Deal With It! (hands on hips, scowl on face) TweetType4 = spit against the wind (reader reaction generally WTF, but sender feels better) TweetType5 = the TweetLink (check out this great webpage that *I* found!) TweetType6 = The New Number Six (testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, anyone listening to me?) TweetType7 = Twaiku (a twitter haiku; loosely, any poem) TweetType8 = self-promotion, self-promotion, mywebsite.com, self-promotion, myothersite.com TweetType9 = Tweet-X(of-Y) - MultiPartTweets TweetType10 = Alt-Language-Tweet (non-understood language, includes programming language) TweetType11 = AllQuestionMarksTweet (Asian Tweet) TweetType12 = the "TweetQuote" (sender often has no clue, but has book of quotations) TweetType13 = TweetThirteen - sent in a moment of anger, deleted too late TweetType14 = the GeekTweet = code; insider language; binary slang TweetType15 = TomboyTweets - the vibe of most women tweeters TweetType16 = GirlyTweets - traditionally feminine sweet-sixteen tweets TweetType17 = AllCapsTweet (shouting, usually with multiple exclamation marks) TweetType18 = SecretConfessionTweet (via http://secrettweet.com/ and others) hg47 TweetType19 = the Echo (repeats the tweet of another) TweetType20 = the RepeatTweet (resends something one already sent) hg47 TweetType21 = the @Tweet (personal message sent publicly) TweetType22 = the Phony@Tweet (pretend personal message to high & mighty sent publicly as a publicity ploy) hg47
11/16/2008 1:56 PM
Friend Rich just turned me on to: slickdeals.net. If you're into hunting down the best price, this may be for you. hg47
11/15/2008 1:33 PM
DeepDiscount.com is having a secret sale till Nov 23 on DVDs & Blu-ray. 25% off. Enter coupon code SUPERSALE when you checkout. hg47
11/10/2008 9:53 AM
I found the update on
WHO'S ON FIRST? that I heard a couple of times on the radio, on rock
stations decades ago, but never knew who did it. Finally found out.
The Credibility Gap was originally formed as
Lew Irwin & Credibility Gap in May 1968 by, of course, Lew Irwin
and it was comprised of the news department staff of KRLA-AM, a
top-40 station in Los Angeles, California. The group offered daily
satirical sketches of the day's news that was played after the
regular news.
An album of their KPPC and post-KPPC material
was released in 1977 called The Bronze Age Of
Radio. The selected tracks poked fun at their then-favorite
political targets like Nixon and Ted Kennedy, a commercial featuring
a rare recurring Gap character (sportscaster Dave Schwartz)
and a modern rewrite on the classic 'Who's On
First' sketch where instead of the confusion of players' odd names,
it was rock groups' names ("Who's on first, Guess Who's on second
and in the third act??" "Yes?"). You can still hear this
stand out track occasionally on the Dr. Demento show, or you can
hear it on Harry Shearer's site (along with other Gap material).
The problem is that it
is a .ram file! I have an audio file conversion program, as part of
my dB Poweramp player, but it doesn't recognize .ram files. I
wanted to convert it to mp3, and then re-post it here. I'm
afraid to download the RealPlayer software, because it seems like a
major installation, and I'm worried it will mess up my dB Poweramp
player. I have learned the hard way, that I have to refuse all
updates to Windows Media Player, because whenever I update the
Windows Media Player it tries to take over my computer, and I lose
all my convenient right-click options when running dB Poweramp; even
worse, it won't let me re-establish dB Poweramp as the default audio
player!
If you do not have
RealPlayer, here is a smaller installation freeware that will let
you play the track:
Download 'Real Alternative'
The audio quality on the .ram file
sucks! But that doesn't make it any less funny. hg47
10/13/2008 10:37 AM
There are all kinds of high-tech high-cost solutions to getting music into every room of your home. But if you just want a cheap solution with great background sound, this may do the job. Cost: $100 per room.
SONY Mini Hi-Fi Component System MHC-EC55. Walmart sells them for a hundred bucks. They have audio in to take the feed from the main stereo/computer. And they also have AM, FM, 3-disc CD changer that also plays mp3s burned to CD-R, which lets every room play something different.
When I moved to El Cajon, the movers trashed my Advent Loudspeakers. So I had to go shopping for new loudspeakers.
Now, I've been brought up on the KLH Model 6 (my dad added a folded 12-foot-long air column tuned to 32 cycles per second, so he could enjoy the lowest notes on his organ tapes), later the Bose 901, later the original Advent Loudspeaker, and the Smaller Advent Loudspeaker. After Henry Kloss left the company, Advent produced many trash loudspeakers, but the original Advent Loudspeaker and the Smaller Advent Loudspeaker hold up as the finest home loudspeakers for reproducing music in the home, regardless of price, regardless of what music you prefer. Neither Advent requires a subwoofer; in fact, both kick the ass of most of the subwoofers on the market.
Before my dad died, he traded in his Advent Loudspeakers for Gale loudspeakers. The GS401A. They were very pretty, black with silver sides, sitting on silver speaker-stands. For several months, I used the Gale GS401A as my main speakers. The sound was very sweet, but it lacked the bottom octave of bass that the Advents provided. I remember thinking that if I just added a subwoofer, that these Gales would be the ultimate sound solution. But eventually, that very sweetness began to bother me: I was listening to the speakers, not the music. I was also starting to record and master my own music then, and I realized that I couldn't use the Gales for monitoring; I needed accuracy, not honey poured over the sound. So I got rid of them.
It has been a long, long time since I shopped for loudspeakers. My dad got his Gales at a high-end custom stereo shop; but I got my Advents at the local Pacific Stereo. So I went down to the local Best Buy, and was moderately surprised that nothing regardless of price satisfied me. I Googled some appointment-only places; but before going to one of them, I tried Circuit City. I found some Polk Audio speakers that work for me.
I bought four Polk Audio Monitor 30s, and one Polk Audio powered subwoofer, PSW12. I've had the Polks for about two years. Are they better than the Advents? Or worse? I have no idea. I would need to do A-B tests. What I do know is that they are adequate for my needs; I also trust the Polks to monitor and master my own music.
I originally bought the Sony MHC-EC55 for work. It was worth a hundred bucks to put my own music system at work so I could listen to my own music every workday. The Sony MHC-EC55 has a 3-disc CD player, audio in, AM, FM, and it plays mp3s burned to CD-R or CD-RW. And when it is set to the "Pop-DSGX" EQ setting, the sound is awesome for a hundred bucks. hg47
8/18/2008 1:22 PM
(the same company seems to be doing business at several different sites, with slightly different availability of product)
These guys record TV shows off cable onto DVD-Rs at slow speed, every episode, every year. The sound isn't very good. The picture isn't very good. Shipping is like 20-bucks. Occasionally, a DVD-R won't even play. But they have some material that isn't available anywhere else. I'm a nut for courtroom drama; for me the sound and picture quality is OK for that. If there's some old show you love, but it isn't available yet on DVD, and you don't want to wait, this might work for you. hg47
8/11/2008 5:29 PM
Statistics don't lie.
Your mother lies. Your girlfriend lies. Your boss lies. The President of the United States lies. But statistics don't lie.
If you get a pet, you will live longer. How much do pets cost? How much longer will you live?
It costs you $45,000.00, total, over your lifetime, average; and you live 7 additional years, average. hg47
http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/
October 15, 2007Would You Pay $45,000 to Live Seven More Years?Stick with me on this one. It's a bit of a round-about post, but I think you'll see where I'm coming from by the end. I've posted a ton on the cost of pets and have come to the conclusion that a pet costs roughly $1,000 a year. Bigger dogs may cost more, a hamster will cost less, but I use $1,000 as a nice, round number to work with. And I know that none of you spends this much each year, but someone is spending a ton because those are average numbers. But we're not here to talk about that issue today anyway. For now, let's just all agree that a pet costs roughly $1,000 per year. So, if you had a pet from the time you were out of your parents house (we'll say age 22) until age 67, this would give you a pet for 45 years (I'm assuming three pets that live 15 years each, but you can plug in your own assumptions here.) In this case, those pets would have cost you $45,000. I was watching a commercial for AIG Insurance the other day when they flashed a startling fact on the screen -- that owning a pet can extend your life by seven years. Of course, I was skeptical of this claim, but knowing what I do about advertising and big companies, I knew they weren't making it up -- they had to have some sort of reasonable back-up for this claim. So I emailed them and asked where they came up with it. They emailed me this link on Ten Small Things That Can Add Big Years to Your Life (which I'll probably cover in more detail on a later post) which includes the following: Several studies have shown that owning a pet lowers a person's blood pressure, increases self-esteem in children, decreases the mortality rates of heart attack victims, decreases cholesterol, decreases depression, relieves stress, and increases family happiness. Pets also make people, particularly younger people, more likely to participate in extracurricular activities. On a whole, research predicts that those who own pets will outlive those who don't by an average of seven years. Here's that last sentence again: On a whole, research predicts that those who own pets will outlive those who don't by an average of seven years. Ok, so let's put it all together. Owning a pet during your adult years will cost you $45,000. Owning a pet during your adult years will add seven years to your life. Therefore, for a $45,000 investment, you can get a pet and expect to add seven years to your life. Sounds like a good deal to me. What do you think? -- 8/11/2008 11:09 AM
Guest Post, from Rich Mansfield:
Meet the Hues. Hai and Mai Hue are fictional “boat people”, refugees from Vietnam - and they’d just as soon never see a boat again! We’ll draw a kindly veil over their early hardships and pick them up as U.S. citizens and Army Reservists. They start off not even speaking English. After they make it to the promised land - the U.S. - they pick up their English in free classes, through library videotapes, and on the job at MacDonald’s. They get a couple hundred bucks each from one weekend of duty a month with the Reserves, and another couple of hundred by going to school on the G.I. Bill. They get teaching credentials and do sub work. Hai calls himself the “Sub Dude”, because of his subdued personality. When they’re not working, they’re scouting for better jobs, trying to break into either the movie industry or longshoring, both of which are like hereditary royalty; hard to get into, but lucrative. They live in a 15-foot, 30-year-old aluminum trailer they bought for $100 cash, in a trailer park that’s cheap but safe, and near a bus stop. Hai asks Mai if this is okay, and she replies, Ban là kidding? Sau cái gì chúngtôi cho là su xuyên qua dieu này ca hai là thiên duong! Which of course translates to: “Are you kidding? After what we’ve both been through, this is paradise!” They have enough government bonds to buy food and supplies for three years. They plan to buy a neighbor’s two-bedroom mobile home when he dies; by that time they hope to have food, supplies, and maintenance covered for twenty years, and can start a family. Their first child, Hoan Hue, is born, and he’s such fun that they don’t do much work after that. And he’s soon followed by twins, Thu and Tri. Hai asks if she wants any more, Mai says no way... But accidents happen, and little Ngo Hue is born. Hai swallows his pride and a couple of aspirin and gets a vasectomy. From what they’ve seen, other parents sacrifice everything for their kids and are surprised when their kids treat them as second-class citizens. They decide on a different approach. Their kids have two choices: Mai Hue or the Hai Hue. The kids eat what’s set before them, and dress in Thrift Shop duds like their parents (jeans and t-shirts, mainly) until they can afford to buy their own $150 sneakers. But Mom and Pop pay the kids to do stuff they’ll need to know when they go on their own, like cleaning, cooking, and managing money. Most of the money goes into a Permanent Portfolio for each kid; they’ll each have enough to buy a trailer and food for life at age 16, when they can get a GED diploma and gain their freedom. And besides, the kids get a realistic perspective of the world by flying space-available to every military base Mom and Pop can get to, whenever school is out. They know from experience that not having a $3,000 birthday party is not to be seriously deprived. All the kids wind up joining the Reserves and becoming officers, doing their monthly weekend and getting their college education paid for without dunning Mom and Pop - who are by now retired military, flying space-available around the world, living in military bases and enjoying the maid service.
8/9/2008 6:21 PM
Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But I am Poptimistic about my future. And your future. hg47
6/23/2008 11:58 AM
My brother Greg gave me a double screen digital
picture frame for my birthday.
10/29/2007 2:23 PM
". . . and if I filled my shiny new 160gb iPod up legally, buying each track online at the 99 cents price that the industry has determined, it would cost me about $32,226. How does that make sense? It's the ugly truth the record industry wants to ignore as they struggle to find ways to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and trade freely with your friends." (link)
('Nuff said.)
10/29/2007 2:14 PM
Please ship Seattle rain C.O.D. to
Southern California. Admit it: you've got more than you need.
Arnold will pay any amount you stipulate!
Last night I was paranoid, worried
about the wind changing direction and blowing embers onto my
apartment complex. So when I went to work I packed a few extra
things into Mom's car. Software back-ups of my documents & music
files on DVD+R & all my current different corrections of glasses, so
I can see the fire, no matter how far or close it gets to me!
It's important to burn clean: I just
dusted, wiped, vacuumed & mopped my whole apartment.
hg47
10/21/2007 8:41 AM Subject: emoticons (o)(o) perfect oo A cup {O}{O} D cup (+)(+) silicone (oYo) Wonderbra (^)(^) cold (Q)(O) pierced \o/\o/ Grandma's (@)(@) big-nipple |o||o| android (-)(-) flat-against-the- shower-door hg47
8/6/2007 7:11 AM
You've probably read this on a poster somewhere:
"There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary. And those that don't."
There are different levels to sexual arousal, different degrees of sexual response. Some guys get it. Most don't.
"Hey, when I get a hard-on, I'm turned on. If I don't sport wood, that babe is not for me."
There has been considerable laboratory research on human sexual response. Federally funded. Grants are available to insert sensors into vaginas. Which brings new meaning to the phrase "pork barrel politics."
But the point is that guys have been poking into vaginas forever and twenty minutes, since before the earliest historical document (porn, actually, papyrus copied from—probably—a broken stone tablet, some assert, detailing a kind of "dry-hump" sexual activity supposedly guaranteed to thrill female humans).
I've long been fascinated by the stats on human sexual response, particularly when human female sexual response would be measured. The squints would insert their probes & sensors into vaginas, and show the women naughty pictures, then measure "sexual response."
According to laboratory testing, most women are sexually aroused by viewing naughty pictures. According to the women themselves, most strongly deny this. "No, I was not aroused. Disgusted, yes."
The mostly male testers most always conclude that this discrepancy is due to the "mystical romantic essence" of their test subjects, "bundles of contradictions masquerading as adult women."
"The silly females don't even know when they're turned on!"
Allow me to offer a counter-point to this POV.
First off, it's not 100% clear to me that any guy can fully understand any gal.
Second off, any guy who wants to try can start by reading Shere Hite & Nancy Friday.
Third off, (pun warning) let me tell you where I'm coming from. Subjectively, when I am sexually aroused, yes, I get a hard-on, but I also get a supremely pleasurable feeling, a high like a drug, endorphins coursing through my bloodstream. It's a yummy good feeling. A few minutes later I start to leak a slippery fluid out the tip of my penis.
Fourth off, some years back, I wrote a series of erotic stories similar to Anais Nin. The surprising thing is that I usually didn't get a hard-on while I was writing, but I always got sticky underwear because of all the lubricant my penis was leaking. What was up with that?
"No, I was not aroused. A bit on edge, perhaps."
There was no highly pleasurable feelings, no erection, but I was lubricating. Then I made the connection: if the lab boys were measuring my lubrication, they would conclude that I was sexually aroused.
If the lab rats are measuring vaginal lubrication, and calling that sexual arousal, they are missing the point.
Lubrication is just the first level, that doesn't begin to get near the subjective experience of sexual arousal. hg47
7/13/2007 7:27 AM
Getting some renewed interest in my screenplay version of BLUES DELUXE. Remind me to keep my casting ideas to myself. Let's not forget that Margaret Mitchell wanted Groucho Marx to play Rhett Butler in GONE WITH THE WIND. hg47
7/9/2007 8:59 AM
In Defense Of Colin Powell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell
'Nuff Said?
If not, how about this for a Post Script.
Still don't get it? Read the next post for context. hg47
6/17/2007 12:42 PM
So there's this young smart U.S. Black dude, with his whole glorious life ahead of him, here in the good ol' United States of America, circa June 2007. He has no money for school. But he's not into rap or carjacking or dealing drugs, no, this guy has the mind of an accountant. Stats. Probability Theory. He takes a cold hard dim view of his likely future here in the "good ol' U.S. of A.," and he decides to play it safe. He knows the death rate for young male Blacks is not good. But he knows how to beat the odds. He knows how to survive. He knows how to "beat the system." It's easy. He goes to his worst enemy, and kills him. Calls 911. Waits for the police patiently, with his hands upon his head, still, motionless. Confesses to murder.
Why? Because the safest place for this young Black man is in prison, and he knows that.
"Factor by which the overall death rate for U.S. blacks aged 15 to 64 exceeds the rate for blacks in state prisons: 2" (Bureau of Justice Statistics <WASHINGTON>/National Center for Health Statistics)
Are you outraged yet? hg47
5/14/2007 5:07 PM
A friend of mine just shared with me a short story he's written about a near future where a start-up company is able to extend on Google Earth a bit and get much better resolution, to the point that it's like having a security camera in the sky, watching down over every business that signs up for the service.
The owners get rich & retire, the cops are able to catch the bad guys, crime drops to near zero, and businesses are able to drop the prices of their goods, consumers get cheaper products, and they feel much safer.
The story has a happy ending.
I realized that I could never write that story.
Transparency is a
double-edged weapon, in my view. There are costs and benefits. I
do not see increased transparency as reducing crime, however. To me
it seems like the classic race between the safe builders and the
safe crackers, between the lock makers and the lock pickers, etc.
The better cops get at looking, the better the criminals will get at
camouflage & hiding.
I would take that POV,
that "message" as my starting point.
That's how I would
write the story. My writing is not as friendly, as warm and fluffy
as yours. I'd take it to the edge. My writing only gets good when
I get fired up, emotionally involved. To get excited, I'd have to
pervert the original intent. After the first bank robbers got
caught, and the satellite service got expanded, and everything
looked rosy, and crime seemed to be going down . . . I'd have a
major high-tech gang of bad guys move in and concentrate all their
efforts on the area of satellite coverage. I'd have them secretly
tap into the satellite coverage, so they could watch in real time
the location of all the cop cars, I'd have them tracking the money
delivery trucks so they could easily steal the cash when they were
most vulnerable, and I'd probably throw in stuff like using the
satellite coverage to blackmail bank executives having homosexual
affairs into helping them steal hundreds of millions from banks
. . . I'd push it to the limit so that ordinary citizens weren't
safe on the streets anymore! I'd have the gang selling information
to child molesters so they could find easy children to snatch, I'd
have the rapists knowing exactly where and when the foxy female
runners exercised alone. Maybe I'd end the story with a riot, or a
civilian lynching of the owners who started up the satellite
service, but I would probably end with the service shut down of
necessity, BECAUSE IT WASN'T SAFE, AND IT WAS RUINING THE TOWN!
Anyway, that's my
default plot; that's how I would write the story, if I couldn't
think of anything better as I was writing it.
Why would I write it
that way? Because, I answer, with a sneaky grin on my face, Because
It Would Be FUN!
hg47
3/26/2007 8:47 AM
I'm still having life-draining time-consuming anger-generating problems with my new blog TruthPics. Everything else in my life has jammed to a stop while I wrestle with this.
It's more proof for this TruthPic:
Everything good and worthwhile takes longer than you think it will. hg47
P.S. 3/27/2007 8:42 AM As a further example of "How Long It Takes," one surfer correctly pointed out to me that my understanding of metric sucks. In the above pic, "Actual length of your penis in mm" is something longer than 35 inches. I have deleted the original post, fixed the pic & reposted. hg47
3/12/2007 9:50 AM
** My Procrastinations Often Give Me A Necessary Frame-Of-Reference For The Artistic Work That Follows. ** hg47
3/8/2007 7:31 PM
I'm supposed to be finding a male agent for my new SF novel 42N8 F8 (the working title). Instead I'm dredging through Excel help files. I got this great idea for a blog: TruthPics. Actually, it's more like Chart-Art.
Excel makes charts from raw data, so I jumped into the blog before I'm really ready. I did a test with Excel & Paint that worked well for the first pic. So I posted it & started the blog. But for my second try, I can't make the chart come out right.
And It's Pissing Me Off!
I planned to do a few Excel Chart-Arts, then up grade my software and do a bunch more Chart-Arts, then REALLY UPGRADE my software, and do animated Chart-Arts with companion dashboard attachments.
But I can't even figure out the damn Excel charts! hg47
3/2/2007 10:43 AM
Do an "Inventory of Cutting-Edge Effects" before you start that new project. Yeah, sure, you could do a Cave Painting with animal blood and plant dye. Don't write your next novel on soft stone tablets chiseled with hard rocks. Maybe your future readers are reading you on their cell phones! hg47
| RECYCLE BIN | |
Ctrl-V - Reality Check. Reality Check Mate! |
|
--
7/10/2009
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.
--
Train Versus Tornado
--
7/5/2009 6:34 PM
--
A Coup Manual: What We Should Know About Iran's Election
The foreign media and western states are confused and puzzled as to how to interpret the Iranian election on June 12th. Over the past few days I've been speaking with many journalists in Tehran who normally go there for one or two weeks on assignment. Many of them, initially, believed that Ahmadinejad's declared re-election was similar in nature to his first term election in 2005. Meaning that he had successfully mobilized his base of poor people and conservatives and that the reformists and Iranian middle class had, once again, lost the election. But recent development tells us that this is not the real story.
So, what are the sources of confusion? What went wrong and why are people angry and un-accepting of the results? Here are some essential questions that one might ask in order to fully understand the issues at hand:
Was the Iranian election rigged?
No doubt it was. There are many signs that indicate a very organized fraud, which has been in the works for many months.
It's inconceivable that Ahmadinejad could have won 24 millions votes. How could he when he had only received just over 5 million in the first round of the 2005 election? In the second round he gained 16 million and that was simply because he was running against Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was very unpopular at the time, a man that was rumored to have corruption in his family, rumors that became etched in the memory of the Iranian people. There was even a saying that "anybody could beat Hashemi in the second round". At that time, even Ahmadineajds's second position in the first round was so controversial that he was accused of an organized fraud led by Iran's militia forces, Basijis, and the Revolutionary Guard. Now, without any change in Iran's demography, he received, in some places, figures of twenty times more votes than he did four years ago.
During the past four years, Ahmadinejad's economic policies have increased inflation from approximately 11 percent to 25 percent, more than double. The effects of such policies have been a hard reality for millions of Iranians. He is the only president in Iran who has not gained the support of Iran's middle class and elite. Although his government spent billions of dollars on propaganda, he remained widely criticized by reformists, experts, civil society activists and even some conservatives. On the other hand, Mousavi (Iran's prime minister at the time of war with Iraq 1980-1988) is very well respected and popular in the society.
Iranian people know him as a man of integrity, a politician who managed the war economy quite thoughtfully. The overwhelming support for Mousavi by the Iranian middle class, the political elite, reformists and millions of people was contagious even amongst part of the conservative base (also known as Ahmadinejad's base). Mousavi drew crowds of more than 50,000 to his rallies over the past three months in small and large cities alike, not just in Tehran. So a landslide victory seemed like a joke.
When did the suspicion start?
On election night, Mousavi received a call from the Ministry of Interior telling him of his victory. Meanwhile, a committee, which included the Minister of Interior himself and two of his deputies, announced different results. They declared Ahmadinejad as Iran's President elect faster than anyone could imagine. While the election was still in progress a news agency, known to strongly support Ahmadineajd, had already written about his landslide victory. It was as if they knew in advance. In less than a few hours the authorities began announcing the results by the millions. Everybody who is familiar with Iran's bureaucracy knows that it's just impossible to have possibly counted the ballots this fast. The voting process is not computerized but totaled by hand and therefore it takes quite a bit of time, particularly with voter turnout being at a record high. So it was obvious that the results were not based on actual votes. Also, like many countries including the United States, Iran is a very diverse country. Candidates naturally have more support in some provinces than in others, like their hometown for example. It's impossible that a candidate could win by a same margin in every single province as Ahmadinejad, allegedly, has. This is numerically improbable and does not make sense to anybody. The results of this election make a mockery of the Iranian voting system and their history as a democracy.
Is it a coup?
It might not seem a classic coup. But there are indications that the fraud did not happen just on the actual Election Day. Even if 90 percent of the people voted reformists, it would never have been reflected in the ballot counts. It's just impossible. Let's review different segments of the game and then you call it whatever you want:
1. Before the elections, Ahmadinejad's supporters, major news agencies and radical newspapers, predicted a landslide victory. They even mentioned a plausible win by 60 percent! An alarming and odd a prediction in a country where one cannot even predict the price of a tomato, or an onion, from one day to the next.
2. The results were announced too quickly to be true. It was as if they already knew what the numbers were going to be. So it seems that the authorities didn't even have to bother to actually count the ballots for results.
3. On Election Day, the police were ready for the huge presence of protesters in the major cities. They were fully armed and well equipped with anti-riot gear. What was supposed to happen? Why were they so prepared?
4. A few hours after the results were announced, and even with all of the complaints, the Iranian Supreme Leader announced Ahmadinejad as the next president, and asked all of the other candidates to cooperate with the winner. Why such a rush?
5. Dozens of prominent reformist
politicians and journalists were systematically arrested
within 48 hours of the announcement of the presidency.
Forces were organized, knowing who to arrest and where
to go without legitimate reason. But this game could not
afford prominent political figures to potentially play
leadership roles against the outcome.
6. On Election Day SMS services were cut off followed by
cell phone reception the day after. Reformists websites
were blocked as well, which forced a disconnect between
surprised reformists and their supporters. Everything
happened very quickly. It's been part of the plan to be
swift.
7. A top-down pressure began. Mousavi and Karrubi were
placed immediately under unofficial house arrest. There
were told that it was for their own security.
Simultaneously, some of the major religious figures from
the office of the Supreme leader, and reportedly, some
of the other officials in power pressured Mousavi to
accept the results.
8. The next day Ahmadinejad's supporters, many of whom were armed with cold arms, rallied in one of the squares in Tehran in a show of power.
9. At the same time, the spontaneous,
and unexpected massive protests began. (Which was not
expected on such a scale (because Iranians know how the
police and the government can go wild and brutal).
Ahmadinejad called it a rebellion. It was a necessary
label for justifying the police action taken to stop the
protesters. The protests were peaceful, but the police
themselves, started to destroy cars setting the scene
for confrontation.
10. Now, you put together the above pieces and tell me
what you would call it.
--
7/5/2009 2:41 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
How the Iranian Election Was Stolen
There is, perhaps, no greater potential for evil than the power of priests speaking in the name of God.
With this power, one Iranian Ayatollah, Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi -- the spiritual leader of President Ahmadinejad -- seems to have stolen the Iranian election, to have justified the now-ongoing arrests of reformers, and to be trying to eliminate such democracy in Iran as now exists.
According to an open letter of early June by a group of employees who work on elections in the Interior Ministry -- after May polls showed that Ahmadinejad would lose the election -- Yazdi gave the Interior Ministry employees a Fatwa, a religious degree, authorizing the changing of votes.
The Ayatollah told them: "If someone is elected the president and hurts the Islamic values . . . it is against Islam to vote for that person." After harshly criticizing the other candidates (Mousavi, Karroubi, and Rezaie) he went on: "You should throw away those who are unqualified, both morally and lawfully."
The letter reported that the elections' supervisors subsequently became "happy and energetic for having obtained the religious Fatwa to use any trick for changing the vote and began immediately to develop plans for it." (The letter indicated that the same thing had been done in March 2006 to help fundamentalists allied with Ahmadinejad in that election. But when the Interior Minister at that time, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, reported these irregularities to the Supreme Leader, he was fired by President Ahmadinejad.)
Among other things, the election supervisors reduced the number of voting stations, increased the number of mobile voting stations, reduced the number of eligible voters, insisted that vote-containing boxes must have two official seals, and printed 12,000,000 more ballots than were necessary.
Yazdi has been called the most conservative and influential cleric in Qom. He espouses complete isolation from the West and proclaims nonliteral interpretations of the Koran to be heretical. He is said to have great influence with the Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji paramilitary force. In 1997, he is said to have encouraged them to use any means, including violence, to stop reform agitation. In 2006, he said to use atomic bombs had religious legitimacy. Above all, he would like to eliminate the democratic element in the Iranian system.
Now, following four years of appointments made by President Ahmadinejad, Yazdi has many loyal supporters in the Government, including the head of the election commission.
A perfect political storm has arisen in Iran. Ironically, May polls showing that democracy might prevail in Iran have created conditions that could lead to the loss of such democracy as exists in Iran.
A weird president, mentored by a fundamentalist Ayatollah, may now use ongoing arrests to eliminate, politically if not physically, his reform opposition and then govern by repression. Recent unconfirmed reports suggest that Mohammad Asgari, an interior ministry official who had reportedly leaked evidence that the elections were rigged, has been killed in a suspicious car accident in Tehran.
Nonviolent opposition is the only answer. And protests are, after all, widespread and not only in Tehran. They have spread to Isfahan, Ahwaz, Shiraz, Gorgan, Tabriz, Rasht, Babol, Mashhad, Zahedan, Qazvin, Sari, Karaj, Tabriz, Shahsavar, Orumieh, Bandar Abbas, Arak, and Birjend. Many of these cities do not have riot police. The revolutionary guards and the Basiji have to be dispatched to many sites -- and an order to crack down everywhere could be more than the authorities would dare.
The Iranian reform movement is trying to seize the high ground, to avoid violence, and to appeal to the forces of repression not to use force. With the world watching, and with so many new techniques of communication, it may be that the reformers can give the authorities a run for their money. But it will take an awful lot of Iranian courage and ingenuity to make it work.
--
4/22/2009 9:50 AM
Can the Oil Shock Alone Explain the Financial Crisis?
http://business.theatlantic.com
Can the Oil Shock Alone Explain the Financial Crisis?
Yes. That's the astonishing conclusion of a paper
presented at the Brookings Institution that I'm still
having trouble wrapping my mind around. The author,
economist James Hamilton, can hardly believe the
conclusions of his economic model, himself (I've got
company), but the findings are remarkable, nonetheless.
Hamilton went back to 2003, when crude oil was around
$30 a gallon and forecast what an oil shock like the one
we experienced in 2007-08 (when oil peaked around $140)
would do to GDP. He graphed the result through the end
of 2008 and, lo and behold, it was damn close to actual
GDP. As though there were no such thing as a
collaterized debt obgligation in the first place! Here's
the graph (the orange dotted line is Hamilton's
projection given oil prices; the black line is actual
GDP):

Perhaps you'll join me in thinking: Huh? Are we really
to believe that this whole thing was caused by oil
shocks? I mean, it certainly makes you appreciate the
mess Detroit is in, but really. How anti-climactic. It
makes this crisis seem so ... 1970s.
What about real estate, subprime mortgages and defaults?
Hamilton says the housing industry had been tightening
up long before the recession -- "subtracting 0.94% from
the average annual GDP growth rate over
2006:Q4-2007:Q3." And housing is factored into
Hamilton's analysis. It was just one of a handful of
multipliers that always turn down during oil shocks.
The Real Time Economics Blog at WSJ moves the theory
forward with a pretty interesting bit of revisionist
history. The grand retelling goes something like this.
Cheap gasoline from the 1990s into this decade
encouraged families to set up their homes farther from
the cities where they worked. But as the price of gas
began to increase, it put a big strain of these
families' commutes. With gas rising from $2 to $4, the
price of these long drives doubled, straining those
families' most expensive payments, namely: mortgages.
When families realized they could not afford their
exurban commutes, they sold their homes for a big loss.
Voila: Their mortgage crisis became a bank crisis and
the rest is our living history.
Hamilton concludes.
Eventually, the declines in income and house prices set
mortgage delinquency rates beyond a threshold at which
the overall solvency of the financial system itself came
to be questioned, and the modest recession of
2007:Q4-2008:Q3 turned into a ferocious downturn in
2008:Q4.
My head's still spinning a bit, but it's interesting to
think about the political consequences of a report like
this being mainstreamed. If the idea somehow stuck that
an oil shock was responsible for the financial crisis,
it could be a significant catalyzer for the push toward
energy reform. Today we're seeing a great national
movement to change Wall Street because the general
consensus is that Wall Street caused this crisis.
Whether Hamilton's theory is wacko or brilliant, just
imagine what a national movement to revolutionize
America's energy consumption would look like. What if we
had oil parties instead of tea parties, demanding more
government investment in alternative fuels and subsidies
for green technologies. That would really be something.
1/23/2009 5:16 PM
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.
By contrast, only about 20% of mothers comb newspaper ads. The action happens at social networks like Maya's Mom and Café Mom and at blogging sites like BlogHer.
Hint: Don't just rely on banner ads; moms want to engage in a conversation. Better to blog--and do it with a sense of purpose. "Don't just blast as many bloggers as you can find with press releases," says Maria Bailey, founder of BSM Media. "Moms are all about relationships, so if you want to approach them, make sure to start with a personal note."
Video blogs, like newbaby.com, let you upload videos featuring mothers using your product free of charge, similar to YouTube; the site boasts 500,000 views per month and 10 to 15 videos watched per visit, according to Bailey's research.
While they've taken awhile to gain traction, podcasts have become an increasingly effective way to push products to more moms.
According to BSM Media, 85% of American moms now have mp3 players. And moms ride in their cars (a convenient place for listening to podcasts) far more than any other demographic.
The key to making hay with moms in any marketing medium, especially when it comes to high-tech items like cameras and computers, is clearly communicating the benefit of the device. "Making that technology understandable and approachable is beneficial to the consumer," says Karen Cage, a spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard.
To boost sales, the company recently launched 10 videos on how to take digital pictures of, say, darting children. Another reason you want hammer home your product's value proposition: Two out of three moms plan to eliminate purchases that are not absolutely necessary in 2009, according to a recent study by Allen & Gerritsen, a Watertown, Mass.-based advertising agency.
But then, product specs will only get you so far with moms. What they really want is an experience. "In order to convince the modern mom to try a new product or service, marketers need to work with them, not just throw ads at them," says Bailey.
Example: Rather than inundate moms with horsepower figures, last year General Motors (nyse: GM - news - people ) chauffeured some 75 moms in its cars for a weekend in Newport, R.I., in conjunction with a weekly podcast called Manic Mommies (produced by two moms).
"We recognize that we don't always do a really good job via advertising or providing a comfortable dealer experience [to women and moms]," says Christopher Barger, director of global communications technology for General Motors. "We have been looking at how we can use [online] social media to improve our efforts there."
If you're lucky enough to have a few extra marketing bucks lying around, work the celebrity mom angle. Finding a familiar face to pitch your product is an expensive but effective strategy.
Last year, talk show host Kelly Ripa, a mother of three, became the face of Electrolux kitchen appliances by demonstrating how fast-heating ovens and microwaves help modern moms stay on top of their family, work and social lives. Desperate Housewife Marcia Cross, mother of twin daughters, is slated to become the new face of Mott's apple sauce in March.
Finally, recognize that moms engage in a lot of groupthink--about everything from dining and relationships to finance and careers. About 55% of those surveyed by BSM Media said they relied on recommendations from friends and family when making purchases for the home; 64% do it when they buy things for the children.
Your best bet: Identify the key influencers in the community (through the PTA, social networks and blogs) and get them to host a party to promote your product. Videogame maker Nintendo recently did just this when it selected eight "ambassador moms" to hold parties promoting its Wii gaming system.
Just because a market is massive doesn't mean you don't need a smart approach to attack it.
--
1/24/2009 8:40 PM
Computation tree logic (CTL) is a branching-time logic, meaning that its model of time is a tree-like structure in which the future is not determined; there are different paths in the future, any one of which might be an actual path that is realised.
Check this out for symbolism on logic
--
1/25/2009 5:58 PM
Need to do a little online detective work? Track down anyone from long lost schoolmates to the new friend whose number you've lost with this assortment of powerful people-search engines. Photo by Byrne7214.
Earlier this week we asked you to share which search engines you use to find people. The votes have been tallied, and now we're back with the five most popular people-search engines.
Pipl is tenacious people-search engine. Pipl's claim to fame is the depths to which it can plumb the "deep web" to find information. When you search for a person using Pipl, you're not limited to a simple white pages search. Pipl scours databases and indexes that standard search engines normally don't touch. If it's there to be found, Pipl returns all manner of things about the person you're searching for, including blog entires, photos, publications, donations on public record, profiles on social and business networking sites, and other overlooked sources. Pipl supports searching by name, username, phone number, and email.
Specialized search engines you say? Heresy! Many readers eschewed fancy people-search engines—many of which often incorporate Google results into their own—preferring instead to get their hands dirty at the source. With more and more people cultivating an online presence, it's easier than ever to find people with broader search engines like Google. One of Google's strongpoints is that you can use additional search parameters that are unavailable at the other search engines. For example, it's impossible to search for "John Smith classic car restoration" to find an old car-obsessed friend of yours when all you can type in is Last Name, First Name. Additionally, Google can sometimes find incredibly obscure references to a person. (I once tracked down an old classmate through a single reference on an out of date softball team roster found through Google.)
Facebook is principally a social network, but its the first stop for many people searchers due to its widespread popularity. By Facebook's count, 150 million active users frequent the site, about a third of which are in the United States. Even if you take those numbers with a grain of salt, that's still an enormous number of people who have put themselves out there to be found. Therein lies the strength of looking for someone on Facebook: By joining the service, Facebook users have essentially put up a big sign that says, "Find me!"
Spock is another people-search engine that relies on multiple sources and aggregation to cull as much information as it can about a subject. In addition to indexing information from various news sites and social networks, Spock has a variety of notifications options available. Like 123people (below), Spock supports email notifications of changes to a person search, but you can also subscribe to an RSS feed for your search.
123people has a broad reach, delving into blogs and public profiles to increase your chances of finding who you're looking for. 123people is a strong people-search engine, but one of the best pieces of functionality available to 123people searchers is its email notification feature, which sends out an email alert whenever the results of a specific search changes. It's a little heavy on the stalk-factor (though in a strange way not all that different from Facebook's newsfeed), but it saves you from wasting your time with fruitless return searches.
you might wanna add [www.yasni.com] [www.linkedin.com] and [martin.atkins.me.uk]
[zabasearch.com] and [www.lexisnexis.com] are also great engines - but lexisnexis is a pay site- but can typically be used in Library Computers in your neighborhood.
Most people who are looking for someone are willing to pay for the service. That's why you find them teasing you with a superficial phone number and address search. Pipl really only skims the surface of the so-called "deep web." If you want to get more serious about finding someone, Intelius and Zaba cross correlate your utilities bills and public records. Those sites can find your phone numbers and addresses of every residence you've ever paid utilities on as well as the names of any relatives that might have claimed to be a relative of yours (think ex-spouses).
Lexisnexis is the Great Grand Godfather of private search engines. They cross correlate all the above with every newspaper and magazine ever written. If you have already used the pay services of Intellius and still can't find someone, use LexisNexis. You won't be disappointed.
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1/16/2009 11:49 PM
(CNN) -- The debate over the controversial practice of child marriage in Saudi Arabia was pushed back into the spotlight this week, with the kingdom's top cleric saying that it's OK for girls as young as 10 to wed.
"It is incorrect to say that it's not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger," Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, the kingdom's grand mufti, said in remarks quoted Wednesday in the regional Al-Hayat newspaper. "A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her."
The issue of child marriage has been a hot-button topic in the deeply conservative kingdom in recent weeks.
In December, Saudi judge Sheikh Habib Abdallah al-Habib refused to annul the marriage of an 8-year-old girl to a 47-year-old man.
The judge rejected a petition from the girl's mother, whose lawyer said the marriage was arranged by her father to settle a debt with "a close friend." The judge required the girl's husband to sign a pledge that he would not have sex with her until she reaches puberty.
Al-Sheikh was asked during a lecture Monday about parents forcing their underage daughters to marry.
"We hear a lot in the media about the marriage of underage girls," he said, according to the newspaper. "We should know that Shariah law has not brought injustice to women."
Christoph Wilcke, a Saudi Arabia researcher for Human Rights Watch, recently told CNN that his organization has heard many other cases of child marriages.
"We've been hearing about these types of cases once every four or five months because the Saudi public is now able to express this kind of anger, especially so when girls are traded off to older men," Wilcke said.
Wilcke explained that while Saudi ministries may make decisions designed to protect children, "It is still the religious establishment that holds sway in the courts, and in many realms beyond the court."
Last month, Zuhair al-Harithi, a spokesman for the Saudi government-run Human Rights Commission, said his organization is fighting against child marriages.
"The Human Rights Commission opposes child marriages in Saudi Arabia," al-Harithi said. "Child marriages violate international agreements that have been signed by Saudi Arabia and should not be allowed." He added that his organization has been able to intervene and stop at least one child marriage from taking place.
Wajeha al-Huwaider, co-founder of the Society of Defending Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia, told CNN in December that achieving human rights in the kingdom means standing against those who want to "keep us backward and in the dark ages."
She said the marriages cause girls to "lose their sense of security and safety. Also, it destroys their feeling of being loved and nurtured. It causes them a lifetime of psychological problems and severe depression."
The Saudi Ministry of Justice has not made any public comment on the issue.
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1/17/2009 3:25 PM
http://www.smashingmagazine.com
awesome pics
You may want to take a look at the following related posts:
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1/13/2009 11:37 AM
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SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - The idea that the U.S. economy is going to recover in the next six months is given little credence at a gathering of top academic economists here over the weekend.
A pickup sometime after June is still the Federal Reserve's quasi-official forecast. And leading institutional forecasters surveyed by the Blue Chip Economic Indicators are optimistic.
But that forecast seemed woefully out of touch to many experts who spoke at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association.
"People are getting nervous," said Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The actions by the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department have driven home the point that policy makers are at their wits' end.
"We don't know what to do. It's really a throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-the-problem strategy. It is hard to argue with it in the middle of the crisis, but you can bet everyone will 10 years from now," said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.
The Fed has indeed thrown the kitchen sink at the financial-market crisis, expanding its balance sheet by $1 trillion, to little obvious effect.
The Treasury Department's management of the $700 billion rescue plan for the financial markets has seemed capricious.
And it may just be the first of several rounds of life preservers for the shattered sector, experts said.
Despite all these efforts, the U.S. economy, hit by an oil shock, a credit crunch and the global downturn, seems to be on a steep slide.
Some argue that the recession has just begun, despite the formal ruling by the business-cycle-dating committee that it began in December 2007.
Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, said the recession began only in mid-September when Lehman Brothers collapsed.
"We are in a horrible mess. I believe it is very young and it is going to be long and deep," he said.
Even in the first quarter of 2010, the economy will likely be weak enough to need macro stimulus, he said.
Martin Feldstein, the prominent Harvard University economist, said there was no longer any basis for believing the recovery could start in the third quarter.
"I think we'll be lucky if by this time next year we see the economy hit the bottom and start turning up," Feldstein said.
"In terms of the level of activity, the end of 2009 is going to look lower than it is today," he said.
Former Clinton economic adviser Laura Tyson said it is too speculative to predict a turnaround.
"The slide may stop, but coming out [of the downturn] will not come until later," she said.
"It is very hard to predict when the situation will turn around," she said.
The downturn has become "self-reinforcing downward-spiral effects going on - from the housing market to the credit market to the real economy and back to the housing market," she said.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson came under constant criticism for his handling of the financial-market crisis.
Rogoff, the former IMF chief economist, said Paulson's policy was similar to the "Wheel of Fortune" game show. Some companies spun the wheel and got $300 billion bailouts. Others spun it and got nothing.
This just added to market insecurity and uncertainty, he said.
Rogoff said the U.S. is "running right along the tracks" of past financial crises in developing countries.
Based on experience, the U.S. housing-market collapse and stock-market weakness should continue until 2010, he said.
The root of the crisis remains the financial sector, Rogoff said. "We're going to be seeing second and third bailouts of the big banks," he said.
The experts generally supported the Fed's unconventional monetary-policy moves to expand its balance sheet and try to shore up asset markets.
The Fed has quietly shifted its policy from supporting institutions to trying to get non-functioning markets back on track, Blinder said.
The central bank will start buying mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae (FNM:
Soon, he said, the Fed will start buying consumer loans.
The Fed is likely to continue to add markets and could start buying municipal securities, he said.
But Rogoff said he was worried that these programs were simply keeping the financial sector on life support and did not seem to curing the underlying problems.
The Fed programs seem to amount to "temporizing," he said.
In 2009, commercial real estate, private equity and hedge funds will suffer, he said.
And the "behemoths" of the financial sector are not really viable, he said.
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1/5/2009 3:16 PM
Scientists from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) have devised an ultra-hard vehicle armour to protect military personnel.
Details of the steel armour, called Super Bainite, were outlined during a seminar at the University of Cambridge.
Unexpectedly, the MoD team has given the armour a protective advantage by introducing an array of holes.
According to scientist Professor Peter Brown, these perforations help deflect incoming projectiles.
"I wouldn't like to have been the first person to have suggested that," said Professor Brown, from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down in Wiltshire.
He explained: "You shouldn't think of them as holes, you should think of them as edges. When a bullet hits an edge, it gets deflected, and turns from a sharp projectile into a blunt fragment - which is much easier to stop. It doubles the ballistic performance and halves the weight."
The armour plates have performed well in ballistic testing at the Ministry of Defence's firing ranges.
Certain heat treatments alter the fine-scale structure of steel, creating a "phase" known as bainite - which has been known about since the 1930s.
But the process, developed by DSTL scientists in collaboration with steelmaker Corus, allows the alloy to be produced quickly and cost effectively.
Super Bainite develops its exceptional strength through a new low-temperature process called "isothermal hardening".
The steel is heated to 1,000C, cooled to about 200C and then held at this temperature for a period of time before cooling to room temperature. Initially, the team held the steel at about 200C for just over two weeks to achieve the right ballistic protection.
However, this was too slow for the process to be commercialised. The researchers subsequently reduced the heat treatment time to eight hours by transforming the steel at 250C instead of 200C.
Importantly, the work gives the UK an indigenous armour steel manufacturing capability, benefitting industry.
Professor Brown also gave details of other current materials research with potential applications in armour.
An industrial process called "Kolsterising" (developed by the firm Bodycote) is able to increase the surface hardness of stainless steel to twice that of Super Bainite while maintaining its ductility - the extent to which a material can be deformed without fracturing.
"It's as hard as a ceramic and as ductile as a metal. It re-defines, really, what steel is capable of," he said.
Professor Brown was speaking at the recent Horizon seminar held at the University of Cambridge.
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1/10/2009 11:44 PM
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk
Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.
While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”
Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.
Though Google says it is in the forefront of green computing, its search engine generates high levels of CO2 because of the way it operates. When you type in a Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to several competing against each other.
It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from whichever produces the answer fastest. The system minimises delays but raises energy consumption. Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.
Wissner-Gross has submitted his research for publication by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and has also set up a website www.CO2stats.com. “Google are very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy,” he said.
Google said: “We are among the most efficient of all internet search providers.”
Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO2 emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.
A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing director of carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO2 emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour, he says. of CO2 Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use).
Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian.
“It’s not an unreasonable comparison,” said Liam Newcombe, an expert on data centres at the British Computer Society. “It tells us how much energy westerners use on entertainment versus the energy poverty in some countries.”
Though energy consumption by computers is growing - and the rate of growth is increasing - Newcombe argues that what matters most is the type of usage.
If your internet use is in place of more energy-intensive activities, such as driving your car to the shops, that’s good. But if it is adding activities and energy consumption that would not otherwise happen, that may pose problems.
Newcombe cites Second Life and Twitter, a rapidly growing website whose 3m users post millions of messages a month. Last week Stephen Fry, the TV presenter, was posting “tweets” from New Zealand, imparting such vital information as “Arrived in Queenstown. Hurrah. Full of bungy jumping and ‘activewear’ shops”, and “Honestly. NZ weather makes UK look stable and clement”.
Jonathan Ross was Twittering even more, with posts such as “Am going to muck out the pigs. It will be cold, but I’m not the type to go on about it” and “Am now back indoors and have put on fleecy tracksuit and two pairs of socks”. Ross also made various “tweets” trying to ascertain whether Jeremy Clarkson was a Twitter user or not. Yesterday the Top Gear presenter cleared up the matter, saying: “I am not a twit. And Jonathan Ross is.”
Such internet phenomena are not simply fun and hot air, Newcombe warns: the boom in such services has a carbon cost.
1/12/2009 3:24 PM
A quarter-century ago, a Britain of dole queues, urban riots and political venom also saw the rise of a great generation of novelists. Boyd Tonkin asks if this slump might also have a literary lining of silver
Friday, 9 January 2009
Margaret Thatcher celebrates on election night in 1987
It hardly sounds like the prelude to a literary revolution. Under a hard-as-nails free-market government, old industries sicken and die at a pandemic rate. Unemployment rockets; inflation spikes as well. As public spending plummets, riots break out on decrepit city streets. Rancour and rage dominate the public realm, twisted up another notch when a skin-saving foreign war polarises an already fractured nation. To cap it all, a long-planned final battle with union power culminates in the mother of all mining strikes.
What else happened in Britain in the first half of the 1980s? Well, literary fiction – for a couple of decades, a dowdy old aunt among the arts – suddenly bred a generation of spellbinders and seducers. When Anthony Burgess lost the Booker Prize in 1980 (with Earthly Powers) and Salman Rushdie won in 1981 (with Midnight's Children), a fusty coterie game all at once began to feel like a thrilling battle of the giants. Two years later, Granta magazine logged its ascendant stars and – in its first list of "Best of Young British Novelists", set an agenda for attention and appeal that has, staggeringly, lasted a full quarter-century: Rushdie, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Rose Tremain – the last a hugely popular winner of the 2008 Orange Prize.
On the high street, a former WH Smith executive called Tim Waterstone plunged some get-lost money into – of all things – classy upmarket bookshops, just as the retail world froze. Did they fly? They soared. Culture hounds who, a few years previously would have burned "modern British novels" for warmth while they queued to catch the new Scorsese or Bertolucci or see The Clash, haunted the faux-library charms of the new chain in search of excitement from new arrivals or – with JG Ballard and others – resurrected greats.
Some advances for literary fiction sped – unsustainably – to the height of a Dynasty hair-do. By the time that the first light fingers of a service-led recovery began to dawn, in the metropolis at least, it felt as if half the fans of Martin Amis's Money (1984) not only wanted to read him but to be him as well.
As recovery took hold, new publishing houses made their entrances, committed to innovation and – in a few cases – destined to triumph. Bloomsbury and Serpent's Tail both launched in 1986. Within a few years, the musty tumbler of publisher's sherry had blossomed into a scintillating, post-colonial glass of New World fizz. Vision, ambition, even sometimes avant-garde experiment, for once raised a British cheer.
Sequels always disappoint, we know. Within and beyond books, things have changed beyond hope of rewind. The cluster of talent codified by Bill Buford at Granta largely existed already, but alone and – often – isolated. If each had their own style and story, together they opened British fiction to a wide and interwoven world. You can't step into that river twice. Tim Waterstone saw the abysmal state of British book retailing, and knew that a swelling band of younger, educated readers might heal it. And, if the North limped, the South strode, with graduate-rich county towns and suburbs full of buyers prepared to give something original – and, for the first time, over-hyped – a try.
Even in the iron years of Thatcherism, vital booster-fuel to serious writers came from protected allies such as public-service broadcasting: Channel 4 began in 1982. In no sense did recession – and the social tension it fostered – make the 1980s BritFiction boom. All the same, the sense of grave and urgent times did open readers' minds to new choices of style and story - which these writers deployed so well.
So could hard times once again not cause but coincide with high achievement? Few factors at work today quite match the conditions of the Eighties fiction upsurge. Waterstone's, now a centralised retail machine, scrambles to make it through the slump along with every other business. Advances have plummeted, with agents obliged to accept ever-thriftier deals from those publishers who still dare to bite.
Even before this downturn, sales of literary fiction had fallen away. Few talents who combined large ambition and broad appeal had come through to match the millennial cluster that gave us David Mitchell, Sarah Waters and Zadie Smith. By and large, the class of '83 still rules at the tills and in the headlines. Whatever their gifts, that exposes a failure to replenish the stock.
One strong view suggests that, mostly, tough conditions will mean safe choices: tried and trusted recipes, even beyond the obvious genre boxes. This week's Costa First Novel Award has gone to Sadie Jones's somewhat McEwanesque tale of class and corruption in the postwar suburbs, The Outcast. No big change there.
Where could the silver lining lurk? Might the flight of big – or even middling – money from literary publishing prompt a quest for bolder choices and wider horizons from authors who know that their finely-finessed debut now stands no chance of reaching the Richard-and-Judy sofa or the Waterstone's front table? If slimmer cheques and smaller expectations force some novelists to give up altogether, surely they might inspire others to thumb their noses at a deep-frozen marketplace and go – as it were – for broke.
The cliché of the decade demands that web culture zooms in to rescue every wheezing ambulance-case in the arts and media. Certainly, the kind of maverick publishing and magazine production that made a plucky showing in the hard British winters of the early Eighties migrated online years ago. Sites such as 3:AM Magazine keep faith with the old little-review tradition of avant-garde provocation and seditious literary cheek.
Any would-be Kafka or Kerouac can bypass the sluggish routine of print entirely. Many more will try. Yet the critical jury on e-literature still has very little solid evidence to consider. Even after years of activity in a climate of back-slapping boosterism about digital art, where are the masterworks that started, or stayed, online? Rather, the cyber-critics have effectively done their print ancestors' old job, charging into battle for the overlooked visionaries and the unsung avant-garde – who write for print. The current bloggers' passion for Paul Griffiths's Let Me Tell You – a novella composed solely of the words that Ophelia speaks in Hamlet – shows the current state of play. Do virtual arbiters still prefer the whiff of paper?
The authors and publishers I asked of course see the fragile future through different sorts of lens. No one proposes that lean years will lead novelists (still less publishers) to snub the market, dump all material aspirations and pursue a dream of perfection. Yet some at least sense a chance that emptier pockets might bring fuller minds. As for favoured genres, much escapist pulp and feelgood schmaltz flourished in the eventful Eighties, and will no doubt do so again. Celebrity titles also began to shout then: the same genre, having pampered publishers though good times, will now be expected to cosset them through bad.
But new marvels, and new gifts, will come to light. And even corporate publishers will find that, to make that quirky, innovative literary fiction reach the whole gamut of its potential readers, they will have to act like small-press guerrillas. Every ambitious writer will need the internet – from Facebook to Amazon – to tell the world about their brilliance, to transmit tasters across cyberspace, and to flog the product. Even if that remains an ink-on-paper book, just like we read in 1981.
That year, when Brixton and Toxteth burned, IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands was elected an MP and died, the SDP split Labour (and Charles and Di wed to give us a comfort break), felt as apocalyptic as any since the Blitz. Yet, in the free state of fiction, a mid-thirties writer who had tanked with his debut published a second novel, Midnight's Children. As we brace for the worst, we should look for the best.
Safety or audacity? Writers and publishers on the prospects for fiction in a slump
Simon Prosser
Publisher (Hamish Hamilton)
In terms of fiction writing, I think there will be two very different responses to the downturn in the market (which is around 12 per cent year on year and likely to worsen). The first and most obvious reaction will be for some writers to try to tailor their books all the more neatly to a perception of what the market demands... But I think there will be a second and more exciting response, which is for writers to think that since the chances of being published successfully in the mass market are even tougher, they may as well take the chance to write exactly what they want to write.
Pete Ayrton
Publisher (Serpent's Tail)
Avant-garde fiction thrives where writers do not expect to live off their writing either because the publishing industry cannot pay the advances writers need to live from... or because they are paid by universities to teach creative writing... Neither condition applies in the UK where writers (often under the influence of agents) will stick even closer to the conventional as mainstream publishers cut their staff, their lists and their advances.
Geoff Dyer
Novelist & critic
Anyone who has an eye on the market is not a writer but a whore. Nothing wrong with being a whore, of course – just don't try to make out you're a writer. Writers sometimes talk of pressure from their publishers to do this or that in order to be more commercial. Nine times out of ten this is sophistry and cowardice... I have this existential conception of writing not as a career but as a back-against-the wall option, the thing you turn to when you've got no other way of making a mark on the world. In those circumstances, whether or not you're going to be adequately recompensed is irrelevant.
Carole Welch
Publisher (Sceptre)
These haven't been great times for literary fiction lately anyway, so in that sense the recession... will probably just reinforce existing trends... I can't really see lowered material expectations... making writers bolder. I can't speak for writers, but I'd say most of them want as many readers for their books as possible, so are unlikely to be avant-garde and experimental unless they believe that's the way to greater sales... I also can't imagine any publisher turning down a novel like David Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas' now on the grounds that in a recession readers would find it too structurally innovative. But I do think publishers will be less inclined than ever to take a chance on a novel that is seen as bleak and depressing, or a novel that might be written with great skill but doesn't have something about it to make it stand out from the crowd.
Gordon Burn
Novelist & critic
It would be encouraging to think that maybe even just a handful of the thousands being laid off... might be encouraged to take time to stop and reflect on their experience, rather then being goaded into the hopeless task of chasing after jobs that... no longer exist. [In the 1980s recession], 'Frieze' with Hirst, Hume, Sarah Lucas etc happened. They are sometimes seen as Thatcher's children – single-minded, aspirational, entrepreneurial. But if the slump could spark a similar from-the-ground-up invigoration of the publishing scene in this country, still run by an Oxbridge-dominated, and largely monocultural establishment, that would be wonderful to see.
Tom McCarthy
Novelist & critic
I expect the recession will accelerate an already well-established pattern: mainstream publishers will concentrate on promoting non-fiction by television presenters and commercial fiction by creative-writing graduates (which should never have been confused with literature in the first place). People wanting to engage seriously in literature will have to look to other arenas: the art world and its publication networks, for example – at least until their work has found a large enough audience to make it commercially attractive to bigger houses. While this may be bad news for writers' bank balances, it's not necessarily a bad thing for literature, which has always "deterritorialised" itself, had to detour beyond its own boundaries, in order to be reinvigorated. The internet has produced some excellent criticism and debate around literature, but I've yet to see any good "primary" writing on there.
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1/13/2009 9:08 AM
want to make money online – this gal may be doing just that.
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1/2/2009 2:46 PM
Kirkland, Wash. – The precedent for oval rooms in American affairs of state can be traced to George Washington. He modified chambers in the President's House in Philadelphia with bowed ends so that guests at formal receptions could all stand equidistant to the president. It was a symbolic expression of democracy.
While the current Oval Office goes back to President Franklin Roosevelt, the White House's first Oval Office was occupied by William Howard Taft in 1909. He avoided the rectangular room used by Theodore Roosevelt, relocated the presidential office to a central position in the West Wing, and opted for the oval.
The repositioning of the president's office signified the central position of the presidency. But here's the funny thing about ovals, or, in geometric terms, ellipses: Unlike circles, which are defined by a single center, ovals are defined by two key points, each, appropriately, called a "focus."
A focal point is a two-way juncture – a spot not only of radiance, but also convergence, the position that "takes the heat." Leaders often deserve the glare of public criticism. But we should also remember that they are not aliens who've arrived by spaceships. They are us.
Yet during elections, undue hope blazes forth from ardent supporters. They project their light onto the candidates whose every action is a petition to their anonymous authority. The candidates reflect that focused light back as their own. The electorate, seeing hope and power as uniquely beyond themselves, get caught in a spell of their own making. Everything seems to revolve around the president.
But the seat of power, the Oval Office, has that other, unseen focal point, as if to indicate a room with two "centers" of responsibility. Could that be our spot in the room? Democracy, after all, is self-government. When the spell of the campaign is inevitably broken, we awake to learn anew the lesson of projecting all hopes and responsibilities, and the cost of not taking our position.
Currently, our greatest surplus is in difficulties, with an ever-growing list of designated villains – predatory lenders, oil companies, polluters, illegal immigrants, politicians, Iran, China, greedy CEOs, car companies, and so on.
Maybe saints are rarer in many of these groups, but that fact alone does not exonerate the rest of us as victimized innocents. Either we are completely passive dependents, or else we share responsibility in shaping the world. And with responsibility comes a share of the blame.
The candidates hold the public accountable at their own peril. They can have our vote if they don't make us look too hard at ourselves. If they propose programs and bailouts as painless as possible, treating symptoms rather than root causes, then we can remain safe in our freedoms, free to point, free of blame.
Democracy is a work in progress. Its imperfections mirror our blind spots. Each age has its blind spots, exposed and magnified mostly through history's lens. The same presidential house in Philadelphia that employed the beautiful symbolism of democracy also had slave quarters. Can we be certain that contemporary life has transcended any remaining counterfeits and abuses of freedom? And if not, then can we be certain that such abuses are not fertilizing the roots of our overgrown difficulties?
Perhaps there is wisdom in calling it the Oval Office. The word "ellipse" derives from a Greek root meaning "defect" and "falling short," as in not being a perfect circle. "Oval" comes from the Latin ovum, "egg," – birth and new beginnings, a place where our greatest aspirations might hatch and take wings.
President-elect Obama will soon occupy the desk at one of the Oval Office's focal points. He campaigned emphasizing the word "we." Like all presidents, his power will have its limits. Like all presidents, he will need our help. We, too, must exercise rightful government, even in the privacy of our daily thoughts and actions. By doing so, we make the move along with the new president, confident there is also a spot reserved for the American people in the room with two centers.
• David Arzouman is an artist, composer, writer, and educator who's developing a new art school in Tokyo.
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1/4/2009 12:09 AM
But blogs are the professional’s curriculum vitae. They are a standing record of strong thin king about a subject.
My own experience is that if you blog, every so often you pop out a signature piece. The kind of post that resonates with others and establishes your position in your field. These blog posts receive a lot of views, get linked to and turn up in Google searches. When you get one of these, congratulations! You have successfully put your flag in the ground for your field.
Tweets don’t do that. Tweets create a tapestry of someone, they foster ambient awareness. This has value in its own right. But they’re not vehicles for heavier thinking. They don’t demonstrate your capacity to size up an issue or idea and bring it home.
I know this is definitely early adopter stuff. The number of professionals spending time tweeting and blogging is still limited. But I suspect this is going to happen:
Those who can work blogging and some twittering into their regular activities are going to earn more money and get promoted faster.
--
12/31/2008 8:34 AM
Over the last two months I’ve had a sidebar poll
running here at ProBlogger that asked readers to tell us
how much their blog earned in October of 2008.
This is an annual poll that we’ve run for a number of
years now so it is always interesting to see the
results.
As usual - the poll […]
This week we’ve been looking at a variety of
techniques to help you increase your blogs earnings in
the lead up to Christmas.
Today I want to share 2 similar techniques that I’ve
used in the last week that is a big part of tripling my
Amazon earnings for the month of December - best seller
[…]
Every now and again I get an email from a ProBlogger reader excitedly telling me that they’re about quit their jobs to become full time bloggers. More often than not they are new bloggers who for one reason or another have it in their minds that blogging for money is a quick and easy thing […]
It’s time for another annual poll here at ProBlogger
- this one asking readers how much they earned in
October 2008? I’ve run this poll a number of times over
the last couple of years and the results are always
interesting.
Just to qualify it - I’m asking about ALL blogging
revenue that you can tie […]
In this video Gary Vaynerchuk answers how to monetize your blog or video blog with a practical illustration.
Of course you need to have at least some traffic to
pull in advertisers - but once you do, if the
advertisers are not coming to you yet - go to them.
PS: this actually works. When I started […]
Last month I ran a poll here at ProBlogger which
asked readers if they make money online from sources
other than blogging.
The result was almost completely split with 1022 of the
2053 people who responded saying Yes and 1031 saying no.
Some of the comments on the launch post of this poll revealed some of the […]
What if I told you that there’s a way to make money as a result of your blog where you don’t need to have a single ad on your blog, where you don’t have to run any affiliate programs and where you don’t have to write any paid reviews?
Would you be interested?
Image by iDream_in_Infrared
Much is […]
If you’re looking for a job as a blogger then the ProBlogger Blog Job Boards have seen 8 new jobs advertised in just the last 3 days. Actually there’s more than that - because some of the ads are for more than one blogger and one has already been filled.
Here’s the latest batch:
Editor and cross-blog […]
In this post Daniel Scocco answers to a question by Warren:
I started a blog about Professional Lifestyle a
little over a month ago. It already has gotten 16,000
visits, has almost 100 subscribers and has a google page
rank of 4 (somehow). Should I put up advertisements at
this early stage?
Ah, the ever controversial question […]
--
12/30/2008 12:16 PM
Reputation management is essential to both individuals and companies. The more popular your brand is, the more critical it will be to keep tabs on it and the more time it will consume out of your day. If you work at a startup and no one has heard of your brand, or if you’re an individual who has just started blogging, these tools are still useful to you.
If, on the other hand, you’re brand new to social media and aren’t known by many people, then these free tools might be a better place to start.
You should consider paid services if you are unable to manage and keep your pulse on your online reputation. Also, paid services help you analyze and understand the magnitude and sentiment of conversations around your brand, which would take you even longer if you did it manually. Services start out at a minimal price of $1 for individual bloggers and shoot up over $100,000 for large enterprises. If you are considering using a paid service, select the one that best matches your current situation and scale up as your requirements grow.
You need to decide if you want software for tracking conversations or if you want to pay a vendor for consulting and reporting. You might want all three. The difference is the amount of labor you’ll have to expense versus the amount of money you’ll want to spend.
Companies should bring all stakeholders involved in this type of a decision to the table before selecting a vendor to use. The key for success is to figure out what groups within your company can benefit from this type of information. The obvious groups would be in marketing research, public relations, advertising, and then executives, who will not only have to sign-off on this initiative, but are most concerned with how their corporate brand is being portrayed in the media (new/traditional).
Depending on the service you are considering, you may have to select keywords (with pay per keyword/phrase services), so that you can track your competitors, your own products or personal brands within your company. Once you have buy-in and one or more people as dedicated resources to either use the vendor’s software or analyze and communicate their reports and strategies across the business, you are ready to select a vendor.
I recommend the top ten vendors listed below (in no specific order):
Buzzlogic offers the “BuzzLogic Insights” application, where you can discover, engage and assess influencers in your industry. You get a collaborative dashboard, which provides you with insight into whose blogging about you and allows you to share this data within your company. There are also watch lists for tracking specific bloggers, blogger profile lists, and social maps (see who links to who).
They divide their services into two major buckets: marketers and PR people. Marketers gain product feedback, understand brand perception and receive monthly readership statistics. PR people are able to build relationships with influential bloggers, discover new influencers and track products that matter to them.
Radian6 offers a solution, where you can setup certain keywords to monitor on a dashboard, automatically track the keywords on blogs, image sharing sites and microblogging sites, and then have it report back to you with an analysis of the results. Data is captured in real-time as discovered and delivered to dashboard analysis widgets.
The solution covers all forms of social media including blogs, top video and image sharing sites, forums, opinion sites, mainstream online media and emerging media like Twitter. Conversational dynamics are constantly tallied to track the viral nature of each post.
TNS Cymfony offers the Orchestra Platform, which is built on a Natural Language Processing engine that automatically identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks important people, places, companies and topics for you.
The platform is able to decipher between different media sources, such as traditional media and social media. Cymfony’s differentiation is that their engine dissects articles, paragraphs and sentences to determine who and what is being talked about, whether something or someone is a key focus or a passing reference, and how the various entities mentioned relate to one another.
Nielsen offers Buzzmetrics, which will supply you with key brand health metrics and consumer commentary from all consumer-generated media. They also have ThreatTracker, which alerts of real-time online reputation threats and gives you a scorecard to show you how you’re doing relative to the competition.
Nielsen has a very strong brand name as the world’s leading provider of marketing information, audience measurement, and media products and services. Pete Blackshaw, father of consumer-generated media, is one of the leaders in charge of this powerful service.
Trackur offers a monitoring plan for individuals ($18 per month), companies ($88), enterprises ($197) and agencies (N/A). Like many of the other services mentioned, Trackur works around your keywords and then organizes the results for you in the form of a Dashboard. Depending on the package, you’ll be able to save more keyword searches and have more frequent updates to your Dashboard.
Trackur was built by one of the leading experts in reputation management, Andy Beal, which gives the service some added credibility.
Brands Eye offers reputation management packages for bloggers ($1 per month), small businesses ($95) and enterprises ($350). The tool tracks every online mention of your brand, giving you a score that accurately reflects the state of your reputation over time. Part of the differentiation is that you can actually tag mentions of your brand and rank them in terms of a number of pre-determined criteria.
Like many of the other services, you are paying for keywords that you can track. The frequency of how many times you receive updates grows depending on how big your package is.
Reputation Defender offers four different services, including MyChild (starting at $14.95 per month), MyReputation ($14.95), MyPrivacy ($9.95) and MyEdge ($99). MyChild scours the Internet for all references to your child or teen by name, screen name or social network profile and reports back to you. MyReputation allows you to review everything that is available to you online, and MyPrivacy allows you to remove your personal information from people search databases, such as Pipl and Peek You.
Finally, MyEdge is a solution for owning your Google results. All of these services scale in size depending on your need and how much money you want to spend.
Sentiment Metrics has a reputation management tool that, just like the other services mentioned, helps you monitor what is being said about you, your brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. The reports you’ll receive by using this software focus on sentiment (it’s in the name), which tells you if the mention is positive, negative or neutral.
The reports have nice visual graphs and you can break them down by gender, age groups and location. One of the big differentiators and benefits of using this service is that you get email alerts sent to you whenever you have bad press.
Visible Technologies offers two different services. The first is TruCast, which is a comprehensive solution for social media analysis and participation used by enterprises who want to track, analyze and participate in social media communities. The differentiation here is that you can comment on blogs and forums directly from the tool they provide.
The second is TruView, which protects and promotes reputations online. This service is similar to Reputation Defender’s MyEdge in how it helps you take ownership of your Google results by ensuring there is positive and relevant content at the top of search engines for your brand name.
Cision offers the Cision Social Media service, which claims to monitor over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites. One of the main benefits, just like Nielsen Buzzmetrics, is that these companies have been monitoring and measuring traditional media sites for decades, so they can provide a more comprehensive solution across the board.
Cision’s product is unique in that it offers 24/7 buzz reporting. Their service is powered by Radian6, which is mentioned above. They also have a Dashboard and daily reports, just like the other services, where they tell you what’s going on with your brand twice a day through email.
Depending on your work schedule, business needs, how popular your brand name is and how much money you want to invest in reputation management, any of these services may be of great assistance to you. And using a fee-based reputation management service, in combination with a number of free services, is a wise decision. Most of the services above aren’t real-time, so subscribing to Google alerts and Twitter feeds is still very important for monitoring your brand.
The sooner you get ahold of what people are saying about your brand and plan how you will respond and manage those relationships, the more successful you will be in social media. This area is still relatively new and no company has gotten it 100% right yet. The complicated part of monitoring a brand in a social world is that humans are needed (human error). Some posts are sarcastic or others are using brands as examples to illustrate a bigger idea and these tools may respond differently.
Now we get to see which vendors use their own
services to monitor their brand names. Let’s see who
comments on this post ![]()
- “Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation”
- “HOW TO: Build Your Online Brand”
- “10 Ways Personal Branding Can Save You From Getting Fired”
- “Twitter, Facebook, Digg: Can You Join Too Many Social Networks?”
--
12/28/2008 10:29 PM
NEW YORK (AP) - Investors are preparing to close out the last three trading days of 2008 with Wall Street's worst performance since Herbert Hoover was president.
The ongoing recession and global economic shock pummeled stocks this year, with the Dow Jones industrial average slumping 36.2 percent. That's the biggest drop since 1931 when the Great Depression sent stocks reeling 40.6 percent.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index is set to record the biggest drop since its creation in 1957. The index of America's biggest companies is down 40.9 percent for the year.
--
One day, I wasn’t a speaker at conferences, and then I was. And then a little while later, I was a paid speaker. And now, I’m a decently paid speaker. Some day, I hope to be a really well-paid speaker. It’s not a bad way to make a few pesos, if only to fund all the crazy research I like to do all the time. (Also nice that it pays for the occasional bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats -strawberry flavor- for my kids, too.) If you’re interested in speaking at events, I have some ideas on how you might get that going.
You might first ask yourself what your goal might be. Are you speaking to further establish yourself and your company as thought leaders? Are you trying to pitch some amazing product? Are you hoping to share the learnings found in your awesome book (available for 24.95 from O’Reilly Publishing)? That’s a good first thing to know: your goal. But after that, my advice is fairly the same.
Blog Your Speech - My first presentation at a conference was Content Networks are the New Blogs. I gave it at BarCamp Boston. I think it went smashingly, but if you want to know for sure, ask Christopher S. Penn. He was there. That’s where we founded PodCamp. Before I stepped on stage (in this case, it’s BarCamp, so the barrier to speaking is pretty low), I looked for support about the blog post, to see if it fit my potential audience.
Since then, I still use the technique. I write about the types of speeches I hope to give. It works all the time. I often hear from various verticals with an association meeting who want to better understand something I brought up in a blog post, or they’ll ask me to further customize something to a specific industry. In both cases, I love the opportunity. It’s a great way to find new places to speak.
Make Friends - It never hurts to actually know some conference organizers. I didn’t know Rick Calvert well before speaking at the first BlogWorld Expo, but I met him and Patti Hosking at Gnomedex and that made it easier to be invited to speak.
Showing up at conferences and having decent conversations with people makes it a bit easier to start speaking at events, because then people come to realize and appreciate the kinds of things you’re about, and might want to know more about your ability to speak on a stage.
Shoot Video- So, you might not have put this one together, but you don’t have to attend a conference to speak. You can just set up your video camera or the iSight in your laptop, and shoot your own speech. Videobloggers do it all the time. Or haven’t you ever watched Gary Vaynerchuk?
Now, if you get to speak at an event, at all costs, try to get some video capture of it. Why? Because it means that people will get the chance to see you in action. And that brings me to my next point .
Have a Speaking Page
One of the best things I ever did was build a speaking page, which contains a few elements for you to get a better sense of what I can do for your organization:
Having a speaking page has given me lots in the way of evidence that I’m doing okay when it comes to presenting.
Social Proof
I also use my LinkedIn profile to get recommendations from people who’ve seen me speak, and I list professional speaker as one of my “jobs” on the site. Further, if I’m going to an event, I blog about the event at least once before attending, and I use Twitter a lot at the event so that it’s not unknown that I’m speaking yet again.
This is all under the realm of social proof. When people see you in the role of speaker, they better understand how you’re going to help, and what you’re going to deliver. The more they see proof of how you’ve delivered, the more they’ll be interested in hiring you for the next gig.
How to Get Paid to Speak
Ask.
Okay, that’s step 1, and believe me it’s not that easy. We don’t pay speakers for my New Marketing Summit, and I couldn’t pay for speakers at Video on the Net. Lots of shows can’t afford to pay for speakers, but those are just the shows you know about. There are very deserving and interesting shows out there that do pay a speaker’s fee, and that do want a paid professional speaker who will deliver quite a lot of value back to their attendees for that money.
One way to see who might potentially pay is to see what they charge for admission. If the price is high, there’s likely a little budget for speaking fees.
**Note: The opportunity to speak at certain places, even for free, sometimes outweighs a fee.
Don’t discount a speaking opportunity because it doesn’t pay. Some places even charge for speaking, as part of a larger sponsorship or exhibitor’s package. That doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities and value in speaking there. Instead, it means that you have to have a conversion plan in mind to transform your efforts as a speaker into business downstream.
Other Things to Consider
Have a good About page on your website. People want to know about the person they’re considering for a slot in their show. Make sure you’re timely in responding to requests for information (which I’m horrible at, but people have been nice to me). Do what you can to make your presentation worth their time, let alone their money.
And above all else, start somewhere. I’ve done some rough analysis, and it turns out that exactly 100% of speakers I’ve met at conferences all started by speaking.
If you want to learn more about what I think makes a top shelf presentation, I’m going to cover that in my free newsletter, which is different than my blog content. That’ll come out by the end of the week, so if you’re interested in more, subscribe for free.
What do you think? Did I miss anything? What else would you tell folks who want to start speaking at events? How did you get your start? What else can I answer for you?
And what do you think makes a speaker into a rockstar?

--
12/27/2008 10:52 AM
http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.
Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.
Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.
At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.
The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.
Another example is book order forms. I write this in June. In October, I will teach a class on Epistemology. The book order forms are already overdue at the book store. It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.) I get almost daily reminders from the department secretary, students sometimes ask me what we will be reading, and the unfilled order form sits right in the middle of my desk, right under the wrapping from the sandwich I ate last Wednesday. This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things. But in fact, the book store is plenty busy with forms already filed by non-procrastinators. I can get mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need to order popular well-known books from efficient publishers. I will accept some other, apparently more important, task sometime between now and, say, August 1st. Then my psyche will feel comfortable about filling out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.
The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?
--
DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.
In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.
“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.
Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.
And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.
“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”
There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.
The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.
The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.
Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011.
The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.
“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.
Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”
Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met “green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. “When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way,” he said.
In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.
“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.
Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.
And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.
“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”
There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.
The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.
The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.
Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011.
The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.
“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.
Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”
Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met “green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. “When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way,” he said.
Inside, a passive home does have a slightly different gestalt from conventional houses, just as an electric car drives differently from its gas-using cousin. There is a kind of spaceship-like uniformity of air and temperature. The air from outside all goes through HEPA filters before entering the rooms. The cement floor of the basement isn’t cold. The walls and the air are basically the same temperature.
Look closer and there are technical differences: When the windows are swung open, you see their layers of glass and gas, as well as the elaborate seals around the edges. A small, grated duct near the ceiling in the living room brings in clean air. In the basement there is no furnace, but instead what looks like a giant Styrofoam cooler, containing the heat exchanger.
Passive houses need no human tinkering, but most architects put in a switch with three settings, which can be turned down for vacations, or up to circulate air for a party (though you can also just open the windows). “We’ve found it’s very important to people that they feel they can influence the system,” Mr. Hasper said.
The houses may be too radical for those who treasure an experience like drinking hot chocolate in a cold kitchen. But not for others. “I grew up in a great old house that was always 10 degrees too cold, so I knew I wanted to make something different,” said Georg W. Zielke, who built his first passive house here, for his family, in 2003 and now designs no other kinds of buildings.
In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.
But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.
Moreover, the kinds of home construction popular in the United States are more difficult to adapt to the standard: residential buildings tend not to have built-in ventilation systems of any kind, and sliding windows are hard to seal.
Dr. Feist’s original passive house — a boxy white building with four apartments — looks like the science project that it was intended to be. But new passive houses come in many shapes and styles. The Passivhaus Institut, which he founded a decade ago, continues to conduct research, teaches architects, and tests homes to make sure they meet standards. It now has affiliates in Britain and the United States.
Still, there are challenges to broader adoption even in Europe.
Because a successful passive house requires the interplay of the building, the sun and the climate, architects need to be careful about site selection. Passive-house heating might not work in a shady valley in Switzerland, or on an urban street with no south-facing wall. Researchers are looking into whether the concept will work in warmer climates — where a heat exchanger could be used in reverse, to keep cool air in and warm air out.
And those who want passive-house mansions may be disappointed. Compact shapes are simpler to seal, while sprawling homes are difficult to insulate and heat.
Most passive houses allow about 500 square feet per person, a comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr. Hasper said people who wanted thousands of square feet per person should look for another design.
“Anyone who feels they need that much space to live,” he said, “well, that’s a different discussion.”

100 Resources for
Over the weekend, the story made the rounds about
Warner Music's
dispute with Google over getting money from YouTube
videos. As we discussed in our post on the topic, it
seemed like Warner had very little leverage here: Google
has no legal responsibility to pay anything, and
removing the videos from YouTube seemed a lot more
likely to harm Warner Music and its artists than Google.
As noted by some folks, for many kids these days,
YouTube is
how they find and listen to music these days.
Forcing your songs off YouTube would be like demanding
their removal from the radio twenty years ago.
Yet, more details are coming out on this story, and it
appears that both Warner Music and Google may recognize
Warner Music's precarious position here. In fact, it
appears that it wasn't Warner Music that demanded its
music be taken down. Instead, reports are coming out
saying that Warner instead went to Google with higher
monetary demands, and it was Google's response
to start pulling the music down, to demonstrate to
Warner Music that YouTube is a lot more valuable to
Warner Music than Warner Music is to YouTube (a lesson
that Warner Music execs desperately need to
learn).
Warner Music's response, apparently, has been to try to
pretend it has some leverage, supposedly leaking a
somewhat questionable story that it, and other major
record labels, are
preparing to launch a "Hulu for music." However, as
Greg Sandoval notes in the News.com link in the
paragraph above, this seems like little more than idle
speculation by the labels. They had talked about this
months ago, and have done nothing since. Instead, it was
a bluff by the record labels in a weak attempt to
convince Google that it needs to play ball or face
competition. Google is likely to call the bluff --
because Google still recognizes what the record labels
seem to have trouble recognizing. The power of YouTube
isn't in having a site that plays videos, it's in the
audience -- and you don't recreate that overnight.
I doubt there's anyone out there who would claim that the dot com bubble bursting was a bigger deal than the current global financial restructuring that's been going on. However, plenty of people (myself included) have suggested that internet companies are more isolated from the root causes of the mess this time around -- and that's almost undeniably true. Last time, a lot of the trouble came directly from overvalued internet companies. This time, it's had little, if anything, to do with internet companies. However, apparently some are noticing that the valuations of 50 or so top internet companies have dipped below their lowest point from when the dot com bubble popped. Of course, in the aggregate, that's rather meaningless. Each of the companies looked at have different circumstances. Besides, the current global financial mess means that no one's really sure how to value anything, meaning that current valuations of pretty much any stock should probably be taken with a huge grain of salt.
12/22/2008 8:12 AM
http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/
Becoming Credible
Tom Wanek believes
credibility can be “purchased” by risking one or more of
six currencies. The more you put at risk, the more
believable your message.
Currencies that Buy Credibility:
1. Material Wealth
Of the six currencies, we see material wealth risked
most frequently in money-back guarantees and statements
like, “Find a lower price anywhere and we’ll refund the
difference plus 10 percent.” Can you think of a better
way to increase credibility by increasing the customer’s
perception of your risk?
2. Time & Energy
Are you in a business that provides an in-home service?
Imagine the power of an ad that says, “If we’re not
there when we promised, we do the job for free. Unlike
other companies, we would never waste your time, then
ask you to pay for ours.” Variations of this classic
example of risking time and energy to increase
credibility have been used by the Clockworks group to
build a number of America’s most successful in-home
service franchises. How else might you risk time and
energy to increase credibility?
3. Opportunity
Ladies, when a man claims to
love you but continues to date other women, is his
statement credible? A self-imposed restriction on
opportunity – dating you exclusively – adds credibility
to his statement, does it not? Likewise, the
manufacturer who gives access to just one retailer in an
area is perceived as committed to that retailer’s
success. Is there a way your
business might risk opportunity to strengthen
credibility?
4. Power & Control
The original purpose of Amazon.com was to sell books.
But by choosing to allow visitors to write negative
reviews, they increased the credibility of the positive
reviews and quickly became one of the internet giants.
Likewise, your company can gain power by giving it away
and you can increase your credibility by giving up
control. How many ways might you do this?
5. Reputation & Prestige
In a report released two weeks ago by CNN/Opinion
Research, George W. Bush had an approval rating of just
24 percent. In a press conference held the following
week, the President said he regretted saying he wanted
Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" and that he had urged
the Iraqi insurgents in 2003, “bring ‘em on.” He said he
was sorry such language made the world believe he was
“not a man of peace.” By putting his prestige at risk
and eating a slice of humble pie, George W. Bush
regained some of his lost credibility, don’t you think?
6. Safety and Well-Being
You're 12 years old. Your stepfather says he loves you
as much as if you were his own, but you’re not sure you
believe him. But when you fall through the ice while
skating on a frozen lake your stepfather dives through
the hole into the freezing water to rescue you. Do you
believe him now?
The president of Lifelock, an identity-theft protection
program, runs ads that say, “My name is Todd Davis.
My social security number is 457-55-5462. So why publish
my social security number? Because I’m absolutely
confident LifeLock is protecting my good name and
personal information, just like it will yours. And we
guarantee our service up to $1 million dollars.”
By risking his personal
well-being through the publication of his Social
Security number and risking his company’s material
wealth by reimbursing up to $1 million in identity-theft
losses, Todd Davis has built Lifelock into the dominant
player in its category. Are you beginning to see how
embracing risk increases credibility?
--
These Self-Illustrating Logical Fallacies are just too good to pass up. Many thanks to the author and I hope he or she doesn’t mind my taking liberties reproducing them here.
I’ll let them speak for themselves, but you may have to think about some of these a little:
1. Begging the question, or petitio principii, is the most common type of fallacy because it is the one that occurs most frequently.
2. A bad set of options is either a false dichotomy or a true dichotomy.
3. You should never label an argument as a slippery slope argument, because next thing you know, you’re going to be calling all arguments that and where will it end?
4. Special pleading is the only type of logical fallacy that is not fallacious. This is because it is “special.”
5. If you don’t know what argumentum ad hominem is, you’re an idiot.
6. An appeal to authority constitutes a logically sound claim. Even the Pope agrees, and he knows a lot of things.
7. There’s nothing wrong with a hasty generalization. After all, most of my friends believe that.
8. Saying I provided a false analogy is like me saying you’re just plain wrong.
9. A non-sequitur conclusion is one which does not follow from the premises, therefore the premises must be wrong.
10. Argumentum ad logicam is a fallacy, so it always leads to a false conclusion.
11. Amphibolies will deceive the foolish, because that is their nature.
12. You can’t accuse someone of the fallacy of equivocation without being guilty of using “equivocation” yourself. See?
13. If I am affirming the consequent, then I am committing a logical fallacy. I am committing a logical fallacy, thus I must be affirming the consequent.
14. If I am denying the antecedent then I am committing a logical fallacy. I am not denying the antecedent, therefore I am not committing a logical fallacy.
15. My fallacy of composition is comprised of sensible words, so naturally it is a sensible statement.
16. A fallacy of division is nonsense, therefore it is comprised of nonsensical words.
17. You better damn well believe that I never resort to an appeal to force.
18. Is your inquiry a loaded question or a stupid one?
19. People who object to a straw man are simply prejudiced against the noble straw people.
20. A non causa pro causa argument is made by nitwits, therefore it is this type of argument that is the cause of human nitwitism.
21. A lot of people know that an argumentum ad populum is valid, especially in this democracy we live in. They can’t all be wrong.
22. Ignoratio elenchi must be a rather popular fallacy, since sociological studies have shown that people tend to think emotionally rather than rationally.
23. My own arguments, by virtue of coming from me, can never really constitute a true “no true Scotsman” fallacy.
24. How can you say a claim is guilty of reification? Where is the empirical evidence for reification? Show me something solid I can hold in my hand, else there is no reason to believe you.
--
12/14/2008 12:12 PM
Take this example from a quality British broadsheet.
One journalist on the paper lamented that:
...it's becoming all too clear at The Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centred on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in.
| RECYCLE BIN |
My name is Harvey,
I will be your Emergency Evacuation Coordinator,
please leave Area 47 in an orderly fashion,
there is plenty of time,
do not trample the other patrons,
exits are clearly marked.
HyperLink Heaven:
Cool Tools – One new tool recommendation per day
Current Trends – One new cultural and technological trend per
day
Street Use – Visual glimpses of how people actually use
technology
True Films – Rave reviews of great documentaries and non-fiction
films
The Quantified Self – Self-monitoring methods for self-knowledge
Asia Grace – My on-going love affair with Asia
Geek Dad – Summaries of projects completed by nerdy dads
Long Views – Reports on efforts to encourage long-term thinking
Kevin Kelly – Personal doings that only my mom cares about
http://jfb_vh.club.fr/menus/programmes/sexy.html - bizarre & cute old postcards
· Abstract & Surreal (6)
· Advertising (8)
· Animals, plants & nature (14)
· Architecture (1)
· Conceptual (16)
· Digital art (1)
· Erotic & nude (22)
· Glamour (11)
· Horror & Macabre (7)
· Humorous (4)
· Miscellaneous (6)
· People & portraits (34)
· Photojournalism (4)
· Photomanipulation (1)
· Still Life (1)
· Urban & Rural (3)
http://www.palinchak.com/photoslaves.php - links to great pics!
http://www.num-eric.com/index.php - DPF, IE
http://www.geryluger.at/ - DPF, IE
http://plfoto.com/zdjecia.html - pics
http://www.underwaterlook.com/ - fine art underwater pics - DPF
http://www.ianscrivener.com/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,58/ - pics
http://www.glamourpixel.de/links.php - glamourpixel links
http://dadanoias.net/ - pic blog
http://corsetgirl.blogspot.com/
http://www.marzischewski.com/ - DPF, IE
The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism periods (1100-1850), currently containing over 20.300 reproductions. Picture commentaries, artist biographies are available. Guided tours, period music, downloadable catalogue, free postcard and other services are provided.
http://www.411locate.com/reverse_lookup.htm - Reverse Lookup - Reverse
Phone, Address, Zip, and Area Code
http://www.matteobertolio.com/#
- DPF, IE
http://sex-and-blogs.com/ - DPF, IE
http://www.kooistra.de/en/ - DPF, IE
Mind Pollen
Kick Books
The Memory Hole
Disinformation
Everything You Know About Sex Is Wrong
Russ' Research Requests
Sexblo.gs
Drawn!
Scanner @ Nerve
Technorgasmic
Regina Lynn (her
blog)
Violet Blue
Fleshbot
Sexoteric Blog
Laura Henkel Fine Art
Impure Thoughts (Eric Singley)
http://eroticartgallery.blogspot.com/ - DPF
http://rareerotica.blogspot.com/ - Scarce Erotic Material From the Past
http://www.alchemicalwedding.com/arserotica/ - The Erotic Art Museum (Oldies Erotica)
http://www.imagenetion.com/ - The ImageNETion Portal is a huge collection of virtual art galleries, featuring illustrations and paintings of pin-ups art, fantasy art, sci-fi art, digital art, comics art, fantastic art, classical art, surreal art, and vintage art, from many artists.
http://sikym.blogspot.com/ - My favorite PhotoBlog
http://susanagar.blogspot.com/ - Hot PhotoBlog