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http://www.businessweek.com/

The Other Arab Spring

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: April 7, 2012

ISN’T it interesting that the Arab awakening began in Tunisia with a fruit vendor who was harassed by police for not having a permit to sell food — just at the moment when world food prices hit record highs? And that it began in Syria with farmers in the southern village of Dara’a, who were demanding the right to buy and sell land near the border, without having to get permission from corrupt security officials? And that it was spurred on in Yemen — the first country in the world expected to run out of water — by a list of grievances against an incompetent government, among the biggest of which was that top officials were digging water wells in their own backyards at a time when the government was supposed to be preventing such water wildcatting? As Abdelsalam Razzaz, the minister of water in Yemen’s new government, told Reuters last week: “The officials themselves have traditionally been the most aggressive well diggers. Nearly every minister had a well dug in his house.”

All these tensions over land, water and food are telling us something: The Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses as well. If we focus only on the former and not the latter, we will never be able to help stabilize these societies.

Take Syria. “Syria’s current social unrest is, in the most direct sense, a reaction to a brutal and out-of-touch regime,” write Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell, in a report for their Center for Climate and Security in Washington. “However, that’s not the whole story. The past few years have seen a number of significant social, economic, environmental and climatic changes in Syria that have eroded the social contract between citizen and government. ... If the international community and future policy makers in Syria are to address and resolve the drivers of unrest in the country, these changes will have to be better explored.”

From 2006-11, they note, up to 60 percent of Syria’s land experienced one of the worst droughts and most severe set of crop failures in its history. “According to a special case study from last year’s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, of the most vulnerable Syrians dependent on agriculture, particularly in the northeast governorate of Hassakeh (but also in the south), ‘nearly 75 percent ... suffered total crop failure.’ Herders in the northeast lost around 85 percent of their livestock, affecting 1.3 million people.” The United Nations reported that more than 800,000 Syrians had their livelihoods wiped out by these droughts, and many were forced to move to the cities to find work — adding to the burdens of already incompetent government.

“If climate projections stay on their current path, the drought situation in North Africa and the Middle East is going to get progressively worse, and you will end up witnessing cycle after cycle of instability that may be the impetus for future authoritarian responses,” argues Femia. “There are a few ways that the U.S. can be on the right side of history in the Arab world. One is to enthusiastically and robustly support democratic movements.” The other is to invest in climate-adaptive infrastructure and improvements in water management — to make these countries more resilient in an age of disruptive climate change.

An analysis by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published last October in the Journal of Climate, and cited on Joe Romm’s blog, climateprogress.org, found that droughts in wintertime in the Middle East — when the region traditionally gets most of its rainfall to replenish aquifers — are increasing, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible.

“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” noted Martin Hoerling, of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, the lead author of the paper. “This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.”

Especially when you consider the other stresses. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, the executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London, writing in The Beirut Daily Star in February, pointed out that 12 of the world’s 15 most water-scarce countries — Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine — are in the Middle East, and after three decades of explosive population growth these countries are “set to dramatically worsen their predicament. Although birth rates are falling, one-third of the overall population is below 15 years old, and large numbers of young women are reaching reproductive age, or soon will be.” A British Defense Ministry study, he added, “has projected that by 2030 the population of the Middle East will increase by 132 percent — generating an unprecedented ‘youth bulge.’ ”

And a lot more mouths to feed with less water than ever. As Lester Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of “World on the Edge,” notes, 20 years ago, using oil-drilling technology, the Saudis tapped into an aquifer far below the desert to produce irrigated wheat, making themselves self-sufficient. But now almost all that water is gone, and Saudi wheat production is, too. So the Saudis are investing in farm land in Ethiopia and Sudan, but that means they will draw more Nile water for irrigation away from Egypt, whose agriculture-rich Nile Delta is already vulnerable to any sea level rise and saltwater intrusion.

If you ask “what are the real threats to our security today,” said Brown, “at the top of the list would be climate change, population growth, water shortages, rising food prices and the number of failing states in the world. As that list grows, how many failed states before we have a failing global civilization, and everything begins to unravel?”

Hopefully, we won’t go there. But, then, we should all remember that quote attributed to Leon Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Well, you may not be interested in climate change, but climate change is interested in you.

Folks, this is not a hoax. We and the Arabs need to figure out — and fast — more ways to partner to mitigate the environmental threats where we can and to build greater resiliency against those where we can’t. Twenty years from now, this could be all that we’re talking about.

http://www.forbes.com/

Why The Numbers Game Matters in Social Media

Here’s how Seth Godin describes the numbers game in social media influence which I think has parallels, not least because social is embedded in ecosystems:

If we put a number on it, people will try to make the number go up.

Now that everyone is a marketer, many people are looking for a louder megaphone, a chance to talk about their work, their career, their product… and social media looks like the ideal soapbox, a free opportunity to shout to the masses.

But first, we’re told to make that number go up. Increase the number of fans, friends and followers, so your shouts will be heard. The problem of course is that more noise is not better noise.

On the other hand if we put more numbers on how influence works, people can fine-tune their voice. They can select benchmarks for where they want to get to on their journey in social media, and get a sense of progress. And people can anchor themselves in forms of behaviour that might turn into a rewarding career.

Yes there is a tendency for people to see social media as predominantly a numbers game but I think that can be explained, in part, by there being no nuance to the metrics.

For as long as its only about one number – how many – people will be driven to increase that one number. But if the metrics include – how rich and how active or how real – people can build in other objectives for their work.

12/12/2011 11:00 PM

Hi, Harv. I just read this interesting article about successful self-publishing, so thought you might be interested.

--eugene

http://finance.yahoo.com

This summer, Darcie Chan's debut novel became an unexpected hit. It has sold more than 400,000 copies and landed on the best-seller lists alongside brand-name authors like Michael Connelly, James Patterson and Kathryn Stockett.

It's been a success by any measure, save one. Ms. Chan still hasn't found a publisher.

Five years ago, Ms. Chan's novel, "The Mill River Recluse," which tells the story of a wealthy Vermont widow who bestows her fortune on town residents who barely knew her, would have languished in a drawer. A dozen publishers and more than 100 literary agents rejected it.

[More from WSJ.com: Readers Guide to Big Sellers]

"Nobody was willing to take a chance," says Ms. Chan, a 37-year-old lawyer who drafts environmental legislation. "It was too much of a publishing risk."

This past May, Ms. Chan decided to digitally publish it herself, hoping to gain a few readers and some feedback. She bought some ads on Web sites targeting e-book readers, paid for a review from Kirkus Reviews, and strategically priced her book at 99 cents to encourage readers to try it. She's now attracting bids from foreign imprints, movie studios and audio-book publishers, without selling a single copy in print.

Five years passed. Then, this past spring, she started reading about the rise of e-book sales and authors who had successfully self published, and decided to give it a shot. She fashioned a cover image out of a photograph her sister took of a mansion in Paoli, and she and her husband used Photoshop to add some gloomy ambience. Then she nervously uploaded her manuscript to Amazon's Kindle self-publishing program. She sold a trickle of copies. A few weeks later, she started selling it on Barnes & Noble's Nook and through SmashWords, a self-publishing program that distributes to major e-book retailers including Apple's iBookstore, Sony and Kobo. Her first royalty check from Amazon was for $39.

She noticed that a lot of popular e-books were priced at 99 cents, and immediately dropped her price from $2.99 to 99 cents. The cut would slash potential royalties—Amazon pays 35% royalties for books that cost less than $2.99, compared with 70% for books that cost $2.99 to $9.99. But sales picked up immediately. "I did that to encourage people to give it a chance," she says. "I saw it as an investment in my future as a writer." The strategy worked. Several reviewers on Amazon said they bought the book because it was 99 cents, then ended up liking it.

Then, at the end of June, "The Mill River Recluse" got a mention on a site called Ereader News Today, which posts tips for Kindle readers. Over the next two days, it sold another 600 copies. Ms. Chan realized she might be able to drive sales herself. She spent about $1,000 on marketing, buying banner ads on websites and blogs devoted to Kindle readers and a promotional spot on goodreads.com, a book-recommendation site with more than six million members.

After learning that self-published authors can pay to have their books reviewed by some sites, she paid $35 for a review from IndieReader.com (IndieReader no longer offers paid reviews). She paid $575 for an expedited review from Kirkus Reviews, a respected book-review journal and website. The review service, which Kirkus launched in 2005, gives self-published authors the option to keep the review private if it's negative. Ms. Chan decided to have hers posted on their website. Kirkus called the novel "a comforting book about the random acts of kindness that hold communities together." She used blurbs from the reviews on her Amazon and Barnes & Noble pages. "I hoped it would lend some credibility," she says. "Most other reviewers won't touch it."

Sales kept climbing. In July, it sold more than 14,000 copies. That month, it was featured on two of the biggest sites for e-book readers, generating a surge of new sales. In August, it sold more than 77,000 copies and hit the New York Times and USA Today e-book best-seller lists; it later landed on the Wall Street Journal list. In September, it sold more than 159,000 copies. To date, she has sold around 413,000 copies.

12/6/2011 9:29 PM

http://www.slate.com/

Why Has Inequality Been Growing?

How technology and winner-take-all markets have made the rich so much richer.

The first part of this series described how growing income disparities have made it more expensive for middle-income families to achieve many basic goals, such as sending their children to a decent school. Today’s installment discusses the forces that have caused income disparities to grow in recent decades. This essay is adapted from Robert H. Frank’s recently published book, The Darwin Economy.

Effective remedies for growing income disparities require a clear understanding of the forces that have caused them. In their recent book, Winner-Take-All Politics, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have argued that explosive salary growth at the top has been fueled by a more lax regulatory environment purchased with campaign contributions. That’s a spot-on description of what happened in the financial services industry, which is of course the principal target of the OWS movement.

But it’s an unsatisfactory account of why inequality has been rising in other occupations. The same pattern of income growth we’ve seen for the population as a whole has been replicated for virtually every subgroup that’s been studied. It holds for dentists, real-estate agents, authors, attorneys, newspaper columnists, musicians, and plastic surgeons. It holds for electrical engineers and English majors. And in none of those instances has it been primarily the result of regulatory favors.

To be sure, executives sometimes pack their boards with cronies who reward them with exorbitant salaries and bonuses. But such abuses are no worse now than they’ve always been. On the contrary, improved communications and falling transportation costs have almost certainly made them less serious. Executive hiring committees may not be perfectly informed, but they have more information than they used to, and this makes reputation a more effective predictor of performance. Similarly, increased vigilance from institutional shareholders and growing threats of hostile takeovers have placed additional constraints on executive pay abuse.

Despite these advances, corporate governance remains imperfect. But although there will always be cases in which mediocre executive performances are rewarded with high salaries, those who fail to deliver generally get the ax more quickly than in the past.

In our 1995 book, The Winner-Take-All Society, Philip Cook and I argued that top salaries have been growing sharply in virtually every labor market because of two factors—technological forces that greatly amplify small increments in performance and increased competition for the services of top performers.

Pay by relative performance is one defining condition of what we call a winner-take-all market. A second is that rewards tend to be concentrated in the hands of a few top performers, with small differences in talent or effort often giving rise to enormous differences in incomes. Both features show up in Sherwin Rosen’s description of the market for classical musicians:

The market for classical music has never been larger than it is now, yet the number of full-time soloists on any given instrument is on the order of only a few hundred (and much smaller for instruments other than voice, violin, and piano). Performers of the first rank comprise a limited handful out of these small totals and have very large incomes. There are also known to be substantial differences between [their incomes and the incomes of] those in the second rank, even though most consumers would have difficulty detecting more than minor differences in a “blind” hearing.

The enormous leverage of the most talented musicians was made possible by the development of breathtakingly lifelike recording and playback technologies. Now that most music we listen to is prerecorded, the world’s best soprano can be literally everywhere at once. And since it costs no more to stamp out compact discs from her master recording than from the master recording of any other singer, millions of us are each willing to pay a few cents extra to hear her rather than other singers who are only marginally less able. The upshot is that the best soprano lands a seven-figure recording contract while only marginally less gifted performers struggle to get by.

Both the scale and scope of individual markets have grown enormously in recent decades. If one seller’s offering is better than all others, buyers from around the world now quickly get word of that fact. Lower shipping costs, coupled with falling trade barriers, have made it easier than ever to serve buyers everywhere. If an economic opportunity arises anywhere in the networked world, ambitious entrepreneurs are able to discover and exploit it more quickly than ever.

Can the Jobs-and-Income Crisis End Well?

Some economists believe that today's grinding unemployment and slow growth are masking the transition to a vibrant digital economy

Could John Maynard Keynes be right about 2030?

In recent writings, such scholars as Eric Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, W. Brian Arthur, and Richard Florida, as well as consultants at McKinsey & Co., have made a strong case that we’re living through a transition toward an economy dominated by a digital ecosystem. “Technological progress—in particular, improvements in computer hardware, software, and networks—has been so rapid and so surprising that many present-day organizations, institutions, policies, and mindsets are not keeping up,” write Brynjolfsson and McAfee, scholars at the MIT Sloan School of Management and authors of the e-book, Race Against the Machine. Adds Arthur, a visiting researcher with the Intelligent Systems Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center in a McKinsey & Co. essay: “Is this the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution? Well, without sticking my neck out too far, I believe so.”

It takes time for major technological innovations to spread throughout an economy. A huge, nearly invisible digital economy has been built since the personal computer entered the workplace about three decades ago, followed by the commercial dawn of the Internet in 1995 via Netscape’s initial public offering. Arthur calculates that the digital “second economy” will rival the physical economy in size by 2025. Brynjolfsson and McAfee illustrate the rapid evolution of the digital economy with examples such as the driverless, software-controlled car being developed by Google and the Watson supercomputer IBM designed to play Jeopardy. Instead of electric power—a major innovation that drove productivity in the mass production economy of Smokestack America in an earlier era—think Big Data. In 15 of the U.S. economy’s 17 sectors, companies with more than 1,000 employees store over 235 terabytes of data, on average. That’s more data than the Library of Congress contains, according to McKinsey. Mining the data offers vast opportunities for improving efficiency and quality in most businesses.

http://www.theepochtimes.com

2011 Record Year for Extreme Weather Events

Insurance companies, local governments look to adapt

The United States had 14 extreme weather events in 2011, each costing over $1 billion. The rise in these events not only impacts administrative planning in counties and cities, but is also dramatically affecting the insurance industry.

According to Dr. Jeff Masters, meteorologist with online weather forecasters Weather Underground, 2011 has been a unique year.

Masters, a meteorologist for over 30 years, says three or four extreme weather events is the national average, but 2011 broke the previous record of nine events in 2008.

“Looking back on historical records, which go back to the late 1800s, I can’t find anything that compares,” he said via a teleconference organized earlier this week by the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

11/14/2011 11:47 AM

http://www.rollingstone.com

How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich

The inside story of how the Republicans abandoned the poor and the middle class to pursue their relentless agenda of tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent

By Tim Dickinson

November 9, 2011 7:00 AM ET

(Read the article, if you're interested. Grand Old Party or Gold Over People, you decide. - @hg47)

11/14/2011 11:47 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Millionaires receive billions in federal ‘welfare,’ Coburn says

The super-wealthy are receiving billions of dollars in federal benefits, according to a report released Monday by the office of Sen. Tom Coburn, one of the leading congressional opponents of government waste.

In the 37-page report, titled “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” Coburn (R-Okla.) states that since 2003, persons with an annual gross income of at least $1 million have received a total of $9.5 billion in government payments, including $9 billion in Social Security retirement benefits, $74 million in unemployment insurance and $316 million in farm program payments.

Coburn also details about $114 billion in federal tax breaks claimed by millionaires since 2006, at an annual average of $28.5 billion. In 2009, nearly 1,500 millionaires paid no federal income tax, according to Coburn’s report.

“This welfare for the well-off — costing billions of dollars a year — is being paid for with the taxes of the less fortunate, many of who are working two jobs just to make ends meet, and IOUs to be paid off by future generations,” the Oklahoma Republican said in a statement. “We should never demonize those who are successful. Nor should we pamper them with unnecessary welfare to create an appearance everyone is benefiting from federal programs.”

10/6/2011 3:08 PM

http://seekingalpha.com/

Prophets Of Doom: 12 Insider Quotes About The Nearing Economic Crisis

The following are 12 shocking quotes from insiders that are warning about the horrific economic crisis that is almost here....

#1 George Soros: "Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression with incalculable political consequences. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation."

#2 PIMCO CEO Mohammed El-Erian: "These are all signs of an institutional run on French banks. If it persists, the banks would have no choice but to delever their balance sheets in a very drastic and disorderly fashion. Retail depositors would get edgy and be tempted to follow trading and institutional clients through the exit doors. Europe would thus be thrown into a full-blown banking crisis that aggravates the sovereign debt trap, renders certain another economic recession, and significantly worsens the outlook for the global economy."

#3 Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, global head of securities services at UniCredit SpA (Italy's largest bank): "The only remaining question is how many days the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank can keep up Greece’s spirits."

#4 Stefan Homburg, the head of Germany's Institute for Public Finance: "The euro is nearing its ugly end. A collapse of monetary union now appears unavoidable."

#5 EU Parliament Member Nigel Farage: "I think the worst in the financial system is yet to come, a possible cataclysm and if that happens the gold price could go (higher) to a number that we simply cannot, at this moment, even imagine."

#6 Carl Weinberg, the chief economist at High Frequency Economics: "At this point, our base case is that Greece will default within weeks."

#7 Goldman Sachs strategist Alan Brazil: "Solving a debt problem with more debt has not solved the underlying problem. In the US, Treasury debt growth financed the US consumer but has not had enough of an impact on job growth. Can the US continue to depreciate the world’s base currency?"

#8 International Labour Organization director general Juan Somavia recently stated that total unemployment could "increase by some 20m to a total of 40m in G20 countries" by the end of 2012.

#9 Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackerman: "It is an open secret that numerous European banks would not survive having to revalue sovereign debt held on the banking book at market levels."

#10 Alastair Newton, a strategist for Nomura Securities in London: "We believe that we are just about to enter a critical period for the eurozone and that the threat of some sort of break-up between now and year-end is greater than it has been at any time since the start of the crisis"

#11 Ann Barnhardt, head of Barnhardt Capital Management, Inc.: "It's over. There is no coming back from this. The only thing that can happen is a total and complete collapse of EVERYTHING we now know, and humanity starts from scratch. And if you think that this collapse is going to play out without one hell of a big hot war, you are sadly, sadly mistaken."

#12 Lakshman Achuthan of ECRI: "When I call a recession...that means that process is starting to feed on itself, which means that you can yell and scream and you can write a big check, but it's not going to stop."

9/19/2011 2:03 PM

http://www.cbsnews.com/

Obama: "This is not class warfare -- It's math"

Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET

"This is not class warfare -- it's math," Mr. Obama said from the White House Rose Garden, addressing GOP critiques of his plan head on.

"The money has to come from some place," he continued. "If we're not willing to ask those who've done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit... the math says everybody else has to do a whole lot more, we've got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor."

In response, Mr. Obama said, "I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or teacher is class warfare. I think it's just the right thing to do."

http://www.citizenwarrior.com

THE QURAN is Islam's most holy book. Sixty-one percent of the Quran is about non-Muslims. Writings about what Muslims should do is religious. Writings about what non-Muslims should do or how Muslims should deal with non-Muslims is political (read more about this). Therefore, based on Islam's most holy book, Islam is more political (61%) than religious (39%).

There are 245 verses in the Quran that could be considered "positive verses" about non-Muslims. Every single one of those verses have been abrogated by later, negative verses about non-Muslims. Not one positive verse about non-Muslims is left.

In contrast, there are 527 verses of intolerance toward non-Muslims, and 109 verses specifically advocating violence towards non-Muslims. Not one of these verses has been abrogated.

My conclusion: Non-Muslims who like Islam don't know much about it

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com

Ex-fighter pilot recalls her 9/11 suicide mission

F-16 pilot Heather Penney was ordered to fly a suicide mission on Sept. 11, 2001, to bring down United Flight 93. "I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot," she recalls 10 years later.

By Steve Hendrix

The Washington Post

In the monumental confusion of those first hours, it was impossible to get clear orders. Nothing was ready. The jets were still equipped with dummy bullets from the training mission.

There were no armed aircraft standing by and no system in place to scramble them over Washington.

"There was no perceived threat at the time, especially one coming from the homeland like that," said Col. George Degnon, vice commander of the 113th Wing at Andrews.

Things are different today, Degnon said. At least two "hot-cocked" planes are ready at all times, their pilots never more than yards from the jet.

A third plane hit the Pentagon, and almost at once came word that a fourth plane, maybe more, could be on the way. The jets would be armed within an hour, but somebody had to fly now, weapons or no weapons.

"Lucky, you're coming with me," Col. Marc Sasseville barked.

They were gearing up in the preflight life-support area when Sasseville, struggling into his flight suit, met her eye.

"I'm going to go for the cockpit," Sasseville said.

She replied without hesitating.

"I'll take the tail."

It was a plan. And a pact.

"Let's go!"

She climbed in, rushed to power up the engines, screamed for her ground crew to pull the chocks. She muttered a fighter pilot's prayer — "God, don't let me (expletive) up" — and followed Sasseville into the sky.

They screamed over the smoldering Pentagon, heading northwest at more than 400 mph, flying low and scanning the clear horizon. Her commander had time to think about the best place to hit the enemy.

Grim calculations

"We don't train to bring down airliners," said Sasseville, now stationed at the Pentagon. "If you just hit the engine, it could still glide and (the pilot) could guide it to a target. My thought was the cockpit or the wing."

He also thought about his ejection seat. Would there be an instant just before impact?

"I was hoping to do both at the same time," he said. "It probably wasn't going to work, but that's what I was hoping."

Penney worried about missing the target if she tried to bail out. "If you eject and your jet soars through without impact ... ," she trailed off, the thought of failing more dreadful than the thought of dying.

Unexpected outcome

But she didn't have to die. She didn't have to knock down an airliner full of children and salespeople and loved ones.

The passengers did that themselves.

9/11/2011 12:10 PM

http://www.truth-out.org/

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

Saturday 3 September 2011

by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

9/8/2011 9:37 AM

http://www.cbsnews.com

Left behind in America: Who's to blame for the wealth divide?

Take a moment and think about how you feel wealth should, ideally, be spread among the American people.

If you're like the average respondent in a 2010 Harvard Business School/Duke University study, your response was this: The richest top 20 percent of society, as determined by net worth, should control 32 percent of the wealth. The bottom 20 percent should control about ten percent. And the rest should be spread out among the 60 percent in the middle, with higher-earners taking a slightly larger share.

It probably won't surprise you to hear that those figures don't match reality. But you might well be shocked by just how far off they are. In the study, Americans were asked how they thought wealth was actually distributed; they estimated that the top 20 percent controlled about 59 percent of the nation's wealth, while the bottom controlled about three percent.

That wasn't even close: In reality, the top 20 percent controlled about 84 percent of the wealth, while the bottom quintile controlled just 0.1 percent. The combined net worth of the bottom 40 percent, in fact, accounted for just 0.3 percent of the nation's wealth. (See chart below, where that bottom 40 percent doesn't even show up.)

One indicator of where you fall on the spectrum is race: White households, on average, had a median wealth of $113,149 in 2009 - 20 times the median wealth of black households ($5,677) and 18 times that of Hispanic households ($6,325). That's the largest gap between whites and minorities since the census started tracking such data in 1984.

It's not just wealth. In 2007, U.S. income inequality hit its highest mark since just ahead of the Great Depression in 1929. And that was before the current recession brought joblessness and financial peril to scores of Americans, most of whom are on the wrong side of the wealth divide.

According to the CIA's World Factbook, the United States now ranks 39th in the world when it comes to income inequality. What that means is that only 38 out of 136 countries have a less equitable distribution of income than the United States; the list of countries with a more equitable income distribution includes Iran, Russia, Turkmenistan and Yemen.

9/4/2011 11:04 AM

http://www.slate.com

The True Cost of 9/11

Trillions and trillions wasted on wars, a fiscal catastrophe, a weaker America.

By Joseph E. StiglitzPosted Thursday, Sept. 1, 2011, at 4:51 PM ET

The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks by al-Qaida were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama Bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush's response to the attacks compromised America's basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.

The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to al-Qaida—as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive—orders of magnitude beyond the $60 billion claimed at the beginning—as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.

Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America's war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3 trillion to $5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50 percent of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans' medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health care costs will total $600 billion to $900 billion. The social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.

Even if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax "relief" for the wealthy.

http://bigthink.com/ideas/39663

The Soft-on-Crime Roots of British Disorder

In a civilized society people would be allowed to defend themselves with guns, not baseball bats.

As wild gangs of youths burned homes, shops and cars and severely beat anyone who tried to stop them last week, English people tried to defend themselves. Their desperation triggered a 5,000% increase in purchases of baseball bats from Amazon.

This is a sad symbol of the failure of the British approach to crime—with its sympathy for offenders, intolerance of self-defense, and unwillingness to pay for adequate crime control. A people once proud of their peaceful country and unarmed policemen had to resort to clubs to protect life and limb.

Great Britain's leniency began in the 1950s, with a policy that only under extraordinary circumstances would anyone under 17 be sent to prison. This was meant to rehabilitate young offenders. But the alternative to incarceration has been simply to warn them to behave, maybe require community service, and return them to the streets. There has been justifiable concern about causes of crime such as poverty and unemployment, but little admission that some individuals prefer theft to work and that deterrence must be taken seriously.

Victims of aggression who defend themselves or attempt to protect their property have been shown no such leniency. Burglars who injured themselves breaking into houses have successfully sued homeowners for damages. In February, police in Surrey told gardeners not to put wire mesh on the windows of their garden sheds as burglars might hurt themselves when they break in.

If a homeowner protecting himself and his family injures an intruder beyond what the law considers "reasonable," he will be prosecuted for assault. Tony Martin, an English farmer, was sentenced to life in prison for killing one burglar and wounding another with a shotgun during the seventh break-in at his rural home in 1999. While his sentence was later reduced to five years, he was refused parole in 2003 because he was judged a danger to burglars.

It Could Happen Here: Asher Edelman

Daniel Honan on August 10, 2011, 12:00 AM

What's the Big Idea?

The Fed promised to hold short-term interest rates near zero until mid-2013. Now what? "If I were Chairman of the Fed right now," says the legendary entrepreneur and art world financier Asher Edelman, "I would try to instruct both the President, his advisors, and Congress that monetary easing alone or monetary policy alone, can never revive the economy."

Edelman, who has worked in investment banking, money management, and derivatives trading on Wall Street since 1961, says the the recent actions by the deficit hawks in Congress amounted to "an absolute absurdity" given that we are still in the middle of a recession. He tells Big Think: "Without fiscal intervention on the part of government we will be a very long time before the consumer is able to revive his needs and a very long time before our budget will in any way become balanced."

Reaganomics, according to Edelman, has been proven nonsense "time and time again...it doesn’t trickle down anywhere. The man with a million-dollar income who makes another $100,000 is more likely than not not to spend it."

(My take? We're in Depression 2.0 right now. But the panic has been averted, this time around. - @hg47)

8/10/2011 6:48 AM

http://www.city-journal.org/

Is Islam Compatible with Capitalism?

The Middle East’s future depends on the answer.

The moment you arrive at the airport in Cairo, you discover how little Egypt—the heart of Arab civilization—is governed by the rule of law. You line up to show your passport to the customs officer; you wait and wait and wait. Eventually, you reach the officer . . . who sends you to the opposite end of the airport to buy an entry visa. The visa costs 15 U.S. dollars; if you hand the clerk $20, though, don’t expect any change, let alone a receipt. Then you make the long hike back to the customs line, where you notice that some Egyptians—important ones, apparently—have helpers who hustle them through. Others cut to the front. It’s an annoying and disturbing welcome to a chaotic land, one that has grown only more chaotic since the January revolution. It’s also instructive, effectively demonstrating why it’s hard to do business in this country or in other Arab Muslim lands, where personal status so often trumps fair, universally applied rules. Such personalization of the law is incompatible with a truly free-market or modern society and helps explain why the Arab world’s per-capita income is one-tenth America’s or Europe’s.

(this Internet article makes some interesting points concerning the past and future of the Middle East - @hg47)

8/9/2011 7:42 AM

http://www.ibtimes.com/

Severe Solar Storms Could Disrupt Earth This Decade: NOAA

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency that focuses on the condition of the oceans and atmosphere, said a severe solar storm could cause global disruptions in GPS systems, power grids, satellite communications, and airline communications.

With solar activity expected to peak around 2013, the Sun is entering a particularly active time and big flares like the recent one will likely be common during the next few years.

Most solar flares will only cause minor problems with satellites and power grids, but a major flare in the mid-19th century blocked the nascent telegraph system, and some scientists believe that another such event is now overdue.

In a huge solar storm back in 1859, telegraph offices worldwide were hit, some telegraph operators reported electric shocks, the telegraph systems malfunctioned and even paper caught fire. It is the strongest solar storm on record and is called the “Carrington Event,” which is named after Richard Carrington, who viewed and reported on the solar flare of Sept. 1, 1859. In 1989, six million people in Quebec, Canada were left without power for several hours when a solar storm took down a power grid.

According to a report by the National Research Council in 2008, a solar storm similar to the ones in the past could cause up to $2 trillion dollars in damage across the globe today.

The NOAA predicted four “extreme” solar emissions which could threaten the planet this decade. Similarly, NASA warned that a peak in the sun's magnetic energy cycle and the number of sun spots or flares around 2013 could enable extremely high radiation levels.

This is a special problem in the United States and especially a severe threat in the eastern United States as Federal Government studies revealed that this extreme solar activity and emissions may result in complete blackouts for years in several areas of the nation. Moreover, there may also be disruption of power supply for years, or even decades, as geomagnetic currents attracted by the storm could debilitate the transformers.

[hg47: "A Carrington Level Event today aimed at the Earth, hitting the United States, would first knock out most of the electrical power grid, perhaps all of it. Total Black Out. That's not the real problem. All the wires which normally distribute electrical power to us would pick up huge erratic electrical energy surges & spikes from the solar storm. This energy might destroy most of the sensitive electrical devices in your home. Many or most of the plugged-in TVs, stereos, refrigerators, destroyed, reduced to scrap. The more high-tech the electrical device, the more vulnerable. That's not the real problem. The real problem is that the electrical wiring would pick up energy from the solar storm and feed it backwards up the distribution system: A huge Carrington Level solar storm could destroy most of the step-down transformers in our electrical grid. Building new transformers and replacing all the busted transformers could take months or YEARS. Try to imagine surviving without Electricity for Months or Years, here in the good old USA."]

Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said U.S. plants affected by a blackout should be able to cope without electricity for at least eight hours and should have procedures to keep the reactor and spent-fuel pool cool for 72 hours.

Nuclear plants depend on standby batteries and backup diesel generators. Most standby power systems would continue to function after a severe solar storm, but supplying the standby power systems with adequate fuel, when the main power grids are offline for years, could become a very critical problem.

If the spent fuel rod pools at the country's 104 nuclear power plants lose their connection to the power grid, the current regulations are not sufficient to guarantee those pools won't boil over, exposing the hot, zirconium-clad rods and sparking fires that would release deadly radiation.

A report by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said that over the standard 40-year license term of nuclear power plants, solar flare activity enables a 33 percent chance of long-term power loss, a risk that significantly outweighs that of major earthquakes and tsunamis.

A solar flare is caused when an intense burst of radiation comes from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. Flares are the solar system's largest explosive events. A CME happens when the outer solar magnetic fields are closed, often above sunspot groups, and the confined solar atmosphere can suddenly and violently release bubbles of gas and magnetic fields.

http://gawker.com

Update: Only 92% of Newt Gingrich’s Twitter Followers Are Fake

Yesterday, we published an item based on a former Newt Gingrich staffer's claim that Gingrich assembled his 1.3 million Twitter followers—a number that he's taken to bragging about—in part by buying fake Twitter followers. A lot of people did not think that was true! But today social networking search firm PeekYou announced that it had crunched the data and come to the conclusion that roughly 106,055 of Gingrich's million-plus followers are real people. The rest are fakes.

7/29/2011 8:51 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com

http://www.latimes.com/

Borrowing and spending the GOP way

The big deficit facing the U.S. is mostly Republican in origin, the Congressional Budget Office says. The Bush tax cuts alone have added $3 trillion in red ink, yet the party wants to double down on its failed policy.

By Mike Lofgren

June 26, 2011

President Obama's fiscal policies are a mess. Whatever one thinks of the need for stimulus in a severe recession, it is obvious that running trillion-dollar deficits for years on end is unsustainable. Moreover, his proposals are dishonest. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that his proposed 2012 budget underestimates spending while overestimating revenues.

Sadly, the Republicans have offered no viable alternative.

The failure of our leaders to offer realistic budget proposals was a major reason I decided to retire after 28 years in Congress, most of them as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees. My party talks a good game, railing about the immorality of passing debt on to our children. But the same Congressional Budget Office that punctured Obama's budget also concluded that the major policies that swung the budget from a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion in 2001 to the present 10-year deficit of $6.2 trillion were Republican in origin.

Consider the two signature GOP policies of George W. Bush's presidency: the wars and the tax cuts. Including debt service costs, Bush's wars have cost about $1.7 trillion to date. Additionally, as part of being "a nation at war," the Pentagon has spent about $1 trillion more than was expected in the last decade on things other than direct war costs, which has been a bonanza for military contractors but a disaster for the federal budget. And finally, there has been another trillion dollars spent domestically in response to 9/11, including spending on such things as establishing the Homeland Security Department and increasing the budgets for the State Department and the Veterans Administration.

The Bush tax cuts have added another $3 trillion in red ink. While Republican leaders wail that Americans — particularly their rich contributors — are overtaxed, the facts say otherwise: U.S. taxpayers, particularly the wealthiest, pay far less in taxes than they would in most other developed countries. Today, the 400 wealthiest Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 125 million. The GOP insists that those wealthy people use their money to create jobs, and that taxing them more heavily would ultimately hurt the economy. But, if that's so, why was the rate of job creation in the decade after the Bush tax cuts the poorest in any decade since before World War II?

Like a drunk swearing off hooch for the hundredth time, Republicans are now trying to show they are serious about controlling the deficit by saying they won't raise the debt ceiling unless they get through some of their cost-saving projects, like privatizing Medicare. Meanwhile, they want revenue increases "off the table," even though, at 14.8% of GDP, revenues are at their lowest level in 60 years. And the budget passed by the Republican-controlled House further cuts taxes on the wealthy, a fact it glosses over with optimistic growth forecasts.

6/4/2011 1:06 PM

http://online.wsj.com/

The Bullish Case for the U.S. Economy

As intriguing in this moment of U.S. pessimism is the 56-year-old uber-investor's long-term bullishness on American companies and U.S. competitiveness. "You could say we're the best house in a bad neighborhood," says the man who has spent 28 years managing money. "We have fewer problems and more solutions than Europe or Japan."

5/29/2011 7:05 AM

http://www.americanthinker.com/

"Fine. A Mosque at ground zero. But how about a cathedral in Mecca first? It is part of our Christian outreach program of bridge building."

5/25/2011 6:07 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Members of Congress Get Abnormally High Returns From Their Stocks

Members of the House of Representatives considerably outperform the stock market in their personal investments, according to a new academic study.

Four university researchers examined 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House representatives from 1985 to 2001, and found what they call "significant positive abnormal returns," with portfolios based on congressional trades beating the market by about 6 percent annually.

5/11/2011 11:45 AM

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

The uses of semen? One: reproduction. Two: best not mentioned, really…

As American surgeon Lazar Greenfield discovered, there are some subjects that simply cannot be taken lightly

There are certain subjects – GM, nuclear power, climate change – that cause aeration in scientific circles. And, as president elect of the American College of Surgeons Lazar Greenfield found out recently, the reputed antidepressant effects of semen are also a subject to be treated with care.

In his Valentine's Day-themed editorial in Surgery News, "Gut Feelings", Lazar cited a study that reported the mood-boosting effects of semen on women, concluding: "So there's a deeper bond between men and women than St Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolate."

Greenfield's Andy Gray moment offended many ACS members and he was accused of sexism; demonstrations were threatened. Greenfield is a highly respected retired professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan with what has been described as "a reputation for supporting women in surgery" and he is also the inventor of the Greenfield Filter, a device that prevents blood clots.

Confronted with the furore he'd caused, Greenfield apologised and gave up his editorship of Surgery News. Two weeks ago the controversy over what had become known as "Semengate" hadn't gone away, so he also resigned from his ACS position.

Greenfield told the Detroit Free Press: "I was short-sighted in not anticipating the potential for my remark to be misinterpreted… I thought [these were] fascinating new findings related to semen, and the way in which nature is trying to promote a stronger bond between men and women. It impressed me. It seemed as though it was a gift from nature. And so that was the reason for my lighthearted comments."

The study he was referring to was in fact published back in 2002 by Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at SUNY-Albany. His team found that women whose partners didn't use condoms were less depressed. They also found that depressive symptoms and suicide attempts were higher among women who used condoms regularly compared to those who didn't. Moreover, the women who didn't use condoms became more depressed the longer they went without having sex. Gallup suggested this was because semen contains oestrogen and prostaglandins which have been linked to lower levels of depression, and oxytocin which promotes social bonding.

Gallup's study came with an important caveat: "I want to make it clear that we are not advocating that people abstain from using condoms. Clearly an unwanted pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease would more than offset any advantageous psychological effects of semen."

Last week, his research back in the news, Gallup elaborated to Popular Science: "Seminal plasma evolved to control and manipulate the female reproductive system so as to work toward the best interests of the donor – the male." He suggested that the possible antidepressant properties of semen may promote bonding between the sexual partners, and that was to the male's reproductive advantage.

Asked about the controversy Greenfield's remarks had caused, Gallup commented: "I think it's a tragic overreaction. The point at which we begin to let political agenda dictate what science is all about is the point when science ceases to be a viable enterprise."

http://www.investors.com/

Israel, a New Jersey-sized nation of 7.5 million people (1.7 million of whom are Arab) filed 7,082 international patents in the five years ending in 2007. By contrast, 28 majority-Muslim nations with almost 1.2 billion people — 155 times the population of Israel — were granted 2,071 patents in the same period.

Narrowing the comparison to the 17 Muslim nations of the Middle East from Morocco to Iran and down the Arabian Peninsula, the 409 million people in that region generated 680 patents in five years.

This means that the Arab and Iranian world produced about one patent per year for every 3 million people, compared with Israel's output of one annual patent for every 5,295 people, an Israeli rate some 568 times that of Israel's neighbors and sometime enemies.

The awarding of Nobel Prizes in the quantitative areas of chemistry, economics and physics shows a similar disparity, with five Israeli winners compared with one French Algerian (a Jew who earned the prize for work done in France) and an Egyptian-American (for work done at Caltech in California).

This phenomenon is manifested in other nations as well, where bad government begets poverty. Free South Korea, with 48.8 million people, filed 24,200 international patents from 2003 to 2007. The 24.5 million people in the North Korean slave state managed to produce 14 patents in the same period.

But wealth isn't the sole explanation for this disparity in intellectual innovation. Saudi Arabia enjoyed a per capita income of $24,200 in 2010. Yet the Kingdom averages an anemic 37 patents per year compared with Israel's 1,416 per year — and there are 3 1/2 times more Saudis than Israelis, meaning that Israel's per capita output of intellectual property is 132 times greater than Saudi Arabia's.

My on-the-ground education in the Middle East began in 1984, when I attended school at American University in Cairo, Egypt. At the time, Israel was a socialist state, still very much mired in a planned economy focused on heavy industry and agriculture, replete with government subsidies and heavy regulation.

Israel's per capita output stood at $6,749 (in current U.S. dollars), 41% of America's — slightly less than the Soviet Union's per capita output at the time.

Egypt also featured a planned economy in the 1980s, with smoke-belching heavy industries making Cairo among the world's most polluted cities. Egypt's per capita production was $881, about 5% of U.S. per capita output. Israel produced about 7.7 times more goods and services per person than did Egypt.

In 2010, before unrest disrupted its economy, Egypt produced $2,759 per capita, a little less than 6% of U.S. per capita production. Israel, meanwhile, had improved its per capita wealth generation to $26,843, or 56% of America's per capita GDP.

Remarkably, the populations of Egypt and Israel grew at almost the same rate, Egypt's being driven by internal growth, Israel's largely by more than a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union. By 2010, Israel had improved its ratio of productivity over Egypt, producing about 9.7 times more goods and services per person than its neighbor to the south.

Why this growing disparity in wealth creation between Israel and Egypt?

The Egyptian Revolution of 1952 saw the overthrow of monarchy with the military running the nation's economy. This invariably led to stagnation and a growing external debt.

Egypt has launched two waves of economic liberalization since 1984, one under the auspices of an International Monetary Fund standby agreement in 1991 and another in 2004, when former President Mubarak appointed an economic-reform-minded Cabinet. The 1991 effort focused on the privatization of state-owned enterprises.

The 2004 program reduced import tariffs, cut taxes and allowed the Egyptian pound to float. The reforms of the 1990s took some time to take hold, with the Egyptian economy seeing year-over-year growth in per capita income (purchasing power parity) rising an impressive 5.7% per year from 1997 to 2000. Mubarak's 2004 free-market reforms bore even more fruit, with per capita growth averaging 6.9% from 2005 to 2008.

However, the demonstrators of Tahrir Square claim, with some justification, that the most recent round of reforms mostly benefited the nation's elite. This crony capitalism is said to have generated a massive amount of wealth for the two sons of the former Egyptian president. And, with that wealth concentrated at the top, resentment mounted in the masses who saw their cooking fuel subsidies cut while the cost of basic necessities soared.

Now the Egyptian economy has been hammered by unrest. Crime has tripled since Mubarak's ouster. A wave of child kidnapping has struck fear in wealthy and upper-class parents. Militant Islamists now operate in the open, brazenly attacking Egypt's large Christian minority and moderate Muslims alike. Tourism, accounting for 11.3% of the economy, has dried up. Unemployment is surging.

Adding to Egypt's travails, the Muslim Brotherhood is calling for "modesty police" — mirroring the actions taken by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Gaza, after its 2006 electoral win and subsequent bloody purge of its more secular rival, Fatah.

These would-be mullahs of misery are also calling for the criminal prosecution of those who made money during the Mubarak era, coupling that call with a return to Egyptian socialism. This sure recipe for economic failure will inevitably cause Egypt's new leaders to blame Israel, the Jews and America for Egypt's problems. As the availability of bread declines, the index of hate will rise. This volatile equation is good for neither Egypt nor Israel.

After its founding in 1948, Israel was also burdened with a socialist economy. Israel's main right-wing party, Likud, won the 1977 elections, but that win was mainly a reaction to Israel's near-run victory in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Likud did little to change Israel's socialist policies.

Israel's commitment to socialism wasn't challenged until former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appointed Benjamin Netanyahu as finance minister in 2003. Many thought Sharon made this move to bury rival Netanyahu's career. Netanyahu sought to remake Israel's economy, instituting reforms such as liberalization of the banking system.

Critics scoffed at these reforms as "Thatcherite," worrying that Israel's social safety net was being dismantled. But Netanyahu's free-market reforms worked, causing Israel to see its longest sustained period of high economic growth, with per capita income (purchasing power parity) rising an average of 6% per year from 2004 to 2008. Israel is now considered a high-tech market economy.

The telltale signs of Israel's economic rise can be seen in the Tel Aviv skyline and the new office complexes around Jerusalem. International giant Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. was founded in 1901 by three pharmacists in Jerusalem. Today it employs 40,000 around the world.

Teva has a market cap of $44.2 billion — the most highly valued company based in Israel and the ninth-largest firm traded on the Nasdaq. Seventy percent of its revenue comes from generics, a niche it pioneered, while 30% comes from newly developed drugs. Teva's history and forward-looking strategy is for revenue to double every four years, with 65% of that coming from internal growth.

Teva's success in the generic market is predicated on rapidly developing high-quality formulations and quickly getting approval for them within 180 days after filing — a quick turnaround that competitors find difficult to match.

A few miles from Teva's gleaming office campus west of the Old City sits the former national mint building for the British Mandate. Built in 1937, this renovated building, along with the old Ottoman Empire railway warehouses next to it, houses the JVP Media Quarter and 300 entrepreneurs.

The complex hosts Israel's leading venture capital firm, Jerusalem Venture Partners, as well as 35 startups and a performing arts center for good measure. JVP, which has helped launch 70 companies since 1993, has more than $820 million under management with seven active venture capital funds.

The Media Quarter concept was created in 2002 when JVP founder Erel Margalit wanted to create a media-focused incubator that combined technology, culture, art and business. JVP has shepherded 18 initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, including some of the largest Israel-based companies: Qlik Technologies, Netro Corp., Chromatis Networks, Precise Software, Cogent Communications.

The government of Israel created 28 incubators between 1990 and 1993 under the auspices of the Office of the Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Reminiscent of Japan's state-guided capitalism through the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Israel's incubators were designed to engage the scientific and engineering skills of the large influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

The government eventually viewed the effort as a burden, so it privatized its incubators. Today there are 24 incubators that can receive a government grant of $500,000 per company and up to $1.5 million in state seed capital.

Less than 300 miles separate the purposeful creative buzz in the JVP Media Quarter from the restive streets of Cairo, where the Muslim Brotherhood tells Egypt's unemployed that their plight is the fault of corrupt capitalists and Jews. It doesn't take a Nobel Prize-winning economist to figure out where these two economies are going.

• DeVore served in the California Legislature from 2004 to 2010. He is a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and served as a special assistant for foreign affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon. He studied at American University in Cairo in 1984-85.

4/15/2011 10:30 AM

http://www.businessweek.com/

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

3/6/2011 5:05 AM

http://www.marketwatch.com/

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.

These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.

David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being “hollowed out.” New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.

“There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,” Professor Autor said. “Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”

Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics. Only recently have researchers been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of e-mail from the Enron Corporation.

“The economic impact will be huge,” said Tom Mitchell, chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.”

Nowhere are these advances clearer than in the legal world.

E-discovery technologies generally fall into two broad categories that can be described as “linguistic” and “sociological.”

The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”

The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.

Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing “digital anomalies” that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

For example, it finds “call me” moments — those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter.

“It doesn’t use keywords at all,” said Elizabeth Charnock, Cataphora’s founder. “But it’s a means of showing who leaked information, who’s influential in the organization or when a sensitive document like an S.E.C. filing is being edited an unusual number of times, or an unusual number of ways, by an unusual type or number of people.”

The Cataphora software can also recognize the sentiment in an e-mail message — whether a person is positive or negative, or what the company calls “loud talking” — unusual emphasis that might give hints that a document is about a stressful situation. The software can also detect subtle changes in the style of an e-mail communication.

A shift in an author’s e-mail style, from breezy to unusually formal, can raise a red flag about illegal activity.

“You tend to split a lot fewer infinitives when you think the F.B.I. might be reading your mail,” said Steve Roberts, Cataphora’s chief technology officer.

Another e-discovery company in Silicon Valley, Clearwell, has developed software that analyzes documents to find concepts rather than specific keywords, shortening the time required to locate relevant material in litigation.

Last year, Clearwell software was used by the law firm DLA Piper to search through a half-million documents under a court-imposed deadline of one week. Clearwell’s software analyzed and sorted 570,000 documents (each document can be many pages) in two days. The law firm used just one more day to identify 3,070 documents that were relevant to the court-ordered discovery motion.

Clearwell’s software uses language analysis and a visual way of representing general concepts found in documents to make it possible for a single lawyer to do work that might have once required hundreds.

“The catch here is information overload,” said Aaref A. Hilaly, Clearwell’s chief executive. “How do you zoom in to just the specific set of documents or facts that are relevant to the specific question? It’s not about search; it’s about sifting, and that’s what e-discovery software enables.”

For Neil Fraser, a lawyer at Milberg, a law firm based in New York, the Cataphora software provides a way to better understand the internal workings of corporations he sues, particularly when the real decision makers may be hidden from view.

He says the software allows him to find the ex-Pfc. Wintergreens in an organization — a reference to a lowly character in the novel “Catch-22” who wielded great power because he distributed mail to generals and was able to withhold it or dispatch it as he saw fit.

Such tools owe a debt to an unlikely, though appropriate, source: the electronic mail database known as the Enron Corpus.

In October 2003, Andrew McCallum, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, read that the federal government had a collection of more than five million messages from the prosecution of Enron.

He bought a copy of the database for $10,000 and made it freely available to academic and corporate researchers. Since then, it has become the foundation of a wealth of new science — and its value has endured, since privacy constraints usually keep large collections of e-mail out of reach. “It’s made a massive difference in the research community,” Dr. McCallum said.

The Enron Corpus has led to a better understanding of how language is used and how social networks function, and it has improved efforts to uncover social groups based on e-mail communication.

Now artificial intelligence software has taken a seat at the negotiating table.

Two months ago, Autonomy, an e-discovery company based in Britain, worked with defense lawyers in a lawsuit brought against a large oil and gas company. The plaintiffs showed up during a pretrial negotiation with a list of words intended to be used to help select documents for use in the lawsuit.

“The plaintiffs asked for 500 keywords to search on,” said Mike Sullivan, chief executive of Autonomy Protect, the company’s e-discovery division.

In response, he said, the defense lawyers used those words to analyze their own documents during the negotiations, and those results helped them bargain more effectively, Mr. Sullivan said.

Some specialists acknowledge that the technology has limits. “The documents that the process kicks out still have to be read by someone,” said Herbert L. Roitblat of OrcaTec, a consulting firm in Altanta.

Quantifying the employment impact of these new technologies is difficult. Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

The computers seem to be good at their new jobs. Mr. Herr, the former chemical company lawyer, used e-discovery software to reanalyze work his company’s lawyers did in the 1980s and ’90s. His human colleagues had been only 60 percent accurate, he found.

“Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss,” he said.

3/4/2011 11:57 PM

1. Wealth gap: Super-Rich vs class wars, death of democracy

The gap: In one generation, America’s wealthiest 1% has exploded from 9% to 23% of America’s income, while middle-class income has stagnated. Even Buffett admits: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and winning.”

But my rich friend tells the real story, of their social disconnect. The rich just don’t care. They live in a different world, live by a self-centered code lacking a moral compass. The public welfare is honored only if supported by tax benefits.

3. Pentagon’s perpetual war machine vs America’s budget time bomb

The mathematics of our $75 trillion Social Security and Medicare deficits often seem insurmountable, but can be recalibrated. However, the war-loving mindset of America’s neocons — fueled by China’s military actions, the insatiable expansion of our military spending and a Pentagon prediction that global population growth — is putting more and more pressure on the world’s scarce resources, and will, in turn, increase global wars and the demand for more war spending, increasing the risk of sudden revolutions everywhere.

3/3/2011 2:58 AM

http://www.businessinsider.com/

These Are The Controversial Satellite Photos That Set Off Protests In Bahrain

http://www.theregister.co.uk/

Flash drives dangerously hard to purge of sensitive data

2/4/2011 12:08 PM

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org

“Freedom” vs. “Freedom”

"Freedom" means one thing to the West and another thing to Islam.

Americans must learn two concepts to better understand the political earthquake the United States is now pushing as President Obama gives his nod to "the Arab street," predominantly organized, it seems, by the Muslim Brotherhood, to force out an ally, Hosni Mubarak.

Many on the right have seen in the anti-Mubarak movement vindication of George W. Bush's Big Idea -- that ballot-box democracy would transform the umma into Jeffersonian, or, at least, pro-Western and anti-jihad republics. That this hasn't happened anywhere (and in spades) doesn't dampen their enthusiasm. In fact, citing Bush to bolster pro-"opposition" commentary is in vogue. Writing in the Washington Post, Elliott Abrams quotes Bush, circa 2003, as saying: "Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? ... Are they alone never to know freedom ...?" Jay Nordlinger at National Review quotes Bush, circa 2008, as saying: "The truth is that freedom is a universal right -- the Almighty's gift to every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth."

Such is "universalist" gospel. Universalists believe all peoples prefer freedom to its absence, which is probably true. But they also believe all peoples define "freedom" in the same way. Is that true?

The answer -- and first concept -- is no. The entry on freedom, or hurriyya, in the "Encyclopedia of Islam" describes a state of divine enthrallment that bears no resemblance to any Western understanding of freedom as predicated on the workings of the individual conscience. According to the encyclopedia, Islamic freedom is "the recognition of the essential relationship between God the master and His human slaves who are completely dependent on Him." Ibn Arabi, a Sufi scholar of note, is cited for having defined freedom as "being perfect slavery" to Allah. To put it another way, Islamic-style "freedom" is freedom from unbelief.

Suddenly, something seems very lost in Bush-speak translation. It has been from the start, which helps explain what's gone wrong in U.S. wars in the umma. Bringing Western-style "freedom" to the Islamic world may have resembled an idealistic extension of the civil rights crusade in the eyes of President Bush and his followers, but it was actually one big cultural misunderstanding.

At this point, I can imagine being quizzed on whether the Islamic definition of freedom applies outside of a strictly Islamic religious milieu. But judging by the most solid indicators we have -- polling data on Egyptian attitudes from Pew (2010) and University of Maryland/WorldOpinion.Org (2007) -- I would have to say that Egypt is a strictly Islamic religious milieu. These findings reveal a population steeped in the teachings and attitudes of Shariah (Islamic law).

For example, Pew tells us 84 percent of Egyptians favor the death penalty for leaving Islam; 95 percent say it's good for Islam to play a big role in politics. The Maryland/WorldOpinon poll shows that 74 percent of Egyptians favor "strict Shariah," and that 67 percent favor a "caliphate" uniting all of Islam. In free elections, such potential pluralities might well rate as "democratic" in terms of majority rule. But would the West consider them to be "democratic" in terms of individual rights?

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Byron York considered some of these same Egyptian data and found an apparent contradiction between the huge popularity of the death penalty for leaving Islam ("apostasy") on the one hand, and "freedom of religion" (90 percent) on the other. This would be a contradiction in the Western context. But we are not looking at a Western context. Which brings me to Concept Two.

Islam does not recognize as valid any religion but Islam. That means that what we in the West hear as "freedom of religion" becomes, in the Islamic context, freedom of Islam. Indeed, as Stephen Coughlin, the brilliant analyst of Shariah, has pointed out to me, citing both the Koran and quoting the classic Sunni law book “Reliance of the Traveler”, Judaism and Christianity "were abrogated by the universal message of Islam." That means overruled. Further, it is "unbelief (kufr)" -- grounds for the capital crime of apostasy -- "to hold that the remnant cults now bearing the names of formerly valid religions, such as "Christianity" or "Judaism," are acceptable to Allah Most High...."

Suddenly, a post-Mubarak Egypt run by the Muslim Brothers is not so difficult to imagine.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Diana West is a journalist and columnist whose writing appears in several high profile outlets. She also has a website: DianaWest.net.

http://www.newsweek.com/

The criminal-justice system in Pakistan is derelict. The country had 2,113 militant, insurgent, and sectarian terrorist attacks in 2010, which killed 2,913 people and injured 5,824. Scarcely anyone has been brought to justice in a system where suspects are sometimes prosecuted and convicted but most often get released on appeal. In Pearl’s case, the convicted Sheikh may go free on appeal. In a WikiLeaked cable from 2006 published by The Guardian, a Pakistani official assured U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker that Sheikh “would be executed as sentenced.” That hasn’t happened. And uncharged in the Pearl case is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the alleged 9/11 mastermind: the Pearl Project discovered that the FBI and CIA have matched the vein pattern on his right hand to the hand of the killer in the video of Pearl’s decapitation.

http://www.slate.com/id/2276583/

Obama’s post-New Year’s surge past a 50 percent approval rating — well ahead of both Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s comeback trajectories after their respective midterm shellackings — may have only just begun.

There was no drama to Obama’s address — just a unifying theme, at long last, as he reasserted the role of government in rebooting and rebuilding the country for a new century and putting Americans back to work. The president wisely left any theatrics to his adversaries, and, as always, they were happy to oblige.

What were they all afraid of? The answer cuts to the crux of the right’s plight less than three months after its supposed restoration. Having sold itself in 2010 as the uncompromising champion of Tea Party-fueled fiscal austerity, the enhanced G.O.P. caucus arrived in Washington in 2011 to discover that most Americans prefer compromise to confrontation and favor balanced budgets in name only.

A CNN poll this month found that just one American in five regards deficit reduction as pressing enough to justify cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Only one in four would choose balancing the budget if it meant reducing education programs. Indeed, a new Gallup poll reveals that there’s exactly one category of government spending that a majority of voters favors slicing — foreign aid (which amounts to some 1 percent of the budget). Incredible as it sounds, even current government outlays to science, the arts, farmers and antipoverty programs still enjoy 50 percent-plus support.

Like virtually every other week since the shellacking, the State of the Union week was another salutary one for Obama. But the state of the union itself could yet be in the hands of radicals whose eagerness to see the president fail is outstripped only by their zeal to make an ideological point, even if it forces America into default.

12/17/2010 1:14 PM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Fox News Viewers Are The Most Misinformed: Study

Fox News viewers are much more likely than others to believe false information about American politics, a new study concludes.

The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, judged how likely consumers of various news outlets and publications were to believe misinformation about a wide range of political issues. Overall, 90% of respondents said they felt they had heard false information being given to them during the 2010 election campaign. However, while consumers of just about every news outlet believed some information that was false, the study found that Fox News viewers, regardless of political information, were "significantly more likely" to believe that:

--Most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)

--Most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)

--The economy is getting worse (26 points)

--Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)

--The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)

--Their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)

Story continues below

--The auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)

--When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)

--And that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

In addition, the study said, increased viewership of Fox News led to increased belief in these false stories.

http://www.latimes.com

According to the survey, majorities in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria would favor changing current laws to allow stoning as a punishment for adultery, hand amputation for theft and death for those who convert from Islam to another religion. About 85% of Pakistani Muslims said they would support a law segregating men and women in the workplace.

Smart Republicans, Stupid Democrats

If Democrats are the big spenders, why do Republican states get the money?

By Shankar Vedantam

One of the co-chairmen of President Obama's bipartisan debt reduction council recently got in trouble for telling a women's advocacy group that Social Security had "reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits!"

If you guessed it was the Republican co-chairman and not the Democrat who said it, you would be right—it was former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson—but therein hangs a tale.

Republicans have a near monopoly on complaints about government spending. Dozens of new Tea Party candidates were elected to Congress on a promise to clean house. But data going back two decades—to stick to Simpson's crude metaphor—show the milk is mostly coming from Democratic states, and the sucking is being done by Republican states.

The "red" states up in arms about government spending receive the largest share of it. This is not a new finding, but research by economist Gary Richardson at the University of California-Irvine backs it up. Richardson provides insight into how the paradox came about and what it means for the future.

It isn't surprising that the more Republican a state leans, the more likely it is to be furious about government spending. But what is surprising is that states with the highest anti-spending sentiment appear to be the largest beneficiaries of government spending. Not only do red states swallow the lion's share of government spending, but Richardson found a linear relationship between the extent of GOP support in a state—and, by implication, the fervor of its anti-government sentiment—and the amount of federal largesse the state receives.

Alaska, home to Sarah Palin, and where two fiscally conservative Republican candidates for Senate recently mopped up 75 percent of the vote between them, received $1.64 in federal benefits for every $1 the state contributed to the national kitty. Massachusetts, Richardson found last year, received 82 cents for every dollar it paid into the national pool. No doubt as compensation, liberals in Massachusetts and other "blue" states also received lots of vitriol for being such out-of-control spenders.

The 28 states where George W. Bush won more than 50 percent of the vote in 2004 received an average of $1.32 for every dollar contributed. The 19 states where Bush received less than 50 percent of the vote collected 93 cents on the dollar.

"Voting Republican paid large dividends," Richardson wrote in a piece published in the Economist's Voice. "For each 1 percent of the population voting in favor of the Republican presidential candidate, the state received an additional 1.7 cents in benefits for each dollar in taxes."

No sane person would argue that every state should get precisely as much as it puts in. Different states will need larger or smaller benefits at different points of time. But Richardson's data don't just show that the redistribution of resources correlates with a state's political orientation. They show that the amount of money being collected from Democratic states and redirected to Republican states has systematically grown over time.

During the 1970s and 1980s—throughout the Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush administrations—there was no correlation between anti-spending sentiment and getting lots of federal money. The net return to states that voted for Republicans was relatively flat, meaning that "red" states didn't get most of the pie.

But that changed around 1994—after the last Republican takeover of Congress. Then, as now, Republicans rode to power on charges of government profligacy and promises to clean house. Then, as now, Republicans promised to lower taxes and to reduce government expenditure. Then, as now, Republicans warned the Democrat in the White House to come to his senses and move his administration to the right.

Buried in the fine print of Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America," Richardson found an income redistribution scheme. The proportion of government spending on groups that traditionally supported Democrats fell. The proportion of government income from groups that traditionally supported Democrats rose.

"Tax rates declined more for groups that tended to vote Republican. These groups include people with incomes in the upper tail of the distribution, such as small business owners, property owners, and investors accruing capital gains. … At the same time, expenditures fell more for programs directed toward people that tended to vote Democratic. These groups included welfare recipients, inner-city residents, and individuals in the lower tail of the income distribution."

Just as they did in the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans today are arguing not about whether to cut government expenditure, but where and how much to cut it. They are arguing not about whether to extend tax breaks to rich families, but just how rich you have to be to qualify for tax breaks. Smart observers think the Democrats in 2010 will repeat what they did in the 1990s—reduce expenditures on people who tend to vote Democratic and decrease taxes paid by people who tend to vote Republican.

There is certainly room for debate about Richardson's conclusions. Seth Giertz at the University of Nebraska argues, for example, that the correlation merely reflects the fact that we have a progressive tax system—blue states pay more into the kitty because blue states are richer than red states. We also don't know who in the red or blue states is paying or receiving the money. Is it possible that Republicans in blue states are paying most of the money, while Democrats in red states are receiving most of it?

In an e-mail, Richardson argued—and I agree with him—that the progressive-tax-code explanation is inadequate because the blue-state-red-state trend has unfolded even as the tax code has become less progressive. The tax code today barely distinguishes between the merely wealthy and the insanely rich—your local doctor faces the same taxation level as LeBron James. And the linear relationship between the degree of conservatism in a state and the amount of federal spending it receives contradicts the notion that conservatives in blue states might be footing the bill for liberals in red states. The more conservatives a state has, the less it pays. The more liberals a state has, the less it receives.

At a minimum, conservatives must agree there is a contradiction between being against government spending and dominating the politics of states that get the lion's share of federal spending. The beauty of the trick, from a psychological point of view, is not that Republicans serve their constituents. It is that Republicans have succeeded in making Democrats feel lousy for being out-of-touch elitists who can't be trusted to keep spending under control.

11/25/2010 4:38 AM

http://www.usatoday.com/

Future holds key to quantum physics

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

If Yogi Berra had pursued a career in quantum physics instead of baseball, you could imagine him saying something like, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

That's because for a lot of things in quantum physics (and baseball), exactly what happened in the past can be as much of a mystery as what will happen in the future. The future, though, may be literally telling us what is happening now, according to a real trailblazer in the admittedly spooky world of quantum physics

"One remarkable thing about quantum physics is that so many of the fundamental arguments are still with us today," says physicist Yakir Aharanov of Chapman University in Orange, Calif. Aharanov, in Washington D.C. to collect a National Medal of Science this past week, stopped by USA TODAY to talk about his latest work, plumbing the "deep questions" of modern physics.

Aharanov received the medal partly for his first foray into this arena of quantum physics in 1959, working with the physicist David Bohm, to describe what is now called the "Aharanov Bohm" effect. They showed that charged particles can have their trajectories, momentum and other characteristics affected by an electromagnetic field, even when the field is completely shielded from the particle.

This sort of "spooky action at a distance," that Einstein complained about in quantum mechanics — how can something affect something else without apparent connection — is one of those weird and disturbing (and completely, true, this is how stuff works on the quantum level) things about modern physics that has disturbed people for decades. "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it," Danish physicist Niels Bohr said.

"Einstein complained nature is being capricious," Aharanov says. "But nature is not being capricious. Nature is trying to tell us something, I think, about the way we think about the future."

Consider one of the simplest experiments that initially surprised physicists, the double-slit experiment. Physicists could fire tiny electrons from a hot wire towards a screen with two slits, and a second screen lined with electron detectors. Close the left slit, open both and then close the right one, and add up how many electrons smack into any one position on the second screen, for a minute each.

What happens? The first surprise is that the number of electrons recorded from when both slits are open won't equal the number you would get from adding the electrons that pass separately through the right and left slits. The second surprise is that when both slits are open, there are points on the second screen where fewer electrons land than when just one is open. They actually land in an interference pattern indicating that electrons separated by slits are somehow interacting. "Somehow each electron knows that both slits are open," writes the physicist Sandu Popescu of the United Kingdom's University of Bristol in a March Nature Physics article. "But how does an electron passing through one slit know if the other slit is open or not?"

Quantum mechanics explains this by throwing away certainty, and saying on the atomic, or sub-atomic level, objects behave in ways determined purely by their probability of arriving somewhere else, suggesting in a real sense that a particle behaves as if following paths through both slits and then "reincarnates," in Popescu's words, as an undivided particle when it strikes the second screen. Because the electron has been effectively in two places at once as it traveled through the two slits, the electrons could interfere with each other. "It is one of the great mysteries of physics," Popescu concludes.

The Aharanov Bohm effect further scrambles the picture. Stick a shielded electromagnet in between the slits and the electrons fly through the slits differently than they would otherwise, even though the electrons are shielded from the magnetic field. Well, that's just spooky. But physicists can calculate the impact of these spooky effects on the odds of the electrons ending up in their various places, and chalk it all up to quantum weirdness, if they like. A number of experiments even take advantage of such effects for "quantum cryptography" experiments that transmit secure messages across great distances.

But in the November Physics Today, Aharanov and colleagues lay out a new way of looking at quantum weirdness. Pointing to a series of experimental successes based on their predictions in amplifying the intrinsic magnetism, or "spin," of atomic particles, they suggest, "the physicists' notion of time needs to be revisited."

What is really happening in the double-slit experiment, they say, and really wherever atomic particles are interacting with each other (that is to say, everywhere), is not that the two electrons are in two places at once. Instead, time is running both forward, from the electron leaving the wire, and backward, from its final location on the second screen. Where time meets, running backwards and forwards, determines which slit the electron chooses. The future is affecting the past, all the time, on the quantum level. (Sadly our brains don't work on the quantum level, although I really don't want to know what I will look like in another 10 years.)

Thinking about quantum effects this way doesn't change the outcome of past experiments. But it allows physicists to effectively select the future they want their particles to have, within limits, amplifying the results for a desired outcome. A 2008 Science magazine report, for example, used this future selecting technique, called "weak measurement," to amplify the deflection of a laser path by a factor of 10,000.

Who cares? Well, the next revolution in electronics is expected to be in "spintronics," using the intrinsic magnetism of atoms to store information and energy much more efficiently than "electronic" devices. If you want your spintronic ear-bud phone to pick up your calls, amplification might come in handy. "Weak measurement" is the second advance that President Obama mentioned when presenting Aharanov with his medal last week.

One of Aharanov's former students, Jonathan Oppenheim of the United Kingdom's University of Cambridge, has a study in the current Science magazine looking at the limits of "spooky action at a distance," in quantum mechanics. Aharanov says physicists have only started to plumb the possibilities of taking advantage of these so-called "non-local" effects. "I really believe we are close to a second revolution in physics as big as the one a century ago," he says. "I feel we are only beginning to free existing quantum theory and to do so, we must think of time in another way."

The key to the future is the future, in other words, and it is coming towards us fast.

Check out all the links in this story!

http://www.ft.com/

A presidency heading for a fiscal train wreck

By Nouriel Roubini

Published: October 28 2010 20:48 | Last updated: October 28 2010 20:48

What has been the fiscal performance of President Barack Obama? He inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, as well as a budget deficit that – after much needed bail-outs and a series of reckless tax cuts – was already close to $1,000bn. His stimulus package, together with a backstop of the financial system, low rates and quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve, prevented another depression. Mr Obama also deserves credit that the US, alone among advanced economies, currently supports a “growth now”, rather than an “austerity now” path.

But this is but one half of the picture; we must also judge his first two years on his ability to anticipate what the economy will need tomorrow. Here the picture is much less positive. Given the likely path of fiscal policy after next Tuesday’s election – with the expiration of existing stimulus and transfer payments, and even with most of the 2001-03 tax cuts being kept – the US economy will soon experience serious fiscal drag just when it needs a further boost. Problematically, the administration’s failures leave it relying on the Fed, which is bent on further QE, likely to be announced next Wednesday. But studies show this will have little effect on US growth in 2011, so fiscal policy should be doing some of the lifting to prevent a double dip recession.

In an ideal world Mr Obama would also have been able to move towards reforming and reducing entitlement spending, with commitments to measures that could be phased in over the next few years, therefore avoiding short-term fiscal pain. He would also have committed to increase, gradually over the next few years, less distortionary taxes such as a VAT and a carbon tax. This would have reduced the fiscal deficit, and created a climate in which no investor would worry about additional stimulus.

Sadly, this has not happened. In fact the opposite will now take place. The term stimulus is already a dirty word, even within the Obama administration. After the Republicans make significant electoral gains further stimulus is even less likely. Medium-term consolidation, meanwhile, will be all but impossible as the 2012 presidential election begins to loom large.

In truth the only window of opportunity is 2011. Here the president deserves credit for setting up a bipartisan debt commission, which is most likely to propose a sensible combination of entitlement spending cuts and increases in taxes. But sadly the chance that these recommendations will be implemented in 2011 is close to zero. Republicans will veto any tax increase, while Democrats will resist unpopular entitlement reform.

The upshot is that the current gridlock in Congress will soon get much worse. Of course, Mr Obama cannot entirely be blamed for his limited progress, when the Republicans take that Leninist approach of “the worse the better”, and offer no co-operation on any issue. That they now see Mr Obama as a one-term president will soon mean the worst open warfare inside the Beltway in 30 years.

The coming stalemate will only be made worse by the lack of a reason to act on the deficit. The bond vigilantes are asleep, while borrowing rates remain unusually low. Near zero rates will continue as long as growth and inflation are low (and getting lower) and repeated bouts of global risk aversion – as with this spring’s Greek crisis – will push more investors to safe dollars and US debt. China’s massive interventions to stop renminbi appreciation will mean purchasing yet more treasuries too. In short, kicking the can down the road will be the political path of least resistance.

The risk, however, is that something on the fiscal side will snap, and the bond vigilantes will wake up. The trigger could be a debt rollover crisis in a major US state government, or perhaps even the realisation that congressional gridlock means bipartisan solutions to our medium-term fiscal crisis is mission impossible. Only then will our politicians suddenly remember that, on top of our federal debt, the US suffers from unfunded social security and Medicare liabilities, state and local government debt, and public pension bills that add up to many multiples of US GDP.

A bond market shock is thus the only thing likely to break the impasse. Mr Obama may take some comfort from the fact that the worst of the coming fiscal train wreck will be prevented by the Fed’s easing. But the risk is he will then preside not over a bout of inflation but a Japanese style stagnation, where growth is barely positive, and deflationary pressures and high unemployment linger.

The Obama administration did the right thing early, and avoided another depression. He is still doing the right thing now in pointing out the risks of early austerity. And he is limited by an unco-operative Republican party trapped in a belief in voodoo economics, the economic equivalent of creationism. Even so, he and his party have been unwilling to tackle long-term entitlement spending. Two years in, and this means the US remains on an unsustainable fiscal course.

The result will soon be the worst of all worlds: neither short-term stimulus nor medium-term fiscal sustainability. Fiscally the only light at the end of the tunnel may be that which causes the upcoming crisis. With two years of gridlock in prospect, it will fall to the next president in 2013 – whoever he or she may be – to start fixing America’s fiscal mess. Whether that is Mr Obama or not, that he may leave this challenge may become the worst of his legacy.

The writer is chairman of Roubini Global Economics, Professor at the Stern School of Business, NYU and co-author of Crisis Economics

10/22/2010 4:33 PM

http://www.catholicnews.com/

In his written submission, Archbishop Raboula Beylouni, who works in the Syrian Catholic curia in Lebanon, wrote that formal Catholic-Muslim dialogues are "difficult and often ineffective," partially because the Quran tells Muslims they belong to "the only true and complete religion."

Muslims, he said, come "to dialogue with a sense of superiority and with the certitude of being victorious."

In addition, the archbishop said, "The Quran allows the Muslim to hide the truth from the Christian and to speak and act contrary to how he thinks and believes."

Islam does not recognize the equality of men and women and does not recognize the right of religious freedom, he also wrote.

http://money.usnews.com

Politicians repeatedly misunderstand why voters send them to Washington. Every time there's a change in the status quo, the new blood concludes that the electorate has issued a "mandate" and demanded sweeping change. But voters don't always want sweeping change. Mostly, they want the things that aren't working right to work better. Still, the empowered newcomers seize the moment to institutionalize as much of their ideological agenda as possible. Time and again, the overreach turns off voters, and they seek change all over again.

10/16/2010 6:31 PM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

A study from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that the public's view of Islam has worsened. The study found that 30% have a favorable view of Islam, while 38% hold an unfavorable view. Gallup polling reveals that Americans were asked what they admire about the Muslim world, 57% responded "nothing" or "I don't know."" Despite major polling by Gallup and Pew that show that American Muslims are well integrated economically and politically, a January 2010 Gallup Center for Muslim Studies report found that 43% admit to feeling at least "a little" prejudice toward Muslims -- more than twice the number who say the same about Christians, Jews, and Buddhists.

These opinions existed but were less visible until the debates in New York over the proposed Islamic Center reached a high pitch. When the University of North Carolina assigned reading the Qur'an to incoming freshman, O'Reilly compared the assignment to having students read Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1941. More recently, Newt Gingrich compared Muslim Americans who want to build the Islamic center in New York to Nazis who would erect a sign next to Holocaust museum. Gingrich has also received a standing ovation earlier this year at the Values Voter Summit when he called for a "federal law that says Shariah law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States." Oklahoma State Rep. Rex Duncan also expects that his "Save our State" referendum to keep Islamic law out of state courts to pass easily on Election Day. The Center for Security Policy released a 177-page report last month called "Shariah: The Threat to America" and says Islamic Law is infiltrating American society. The report cites examples such as Muslims building mosques and using Islamic financing to buy homes.

10/14/2010 9:39 AM

http://www.msnbc.msn.com

Back surgery may backfire on patients in pain

Patients who had spinal fusion were less likely to return to work and needed more opiates, study says

Adapted from Dr. Peter Hammond's book: Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat

Islam is not a religion, nor is it a cult. In its fullest form, it is a
complete, total, 100% system of life.

Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military
components. The religious component is a beard for all of the other
components.

Islamization begins when there are sufficient Muslims in a country to
agitate for their religious privileges.

When politically correct, tolerant, and culturally diverse societies
agree to Muslim demands for their religious privileges, some of the
other components tend to creep in as well.

Here's how it works:

As long as the Muslim population remains around or under 2% in any
given country, they will be for the most part be regarded as a peace-loving
minority, and not as a threat to other citizens. This is the case in:

United States -- Muslim 0.6%
Australia -- Muslim 1.5%
Canada -- Muslim 1.9%
China -- Muslim 1.8%
Italy -- Muslim 1.5%
Norway -- Muslim 1.8%

At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and
disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from the jails and among
street gangs. This is happening in:

Denmark -- Muslim 2%
Germany -- Muslim 3.7%
United Kingdom -- Muslim 2.7%
Spain -- Muslim 4%
Thailand -- Muslim 4.6%

From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to
their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the
introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby
securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure
on supermarket chains to feature halal on their shelves -- along with
threats for failure to comply. This is occurring in:

France -- Muslim 8%
Philippines -- 5%
Sweden -- Muslim 5%
Switzerland -- Muslim 4.3%
The Netherlands -- Muslim 5.5%
Trinidad & Tobago -- Muslim 5.8%

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them
to rule themselves (within their ghettos) under Sharia, the Islamic Law.
The ultimate goal of Islamists is to establish Sharia law over the
entire world.

When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase
lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions. In Paris , we
are already seeing car-burnings. Any non-Muslim action offends Islam and
results in uprisings and threats, such as in Amsterdam, with opposition
to Mohammed cartoons and films about Islam. Such tensions are seen
daily, particularly in Muslim sections in:

Guyana -- Muslim 10%
India -- Muslim 13.4%
Israel -- Muslim 16%
Kenya -- Muslim 10%
Russia -- Muslim 15%

After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad
militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian
churches and Jewish synagogues, such as in:

Ethiopia -- Muslim 32.8%

At 40%, nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and
ongoing militia warfare, such as in:

Bosnia -- Muslim 40%
Chad -- Muslim 53.1%
Lebanon -- Muslim 59.7%

From 60%, nations experience unfettered persecution of non-believers of
all other religions (including non-conforming Muslims), sporadic ethnic
cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon, and Jizya, the tax
placed on infidels, such as in:

Albania -- Muslim 70%
Malaysia -- Muslim 60.4%
Qatar -- Muslim 77.5%
Sudan -- Muslim 70%

After 80%, expect daily intimidation and violent jihad, some State-run
ethnic cleansing, and even some genocide, as these nations drive out
the infidels, and move toward 100% Muslim, such as has been experienced and in
some ways is on-going in:

Bangladesh -- Muslim 83%
Egypt -- Muslim 90%
Gaza -- Muslim 98.7%
Indonesia -- Muslim 86.1%
Iran -- Muslim 98%
Iraq -- Muslim 97%
Jordan -- Muslim 92%
Morocco -- Muslim 98.7%
Pakistan -- Muslim 97%
Palestine -- Muslim 99%
Syria -- Muslim 90%
Tajikistan -- Muslim 90%
Turkey -- Muslim 99.8%
United Arab Emirates -- Muslim 96%

100% will usher in the peace of 'Dar-es-Salaam' -- the Islamic House of
Peace. Here there's supposed to be peace, because everybody is a Muslim, the
Madrasses are the only schools, and the Koran is the only word, such as in:

Afghanistan -- Muslim 100%
Saudi Arabia -- Muslim 100%
Somalia -- Muslim 100%
Yemen -- Muslim 100%

Unfortunately, peace is never achieved, as in these 100% states the
most radical Muslims intimidate and spew hatred, and satisfy their blood lust by
killing less radical Muslims, for a variety of reasons.

'Before I was nine, I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me
against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family
against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; the tribe
against the world, and all of us against the infidel. -- Leon Uris, 'The Haj'

It is important to understand that in some countries, with well under
100% Muslim populations, such as France, the minority Muslim populations
live in ghettos, within which they are 100% Muslim, and within which
they live by Sharia Law. The national police do not even enter these
ghettos. There are no national courts, nor schools, nor non-Muslim
religious facilities. In such situations, Muslims do not integrate into the
community at large. The children attend madrasses. They learn only
the Koran. To even associate with an infidel is a crime punishable with
death. Therefore, in some areas of certain nations, Muslim Imams and
extremists exercise more power than the national average would indicate.

Today's 1.5 billion Muslims make up 22% of the world's population. But
their birth rates dwarf the birth rates of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews,
and all other believers. Muslims will exceed 50% of the world's population by
the end of this century.

http://www.businessinsider.com

Corporate insiders are bailing out of the U.S. stock market at a very alarming rate.

In particular, someone is making some incredibly large bets that the S&P 500 is going to absolutely tank during the month of October.

Corporate insiders are getting out of the U.S. stock market at an absolutely blinding pace. It is being reported that the ratio of corporate insider selling to corporate insider buying last week was 1,411 to 1, and this week the ratio has soared even higher and is at 2,341 to 1.

(info received in an eMail - I lost the sender link)

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE
BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world's population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1988 - Najib Mahfooz

Peace:
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1990 - Elias James Corey
1994 - Yaser Arafat:
1999 - Ahmed Zewai

Economics:
(zero)

Physics:
(zero)

Medicine:
1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
1998 - Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is FOURTEEN
MILLION or about 0.02% of the world's population. They have received the
following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1972 - William Howard Stein
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1989 - Sidney Altman
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
1995 - Martin Perl
2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics:
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Robert Fogel

Medicine:
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1995 - Edward B. Lewis
1996- Lu RoseIacovino

TOTAL: 129!

http://www.citizenwarrior.com

Therefore, based on Islam's most holy book, Islam is more political (61%) than religious (39%).

There are 245 verses in the Quran that could be considered "positive verses" about non-Muslims. Every single one of those verses have been abrogated by later, negative verses about non-Muslims. Not one positive verse about non-Muslims is left.

In contrast, there are 527 verses of intolerance toward non-Muslims, and 109 verses specifically advocating violence towards non-Muslims. Not one of these verses has been abrogated.

My conclusion: Non-Muslims who like Islam don't know much about it.

10/1/2010 11:37 PM

http://bigthink.com/ideas/24292

The Enormous Gap Between The Rich and the Rest of Us

In a recent post, I argued that the tax burden on the rich is not as great as some would have you believe. It’s not that there is anything wrong with being rich. After all, the idea that with hard work and little luck any of us could make it rich is an integral part of the American Dream. But it’s nevertheless bizarre to imagine that the rich are really the ones are suffering—not when the rest of us have been doing so much worse.

As I’ve written, according to the latest census reports, 1 in 7 Americans—and 1 in 5 American children—lives in poverty. That’s more than at any time in the last fifteen years. As Timothy Noah writes, while most Americans think there’s too much income inequality in the U.S., most have no real idea just how much there wide the gap between the rich and the poor has become. As Noah explains in his excellent series on income inequality in the U.S., over that time the rich have gotten steadily richer. As Noah points out, between 1980 and 2005 an incredible 80% of our the nation’s growth went to the richest 1% of the population, so that now that 1% makes around 18% our national income. Far from suffering, the rich are doing better than ever before.

But, as Matt Yglesias says, the real story may be not how rich the rich have become, but how little the rest of us have. While the top 20% own about 85% of our country’s total wealth, the poorest 40% of us own just 0.3% of the country’s wealth. That means the richest fifth of Americans have around 280 times as much money as the poorest two-fifths combined. So maybe we should worry less about how the rich and think a little more about how ordinary Americans are doing.

9/29/2010 11:21 AM

http://articles.latimes.com

It's time to fight back against death threats by Islamic extremists
A federal law is needed to cover threats against free-speech rights. Across media and geographies, Islamic extremists are increasingly using intimidation to stifle free expression.

September 27, 2010|By Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Daniel Huff

Earlier this year, after Comedy Central altered an episode of "South Park" that had prompted threats because of the way it depicted Islam's prophet Muhammad, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris proposed an "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day." The idea was, as she put it, to stand up for the 1st Amendment and "water down the pool of targets" for extremists.

The proposal got Norris targeted for assassination by radical Yemeni American cleric Anwar Awlaki, who has been linked to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight and also to several of the 9/11 hijackers. This month, after warnings from the FBI, Norris went into hiding. The Seattle Weekly said that Norris was "moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity."

It's time for free-speech advocates to take a page from the abortion rights movement's playbook. In the 1990s, abortion providers faced the same sort of intimidation tactics and did not succumb. Instead, they lobbied for a federal law making it a crime to threaten people exercising reproductive rights and permitting victims to sue for damages. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE, passed in 1994 by solid bipartisan margins. A similar act is needed to cover threats against free-speech rights.

A federal law would do two things. First, it would deter violent tactics, by focusing national attention on the problem and invoking the formidable enforcement apparatus of the federal government. Second, its civil damages provision would empower victims of intimidation to act as private attorneys general to defend their rights.

Such an act is overdue. Across media and geographies, Islamic extremists are increasingly using intimidation to stifle free expression.

The "South Park" incident neatly illustrates the benefits. On April 15, following the first of a two-part episode mocking Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad, RevolutionMuslim.com announced that "[w]e have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh." The "warning" included the names, photos and work address of "South Park's" creators, a graphic image of Van Gogh's mutilated body and pictures of other targets of Muslim extremists. Overlaying this was audio of Awlaki preaching about assassinating anyone who defamed the prophet. Panicked, Comedy Central heavily censored the episode.

This rather obvious threat could not be prosecuted. New York Police Department officials explained it did not rise to a crime. Were the FACE Act applicable here, a civil suit would have been available, and precedent suggests it would have been successful.

In 2002, on very similar facts, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a civil award to abortion doctors who sued using the FACE Act. A fringe antiabortion group, ACLA, had in various public venues displayed "Wanted"-style posters bearing the names, photos and addresses of doctors who performed abortions. Their names were also posted on the Internet alongside a list of wounded and murdered doctors whose names were struck through. The 9th Circuit held that ACLA's activities constituted true threats unprotected by the 1st Amendment.

If we leave our artists, activists and thinkers alone to weather the assault, they will succumb and we will all suffer the consequences.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, is a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Nomad: From Islam to America." Daniel Huff is director of the Middle East Forum's Legal Project.

http://www.slate.com/id/2267685/

So who are these people and what do they want from us? A series of polls, as well as be-ins like Glenn Beck's Washington rally last month, have given us a picture of a movement predominated by middle-class, middle-aged white men angry about the expansion of government and hostile to societal change. But that profile could accurately describe the past several right-wing insurgencies, from the California tax revolt of the late 1970s to the Contract with America of 1994—not to mention the very Republican establishment that the Tea Party positions itself against. What's new and most distinctive about the Tea Party is its streak of anarchism—its antagonism toward any authority, its belligerent style of self-expression, and its lack of any coherent program or alternative to the policies it condemns.

In this sense, you might think of the Tea Party as the Right's version of the 1960s New Left. It's an unorganized and unorganizable community of people coming together to assert their individualism and subvert the established order. But where the New Left was young and looked forward to a new Aquarian age, the Tea Party is old and looks backward to a capitalist-constitutionalist paradise that, needless to say, never existed. The strongest note in its tannic brew is nostalgia. Tea Partiers are constantly talking about "restoring honor," getting back to America's roots, and "taking back" their country.

Other than nostalgia, the strongest emotion at Tea Parties is resentment, defined as placing blame for one's woes on those either above or below you in the social hierarchy. This finds expression in hostility toward a variety of elites: the "liberal" media, "career" politicians, "so-called" experts, and sometimes even the hoariest of populist targets, Wall Street bankers. These groups stand accused of promoting the interests of the poor, minorities and immigrants—or in the case of the financiers, the very rich—against those of hard-working, middle-class taxpayers. Beck and Sarah Palin, the fun couple that headlines the Tea Party, express their feelings of victimization at the hands of their betters and lessers on a daily basis—he in his histrionic vein, she in her preening one. Both hedge their resentment in a careful way that often walks the line of bigotry but seldom states it directly.

Nostalgia, resentment, and reality-denial are all expressions of the same underlying anxiety about losing one's place in the country or of losing control of it to someone else. When you look at the surveys, the Tea Partiers are not primarily the victims of economic transformation, but rather people whose position is threatened by social change. Because racial bias is unacceptable both in American political culture and in an individualist ideology, Tea Partiers don't say directly what Pat Buchanan used to: that moving from a predominantly white Christian nation to a majority nonwhite one is a bad thing and should be stopped. Instead, their resistance finds sublimated expression through their reality distortion field: Beck's claim that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred of white people"' or Dinesh D'Souza's Newt-endorsed theory that Obama is a Kenyan Mau Mau in mufti, or the prevalent Tea Party opinion that policies like Obamacare and the stimulus are merely mechanisms for transferring income from the middle class to the minority poor and illegal immigrants—i.e., socialism. Of no previous movement has Richard Hofstadter's depiction of populism as driven by "status anxiety" been so apt.

As mobs go, Republicans will find this one will be especially hard to lead, pacify, or dispel. The Tea Party is fundamentally about venting anger at change it is doesn't like, not about fixing what's broken. Turn the movement's rage into a political program and you've already betrayed it.

http://www.slate.com/id/2266154/

IMF fears 'social explosion' from world jobs crisis

America and Europe face the worst jobs crisis since the 1930s and risk "an explosion of social unrest" unless they tread carefully, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

"Long-term unemployment is alarmingly high: in the US, half the unemployed have been out of work for over six months, something we have not seen since the Great Depression," he said.

Spain has seen the biggest shock, with unemployment near 20pc. Britain's rate has risen from 5.3pc to 7.8pc over the last two years, a slightly better record than the OECD average. This contrasts with the 1970s and early 1980s when Britain was notoriously worse. UK jobless today totals 2.48m.

Mr Blanchard called for extra monetary stimulus as the first line of defence if "downside risks to growth materialise", but said authorities should not rule out another fiscal boost, despite debt worries. "If fiscal stimulus helps avoid structural unemployment, it may actually pay for itself," he said.

"Most advanced countries should not tighten fiscal policies before 2011: tightening sooner could undermine recovery," said the report, rebuking Britain's Coalition, Germany's austerity hawks, and US Republicans. Under French socialist Strauss-Kahn, the IMF has assumed a Keynesian flavour.

The report skirts the contentious issue of whether globalisation lets companies engage in "labour arbitrage", locating plant in low-wage economies such as China to ship products back to the West. Nor does it grapple with the trade distortions caused by China's currency policy, except to call on "surplus countries" to play their part in rebalancing.

The IMF said there may be a link between rising inequality within Western economies and deflating demand.

Historians say the last time that the wealth gap reached such skewed extremes was in 1928-1929. Some argue that wealth concentration may cause investment to outstrip demand, leading to over-capacity. This can trap the world in a slump.

Free Exercise of Religion? No, Thanks.

The taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.

By Christopher Hitchens

Take an example close at hand, the absurdly named Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. More usually known as the Mormon church, it can boast Glenn Beck as one of its recruits. He has recently won much cheap publicity for scheduling a rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. But on the day on which the original rally occurred in 1963, the Mormon church had not yet gotten around to recognizing black people as fully human or as eligible for full membership. (Its leadership subsequently underwent a "revelation" allowing a change on this point, but not until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.) This opportunism closely shadowed an earlier adjustment of Mormon dogma, abandoning its historic and violent attachment to polygamy. Without that doctrinal change, the state of Utah was firmly told that it could not be part of the Union. More recently, Gov. Mitt Romney had to assure voters that he did not regard the prophet, or head of the Mormon church, as having ultimate moral and spiritual authority on all matters. Nothing, he swore, could override the U.S. Constitution. Thus, to the extent that we view latter-day saints as acceptable, and agree to overlook their other quaint and weird beliefs, it is to the extent that we have decidedly limited them in the free exercise of their religion.

One could cite some other examples, such as those Christian sects that disapprove of the practice of medicine. Their adult members are generally allowed to die while uttering religious incantations and waving away the physician, but, in many states, if they apply this faith to their children—a crucial element in the "free exercise" of religion—they can be taken straight to court. Not only that, they can find themselves subject to general disapproval and condemnation.

It was probably the latter consideration that helped impel the majority of American Orthodox Jews to give up the practice of metzitzah b'peh, a radical form of male circumcision that is topped off, if you will forgive the expression, by the sucking of the infant's penis by the rabbi or mohel so as to remove any remaining blood or debris. A few tiny sects still cling to this disgusting ritual, which in New York a few years ago led to a small but deadly outbreak of herpes among recently circumcised babies. On that occasion, despite calls for a ban on the practice from many Jewish doctors, the vastly overrated Mayor Michael Bloomberg chose an election year to say that such "free exercise" should not be interfered with.

We talk now as if it was ridiculous ever to suspect Roman Catholics of anything but the highest motives, yet by the time John F. Kennedy was breaking the unspoken taboo on the election of a Catholic as president, the Vatican had just begun to consider making public atonement for centuries of Jew-hatred and a more recent sympathy for fascism. Even today, many lay Catholics are appalled at the Vatican's protection of men who are sought for questioning in one of the gravest of all crimes: the organized rape of children. It is generally agreed that the church's behavior and autonomy need to be modified to take account both of American law and American moral outrage. So much for the naive invocation of "free exercise."

One could easily go on. The Church of Scientology, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, and the Ku Klux Klan are all faith-based organizations and are all entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. But they are also all subject to a complex of statutes governing tax-exemption, fraud, racism, and violence, to the point where "free exercise" in the third case has—by means of federal law enforcement and stern public disapproval—been reduced to a vestige of its former self.

Now to Islam. It is, first, a religion that makes very large claims for itself, purporting to be the last and final word of God and expressing an ambition to become the world's only religion. Some of its adherents follow or advocate the practice of plural marriage, forced marriage, female circumcision, compulsory veiling of women, and censorship of non-Muslim magazines and media. Islam's teachings generally exhibit suspicion of the very idea of church-state separation. Other teachings, depending on context, can be held to exhibit a very strong dislike of other religions, as well as of heretical forms of Islam. Muslims in America, including members of the armed forces, have already been found willing to respond to orders issued by foreign terrorist organizations. Most disturbingly, no authority within the faith appears to have the power to rule decisively that such practices, or such teachings, or such actions, are definitely and utterly in conflict with the precepts of the religion itself.

Reactions from even "moderate" Muslims to criticism are not uniformly reassuring. "Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s," Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like. What is needed from the supporters of this very confident faith is more self-criticism and less self-pity and self-righteousness.

Those who wish that there would be no mosques in America have already lost the argument: Globalization, no less than the promise of American liberty, mandates that the United States will have a Muslim population of some size. The only question, then, is what kind, or rather kinds, of Islam it will follow. There's an excellent chance of a healthy pluralist outcome, but it's very unlikely that this can happen unless, as with their predecessors on these shores, Muslims are compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are exclusive to themselves. The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization. Those who pretend that we can skip this stage in the present case are deluding themselves and asking for trouble not just in the future but in the immediate present.

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews

'Islamization' of Paris a Warning to the West

PARIS - Friday in Paris. A hidden camera shows streets blocked by huge crowds of Muslim worshippers and enforced by a private security force.

This is all illegal in France: the public worship, the blocked streets, and the private security. But the police have been ordered not to intervene.

It shows that even though some in the French government want to get tough with Muslims and ban the burqa, other parts of the French government continue to give Islam a privileged status.

An ordinary French citizen who has been watching the Islamization of Paris decided that the world needed to see what was happening to his city. He used a hidden camera to start posting videos on YouTube. His life has been threatened and so he uses the alias of "Maxime Lepante. "

Lepante's View

His camera shows that Muslims "are blocking the streets with barriers. They are praying on the ground. And the inhabitants of this district cannot leave their homes, nor go into their homes during those prayers."

"The Muslims taking over those streets do not have any authorization. They do not go to the police headquarters, so it's completely illegal," he says.

The Muslims in the street have been granted unofficial rights that no Christian group is likely to get under France's Laicite', or secularism law.

"It says people have the right to share any belief they want, any religion," Lepante explained. "But they have to practice at home or in the mosque, synagogues, churches and so on."

Some say Muslims must pray in the street because they need a larger mosque. But Lepante has observed cars coming from other parts of Paris, and he believes it is a weekly display of growing Muslim power.

"They are coming there to show that they can take over some French streets to show that they can conquer a part of the French territory," he said.

http://www.businessinsider.com/

2. What We Learned and Didn’t Learn From the Great Depression of the 1930s

This time around, policymakers had knowledge their counterparts didn’t have in 1929; they knew they could avoid immediate financial calamity by flooding the economy with money. But, paradoxically, averting another Great Depression-like calamity removed political pressure for more fundamental reform. We’re left instead with a long and seemingly endless Great Jobs Recession.

THE Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity. In the 1930s, the American economy was completely restructured. New Deal measures — Social Security, a 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half overtime, unemployment insurance, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage — leveled the playing field.

In the decades after World War II, legislation like the G.I. Bill, a vast expansion of public higher education and civil rights and voting rights laws further reduced economic inequality. Much of this was paid for with a 70 percent to 90 percent marginal income tax on the highest incomes. And as America’s middle class shared more of the economy’s gains, it was able to buy more of the goods and services the economy could provide. The result: rapid growth and more jobs.

By contrast, little has been done since 2008 to widen the circle of prosperity. Health-care reform is an important step forward but it’s not nearly enough.

http://blogs.alternet.org

But divide and rule cannot be our only policy. We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.

Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington's most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it—and to rid ourselves of the One World illusion.

http://www.salon.com/

Other highlights: Marianne claims, among other things, that Gingrich started dating his first wife, his high school geometry teacher, when he was 16 -- not 18, as he has said.

Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.

“The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.”

-phoenixtx (aka vrayz)

Digg.com is the powerhouse of social media websites. It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site. It reached one million users in 2007 and likely has more than tripled that by this point. Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”

The concept behind the site is simple. Submitted webpages (news, videos, or images) can be voted up (digging) or down (burying) by each user, sort of a democracy in the internet model. If an article gets enough diggs, it leaves the upcoming section and reaches the front page where most users spend their time, and can generate thousands of page views.

This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction. This was evident with the daily spamming of the upcoming Political section with white supremacist material from the British National Party (articles which rarely reached the front page). The inverse of this effect is more devastating however. Bury brigades could effectively remove stories from the upcoming sections by collectively burying them.

One bury brigade in particular is a conservative group that has become so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours, regardless of subject material. Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content). This group is known as the Digg “Patriots”.

A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots (DP), and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites. DP was founded on 21 May 2009. Since then, over 40,000 posts have been logged at a steady rate of around 3000-4000 per month. The “Patriots” Network on coRank is a tool to submit Diggs to a group list as opposed to sending an e-mail every time. It also has some tools that make submitting to the list as easy as clicking on a bookmark.

The ring leader of the group is Bettverboten, who issues multiple digg and bury orders everyday. She is a Digg power user who has dugg 70,000 articles and has 1500 submits of her own (18% have gone popular) in one short year on the site. She was previously known as Lizbett before her lifetime ban for offensive and inappropriate comments, and has two sleeper accounts waiting if she gets banned again at loquaciouslola and MsBoop. She is also on Twitter, although her primary focus is Digg, where she has acquired a huge following of power users who are likely unaware that she is gaming the system, and even calling to bury some of her mutuals.

The other primary members responsible for cheating are CaptCarrot, ChronicColonic, emmersonbiggins (rjwusa), SadLisa (mollydog), Janinco, allisonrose870, asami21, Benthedog, JeremiahLaments (RightWingAttila), libertyalways, phoenixtx, pray4sneaux, quirkopatra, raggsat98, Ramfire98, and ThePartystar. Digg and bury orders are issued multiple times everyday, with most of the members blindly following without question.

The list above is truncated from the larger membership, some of which are inactive. Not every member listed has admitted to violating the Digg Terms of Service in public either, although most are guilty of some abuse or another. This group is the heart of a complicated web on various networks, including Twitter, Propeller, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and Facebook, all dedicated to ramming an extreme right wing viewpoint down the throats of those communities and censoring opposing viewpoints. This includes such means as cyber stalking, bullying, and terror, as exposed on YouTube yesterday (something not one of the DP group condemned). Not surprisingly, there is also a heavy contingent active on the ultraconservative FreeRepublic.

There are a few differences of opinion within DP, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective. They hate Obama. They hate progressives. They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it. They hate the secular nature of our nation. They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. They hate abortion rights. They hate public schools and really hate higher education. They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya. They just love to hate.

Although this is a fringe group of Teabagging wingnuts, many well established figures in the Digg community are also present, such as BalancingAct, EMFK, Janinco, mikeinto, and spindig. 10 members have been part of Digg since 2005-2006, with 43 having their current account there for over 2 years. 19 are in the top 500 all time users as ranked by Social Blade, including 3 in the top 100. They have submitted over 30,000 articles, and dugg over 1,000,000 submits collectively. They regularly front page material, yet have some paranoid delusion that the Digg admins are part of some conspiracy to censor them, not once recognizing the blatant hypocrisy of their organized censorship doing that very thing.

8/3/2010 10:31 AM

http://skymania.com/wp/2009/09/record-sunstorm-will-spell-disaster.html

A spectacular explosion on the Sun that rocked the Earth 150 years ago this week could threaten the lives of tens of millions of people if it happened again today.

The solar storm in September 1859 gave the Earth the mother of all buffetings. A worldwide aurora turned night into day.

Telegraph operators were knocked out or shocked as sparks and flames leapt from their wires in a huge electrical surge.

But in today’s technology-dependent world, a similar event could bring down civilization in the biggest disaster ever to hit mankind.

More havoc would be wreaked than in an asteroid impact, say experts. And humans would face doom as power and communications grids around the globe were destroyed by the event, preventing the production and supply of food, water and medicines.

A British amateur astronomer, Richard Carrington, 33, witnessed the start of the storm that battered the Earth 150 years ago. He was sketching a giant blotch on the sun called a sunspot from near Redhill, Surrey, on September 1 when two dazzling beads of light appeared above it. They were the first observed solar flares.

They faded within minutes. But the next eight days the night skies all around the globe were filled with dazzling red, green and purple auroras. They are usually just seen near the poles.

They were caused by a billion tons of highly charged gas, called plasma, that battered the Earth after racing 93 million miles from the Sun at more than five million miles an hour. Smaller eruptions have been photographed by spacecraft such NASA’s as Stereo.

Our planet’s natural shield, its magnetic field, protected humans from the deadly radiation in 1859 by deflecting it around the magnetic poles. But the massive electrical charge knocked out the Victorian equivalent of the internet, by sending telegraph systems haywire.
Operators shocked by the surge quickly disconnected batteries that powered the telegraph network. But they found it kept working thanks to the power from the aurora.

The next time a perfect solar storm on the same scale is aimed at Earth, the result will be devastating – and much more so for the developed world than for poor countries.

Eight minutes after the flare – called a coronal mass ejection or CME – happens, a pulse of X-rays will cause huge disruption to radio communications. Then, 18 to 36 hours later, we will feel the full impact of space weather with the arrival of superheated gas called plasma from the Sun.

Satellites on which we rely for communications will have their electronics fried, causing £40 billion damage in space. Astronauts on the space station or space tourists will die from massive doses of radiation.

Then power grids around the world will be destroyed as transformers melt, beyond repair. It will take many months or years to replace them. A NASA report says the blackouts would cause more than a trillion pounds worth of damage to the US economy alone.

British scientist Dr Stuart Clark is a solar expert who has written a gripping book about the 1859 solar storm and Richard Carrington called The Sun Kings . He told Skymania News: “These ejections from the Sun are huge. They can contain a billion tons of matter – smashed up atoms carrying vast quantities of electrical and magnetic energy – and that’s what can do the damage. It will short out satellites vital for communications and GPS, turning them into useless junk.

“The space station does not have sufficient shielding. A Carrington-sized flare would be unsurvivable.”

Dr Clark added: “The impact on power grids is the most dangerous effect. Another 1859-sized flare could take out power transformers right across the United States, at which point you have the biggest natural disaster possible. You can’t replace these transformers quickly. So you face weeks, months or potentially even years without proper power supplies.

“The ripple effect from that is colossal. Without power you can’t pump fuel so you can’t drive food to the supermarkets. You can’t pump water to homes or handle sewage. With no power, there is no communication, no way for the Government to pass on information or advice. And even if you think about back-up generators, in places like hospitals, the petrol they need is not going to last longer than a couple of days. Millions will die.

“You could see society collapse and a complete breakdown in law and order. Nowhere is safe from a Carrington-sized flare. This is much more threatening than an asteroid impact and it is much more likely than an asteroid.”

Dr Clark said that much less powerful space weather had already given an indication of the havoc that would be created. “In 1989 north-eastern Canada was knocked out by a solar storm. The region went from normal operations to a completely melted transformer in 90 seconds, cutting power to six million people. Repairs took months.
“Another series of storms battered the Earth around Halloween in 2003. At least two satellites were wrecked and 60 per cent of NASA satellites malfunctioned in some way.

“During that battering, they moved aircraft away from the magnetic poles. The main reason was to avoid communications blackouts, but they were also concerned about radiation levels in passenger jets.”
Scientists have found a tree-ring like record in the Arctic ice of how solar activity has affected Earth. They estimate that a solar event like that of 1859 happens twice in a thousand years. But there is nothing to say it won’t happen next week.

And Dr Clark says that a general decline in the sun’s level of activity is creating conditions like those around the time that Carrington observed his fantastic flare.

He said: “Hopefully, with space telescopes observing the Sun, it mean we won’t be taken by surprise and will see a storm coming. But get it wrong and we’ll have hardly any time to take action and the damage will be done.

“The individual can literally do nothing to protect himself apart from get in some tins of beans and candles. And the only thing we can do to protect power stations is to turn them off.

“If you see one of these things coming and decide it is big enough, turn the power off. That means people will die, there will be accidents, but it is the only sure fire way to proect the power stations.

“But there is no chain of command, no structure for deciding when to turn the power off. And we have no idea when disaster will strike.”

http://www.boingboing.net

Author Whose Bookstore Is the No. 2 (or 4, or 5)

Randy Kearse stepped onto a southbound No. 2 train in Harlem and scanned the crowd, trying to figure out who might be in a buying mood. He strode across the car, pressed his back against the steel doors and cleared his throat: Showtime.

“Excuse me, ladies and gentleman,” he called out.

“I am not begging, borrowing or asking for your food. I don’t represent the homeless, I’m not selling candy or selling bootleg DVDs,” he said, then paused. “I write books.”

A few passengers looked on curiously. Others stared at their hands, at their shoes or at nothing in particular, just not up at Mr. Kearse. He could practically read their minds: Uh-oh — here we go again.

But in a city weary of the relentless, and illegal, subway pitch for money — the emotional spiel, the hand or cup offered from seat to seat — Mr. Kearse is something of a subway sales impresario.

With little or no marketing muscle behind him, Mr. Kearse said he had sold some 14,000 copies of his self-published books in the last three years, at $10 each, mostly through hand-to-hand sales.

He has also sold about 4,000 copies of a 750-page, 10,000-entry dictionary of urban slang terms, “Street Talk,” through Barricade Books of Fort Lee, N.J., the publisher said.

Most novice authors would be lucky to sell that many books through traditional and online stores. Mr. Kearse seems to have reached those numbers largely on his own hustle.

“My quota is 35 books a day,” Mr. Kearse said. “If I don’t hit that number, I’m staying out until I do. Overtime.”

Mr. Kearse does it with a well-designed pitch and a salesman’s instinct for closing the deal. But he also has a product that people seem to want.

“This book is about my life, my experiences, the lessons that I’ve learned from the mistakes that I’ve made,” he said, “mistakes that sent me to prison for 13 and a half years.”

Mr. Kearse, 45, went from hustling crack cocaine as head of a multistate crew, to federal prison, to author and urban self-help guru who not only writes books about his experiences but also mentors children, crooks, prisoners and their families on the perils of the criminal life. Or as one of his titles suggests, he has gone from “Incarceration to Incorporation.”

Plenty of authors have emerged from prison with manuscripts. Some even get them published. But instead of fictional tales of sex, money and murder — the stuff of the booming “street lit” genre — Mr. Kearse has assembled step-by-step guides to going legit, or “Changin’ Your Game Plan: How to Use Incarceration as a Stepping Stone for Success” — another of his titles.

That book, and his overall message of redemption, landed him on “The Colbert Report” in 2007, where he held his own in banter with the host over whether inmates should ever be returned to society.

The market for his message is the subway system, the trains that run through Harlem and the South Bronx. His target demographics, he said, are black and Hispanic passengers from the neighborhoods he once flooded with drugs.

On one recent outing, in an hour Mr. Kearse sold about 10 books. Two buyers asked that he autograph the books for a brother or boyfriend in prison. Another bought a copy for a grandson. One young man gripped Mr. Kearse’s hand tightly, said that he had read the book and thanked him.

“What I’m doing now is the same thing, same concept, as when I was hustling; it was just illegal business that I was doing then,” Mr. Kearse said. (New York City Transit also prohibits selling or panhandling on the subway.)

“I try to show people how to use your natural instincts, the same grind,” he said.

Over lunch in Harlem, he described the science of the subway sale:

A sparsely populated train is better than a packed one; it’s easier to work the crowd.

The cars on the No. 3 train are too loud; you’ll have to yell; it’s very unprofessional.

The A and J trains are too big, with too much ground to cover; intimacy is important.

The Nos. 2, 5 and 4 trains through Harlem are the best: the right audience, smaller cars, and long relatively quiet stretches to make his pitch.

Mr. Kearse said the sales provided him with enough income to cover his bills and pay the rent on his apartment in the Bronx, as well as to help out his five children, ages 20 to 23.

But he said what really motivated him to roll his bag of books around every day was the chance to influence lives.

“A guy wrote me a while back and asked, in respect to all the damage that I’ve done, that I’ve left behind, if I think doing good things now changes any of that,” Mr. Kearse said. “You know, I don’t know if I have an answer for that.”

Mr. Kearse, a 10th grade dropout, said he had built a name for himself on the streets, first locking down the drug trade in a public housing complex in the city, then in North Carolina by setting up a crew of 40 to 50 workers that distributed for him in five cities.

He was indicted on charges of moving more than 50 kilograms of cocaine over two years, he said — allegations he does not dispute.

Since he left prison in 2005, his record has been clean.

“The difference in what I’m doing now is there’s no stress as far as worrying about what the future’s going to be like. Am I going to jail one minute? Am I going to be killed another minute?” he said. “I can stand behind what I’m doing and not feel like I have to hide things.”

One afternoon, arms stretched wide and a book in each hand, he waited for at least a few passengers on a No. 2 train to smile and nod, buying into what he was trying to sell. Thirteen down, 22 books to go.

7/9/2010 5:40 PM

PERIODIC TABLE OF SWEARING

6/28/2010 5:05 AM

http://online.wsj.com/

The Feuding Fathers

Americans lament the partisan venom of today's politics, but for sheer verbal savagery, the country's founders were in a league of their own. Ron Chernow on the Revolutionary origins of divisive discourse.

http://finance.yahoo.com

Think the Gulf Spill Is Bad? Wait Until the Next Disaster

Financial Bombs

The subprime disaster was a result of financial bombs -- derivatives -- exploding in financial institutions such as AIG and Lehman Brothers, as well as banks and financial institution throughout the world. After the bombs AIG manufactured exploded, AIG received $181 billion in taxpayer funding and immediately sent $11.9 billion to France’s Societe Generale, $11.8 to Deutsche Bank, and $8.5 billion to Barclays Bank of Britain. U.S. taxpayer money was going to bail out banks around the world. During the last three months of 2008, AIG was losing more than $27 million an hour. That is how powerful these derivatives can be. The problem I see is this: There are many more such bombs still sitting in balance sheets all over the world.

Military bombs are classified by weight such as 500, 750, and 1,000 pounds, while financial bombs have interesting labels such as CDO (collateralized debt obligations), ABS (asset backed securities), and CDS (credit default swaps). While they sound exotic and sophisticated, when put in everyday language, a CDO is simply debt sold as an asset. And CDS, or swaps, are simply a form of insurance. Since the insurance industry is strictly regulated and the bomb factories producing CDS did not want to comply with insurance industry regulations, they simply called them “swaps,” rather than insurance.

To make matters worse, rating agencies such as Moody’s and S&P (and even Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan) blessed these financial bombs as safe, sound, and good for you. It was almost as good as the pope blessing these products. In 2007 the subprime boom busted, and we know what happened from there.

The problem is that approximately $700 trillion of these financial time bombs are still in the system. While people watch the BP disaster in the Gulf, few people are aware of the other BP -- the financial bomb production -- that is still going on. If this derivative market begins to collapse, we will see another disaster.

Most of us know there is not enough money in the world to fully clean up the Gulf. The same is true with the $700 trillion derivatives market. If just 1% of the $700 trillion derivatives market goes bust, that is a $7 trillion disaster. The entire U.S. economy is only $14 trillion annually. A 10% failure, equating to $70 trillion, would probably bring down the world economy. As with the BP Gulf disaster, there is not enough money in the world to clean up the next disaster.

6/25/2010 7:11 AM

http://finance.yahoo.com/

Gail Neal worked for 12 years placing laid-off workers in new jobs before she got her own pink slip in March 2008. That September, she found a commission-only job selling cemetery plots, an industry she thought would be recession-proof. She was wrong.

"With the economy the way it was, people were doing direct cremations," she says. She persisted for more than a year before launching a new job search. At a networking event, she heard about an ad sales job at a Detroit radio station. She sent a cover letter and one-page resume in a pretty, invitation-sized envelope with a gold sticker, which got the manager's attention. She was hired a few weeks later.

"I'd worked in job placement for long time but did the same thing everyone else does -- sent out a plain resume based on knowledge of a job opening and made phone calls," she says. "I didn't stand out. The competition is such in this area that you've got to do something very different."

Doing something very different seems to be the name of the game in a job market in which unemployment remains stubbornly high. Nearly a quarter of hiring managers say they are seeing unique tactics by candidates -- up from 12 percent in 2008, according to a recent survey by CareerBuilder.com.

Coffee-Cup Creativity

Sometimes these gimmicks work: One in 10 managers surveyed said they have hired someone who used an unusual stunt to get their attention. Consider Alec Brownstein, the 29-year-old advertising copyrighter who got a job by targeting the names of a few creative directors he wanted to hire him, and paying $6 for a Google ad that would appear when those individuals Googled themselves. It read: "Hey, Googling yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too" and linked back to his Web site.

"I thought it was brilliant," says David Perry, managing partner of Perry Martell, an executive search firm in Ontario, Canada. "But he did something that most people who are job hunters don't do -- he had focus. When looking for a job, you need to know who you want to work for and what you want to do, and that means spending the time to identify and research your top 20 employers instead of going to the job boards to click and apply all day long."

Jeff Donaldson, a former Chrysler engineer with two decades of experience, worked with Perry on "extreme networking" after taking a buyout from the automaker last summer.

"The technique that paid off was writing a smart letter in email and snail-mail form," Donaldson says. "I chose 20 people I was friendly with who might be in a position to help me, including people who owned their own companies and executives that I had worked with who would be in a position to affect the decisions of others. I asked them to forward the letter if they knew of somebody who might be in a position to help -- trying to grow exponentially the number of people who knew I was looking for a job. I expected most people to set it aside and shrug their shoulders, but what I found was they were more than happy to help."

Six weeks later, Donaldson found a three-month contract job in his field, which has been renewed several times. "You can't do what everyone else is doing and expect they are going to find you, even if you are the most qualified candidate," he says.

Perry's firm also assisted a Pennsylvania banker who was laid off after three decades with the same firm. He had sent out 1,500 resumes and landed just three interviews and no offers. Perry suggested the client focus on a dozen companies, and find and contact former employees through LinkedIn or Facebook, letting them know he was interested in working for the firm and asking if they would be willing to discuss its issues and challenges.

The banker then crafted a cover letter outlining how he had solved similar issues in his career, and sent it with a one-page resume in a Starbucks coffee cup through Fedex, so the target would have to sign for it. Within 30 minutes of receiving delivery confirmation by email, the banker called and asked if the recipient would meet him for coffee to talk about how he could help the company.

"The whole point is to get them to agree to have coffee, not an interview," Perry says. "An interview request automatically makes the (recipient) uncomfortable because there's an expectation of a job offer." The banker sent the coffee cup to 10 companies, got eight interviews and six offers in five weeks.

Knowing the Limits

Other career experts warn that extreme gimmicks can backfire. "There are bad ways to get noticed and good ways to get noticed," says Cynthia Shapiro, career strategist and author of "What Does Somebody Have to Do to Get a Job Around Here: 44 Insider Secrets."

In her book she notes some flops -- resumes on pink paper; singing telegrams with lyrics about the candidate's qualifications; a resume tied to a bottle of champagne; and even a job seeker who sent his resume by homing pigeon.

"The number one thing in this economy is to look confident, and you can't look confident by sending singing telegrams," Shapiro says. "A hiring manager's job is on the line every time they recommend someone. I'm a laughingstock if I bring the singing telegram guy in for an interview. If he's that desperate I'm going to assume he's unemployable."

She suggests job seekers post articles on a LinkedIn group frequented by potential employers, or volunteer for the board of an industry association. "If someone sees your face or name in a professional capacity, that's great way to get noticed," she says.

Moreover, attention-getting stunts may also distract a job seeker from focusing on the hard work of networking, says John Challenger, chief executive officer of Chicago-based outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

"People can spend a lot of time trying to stand out when all the needles in the haystack look the same -- rather than focus on constantly going out and seeing people," Challenger says. "Nobody wants to do that. You get rejected all day long. It's a lot more fun to sit around and come up with something really inventive or creative. But you have to realize you're not going to find your job by getting into that haystack. You find jobs through other people."

Once Gail Neal got her foot in the door at the radio station, she focused on ways to add value. Neal noticed the station had numerous advertisers in the security category -- alarms, gun stores, surveillance-equipment companies. One afternoon while doing laundry, she got on her cell phone and cold-called firms in the security business, asking if they had ever considered radio advertising.

"I kept dialing until I found three businesses who agreed to appointments," she says. She brought the leads to the second interview, which sealed the deal.

Seven months later, Neal is creating events, promotions and other new sources of revenue, along with selling "plain vanilla commercials," she says. "You've got to do something that makes you stand out and show you can shine." For more job-hunting tips, see my blog.

6/16/2010 6:42 AM

Nasa warns solar flares from 'huge space storm' will cause devastation

Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”, Nasa has warned.

National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning” and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.

Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.

Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.

“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa's Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.

“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”

Dr Fisher added: “Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar affect.”

A “space weather” conference in Washington DC last week, attended by Nasa scientists, policy-makers, researchers and government officials, was told of similar warnings.

While scientists have previously told of the dangers of the storm, Dr Fisher’s comments are the most comprehensive warnings from Nasa to date.

Dr Fisher, 69, said the storm, which will cause the Sun to reach temperatures of more than 10,000 F (5500C), occurred only a few times over a person’s life.

Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.

Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation.

He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely.

A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.

He said preparations were similar to those in a hurricane season, where authorities knew a problem was imminent but did not know how serious it would be.

“I think the issue is now that modern society is so dependant on electronics, mobile phones and satellites, much more so than the last time this occurred,” he said.

“There is a severe economic impact from this. We take it very seriously. The economic impact could be like a large, major hurricane or storm.”

The National Academy of Sciences warned two years ago that power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications could “all be knocked out by intense solar activity”.

It warned a powerful solar storm could cause “twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina”. That storm devastated New Orleans in 2005 and left an estimated damage bill of more than $125bn (£85bn).

Dr Fisher said precautions could be taken including creating back up systems for hospitals and power grids and allow development on satellite “safe modes”.

“If you know that a hazard is coming … and you have time enough to prepare and take precautions, then you can avoid trouble,” he added.

His division, a department of the Science Mission Directorate at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC, which investigates the Sun’s influence on the earth, uses dozens of satellites to study the threat.

The government has said it was aware of the threat and “contingency plans were in place” to cope with the fall out from such a storm.

These included allowing for certain transformers at the edge of the National Grid to be temporarily switched off and to improve voltage levels throughout the network.

The National Risk Register, established in 2008 to identify different dangers to Britain, also has “comprehensive” plans on how to handle a complete outage of electricity supplies.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk

Pelosi's Loss Could Be Obama's Gain

A pivot to the center (and re-election) would be easier without the House speaker.

Over the past 50 years, it should be no surprise which president has the best record for holding down discretionary spending. It was President Reagan. But who was second best? President Clinton, a Democrat. His record of frugality was better than Presidents Nixon, Ford and both Bushes. Mr. Clinton couldn't have done it if Republicans hadn't won the House and Senate in the 1994 election. They insisted on substantial cuts, he went along and then whistled his way to an easy re-election in 1996.

For Mr. Obama, serious spending cuts are the only sensible means of dealing with a potential debt crisis or at least an unsustainable fiscal situation. However, he may not be able to rely on reductions in military spending, as liberal Democrats usually prefer. Mr. Obama has already included deep defense cuts in his budget, and Republicans are unlikely to go along with even deeper cuts.

Mrs. Pelosi won't be any help. She's committed to enacting the Democratic Party's entire liberal agenda, and next to the president she is the most powerful person in Washington. When the president flirted with scaling back his health-care bill last January, Ms. Pelosi stiffened his spine, and the bill passed. As long as she is House speaker, bucking her would be painful, especially if Mr. Obama proposes to eliminate a chunk of the spending she was instrumental in passing in 2009 and 2010.

But if Republicans win the House, everything changes. Mrs. Pelosi's influence as minority leader would be minimal—that is, assuming she's not ousted by Democrats upset over losing the majority.

Mr. Obama would be in a position to make his long-awaited pivot to the center. With Republicans in charge, he'd have to be bipartisan. He'd surely have to accede to serious cuts in spending—even as he complains they are harsh and mean-spirited. Mr. Obama could play a double game, appeasing Democrats by criticizing the cuts and getting credit with everyone else by acquiescing to them.

Mr. Clinton did this brilliantly in 1996. He fought with Republicans over the budget, winning some battles, losing others, as he lurched to the center. He twice vetoed Republican welfare reform bills, then signed a similar measure. He was hailed as the president who overhauled the unpopular welfare system.

In recent months, the president has met repeatedly with Mr. Clinton. We can only guess what they talked about. But given Mr. Clinton's own experience, I suspect he suggested to Mr. Obama that Republicans could be the answer to his political prayers. In 1994, Republicans freed the president from the clutches of liberal Democratic leaders in Congress. In 2010, they can do it again.

6/6/2010 10:16 PM

The 'other' spill BP will be keeping quiet

With the Gulf Coast dying of oil poisoning, there's no space in the press for British Petroleum's most recent spill.

Just last week over 100,000 gallons were lost at its Alaska pipeline operation. A hundred thousand used to be a lot. It still is.

Last Tuesday, Pump Station 9, at Delta Junction on the 800-mile pipeline, busted. Thousands of barrels began spewing an explosive cocktail of hydrocarbons after "procedures weren't properly implemented" by BP operators, say state inspectors.

"Procedures weren't properly implemented" is, it seems, BP's company motto.

Few in the US know that BP owns the controlling stake in the transalaska pipeline. Unlike with the Deepwater Horizon rig, BP keeps its name off the big pipe.

There's another reason for the company to keep its name off the pipe - its management of it stinks. The pipe is corroded, undermanned and "basic maintenance" is a term BP has never heard of.

How does BP get away with it? The same way the Godfather got away with it, bad things happen to folks who blow the whistle. BP has a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.

In one case, BP's CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of whistleblower Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe's tanker facility.

BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP's acts were "reminiscent of nazi Germany."

This was not an isolated case. Captain James Woodle, once in charge of the pipe's Valdez terminus, was blackmailed into resigning from the post when he complained of disastrous conditions there. The weapon used on Woodle was a file of faked evidence of marital infidelity. Nice guys, eh?

Two decades ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an investigation of British Petroleum's management of the Alaska pipeline system. I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan natives who own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding.

Even then, a courageous, steel-eyed government inspector, Dan Lawn, was hollering about corrosion all through the BP pipeline. I say "courageous" because Lawn kept his job only because his union's lawyers have kept BP from having his head.

It wasn't until 2006, 17 years later, that BP claimed to have suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shutdown of the line.

It was pretty damn hard for BP to claim surprise in August 2006 that corrosion required shutting the pipeline. Five months earlier, Lawn had written his umpteenth warning when he identified corrosion as the cause of a big leak.

BP should have known about the problem years before that - if only because it had taped Dan Lawn's home phone calls.

I don't want readers to think BP is a British marauder unconcerned about the US.

The company is deeply involved in US democracy. Bob Malone, until last year the chairman of BP America, was also Alaska State co-chairman of the Bush re-election campaign.

Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP's care of Alaska's environment that he pushed again to open the state's Arctic wildlife refuge to drilling by the BP consortium.

You can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of BP's care of the wilderness. You can smell it - the crude oil is still on the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill.

Exxon took all the blame for the spill because it was dumb enough to have the company's name on the ship.

But it was BP's pipeline managers who filed reports that oil spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the grounding near Bligh Island.

However the reports were bogus - the equipment wasn't there and so the beaches were poisoned. At the time, our investigators uncovered four-volumes worth of faked safety reports and concluded that BP was at least as culpable as Exxon for the 1,200 miles of oil-destroyed coastline.

Nevertheless, we know BP cares about nature because it has lots of photos of solar panels in its annual reports - and it has painted every one of its gas stations green.

The green paint job is supposed to represent the oil giant's love of Mother Nature. But CEO Tony Hayward knows it stands for the colour of the Yankee dollar.

In 2006, BP finally discovered the dangerous corrosion in the pipeline after running a "smart pig" through it. The "pig" is an electronic drone that BP should have been using continuously, though it had not done so for 14 years. Another "procedure not properly implemented."

By not properly inspecting the pipeline for over a decade, BP failed to prevent that March 2006 spill which polluted Prudhoe Bay. And cheaping out on remote controls for its oil well blow-out preventers appears to have cost the lives of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon.

But then failure to implement proper safety procedures has saved BP not millions but billions of dollars, suggesting that the company's pig is indeed, very, very smart.

6/6/2010 2:55 AM

http://www.time.com

How Obama's Enemies May Give Him a Boost

The late, longtime New Yorker critic Pauline Kael was said to have expressed confusion over Richard Nixon's landslide re-election in 1972 — because no one she knew had voted for him. To borrow that notion, conservatives today imagine that everyone views the current occupant of the White House as they do: Barack Obama is the worst President ever. Conventional wisdom posits that this potent right-wing, anti-Obama sentiment will diminish the President's power — enough for Republicans to vanquish Democrats in November, regain control of Congress and weaken the incumbent for 2012.

But this myopia has been created within an electronic cocoon of Fox News, talk radio, conservative websites and rhetoric from Republican leaders, all passionately reinforcing the message that the Obama Administration is disastrous on a historic scale. It's a message that is being transported as gamely by rank-and-file Republicans as it is by erudite conservative columnists with national readerships. (See 10 elections that changed America.)

Of course, in this modern age of extreme polarization, only one President these past 30 years (George H.W. Bush, the père) has escaped the regular damning hyperbole of "worst ever." But the condemnation of Obama seems somewhat more extreme.

The blue-red divide, by almost every measure, has gotten worse, and the ubiquity of electronic media spreads intense political and cultural disdain in the blink of an eye. The always enlightening Google reveals that typing in "Obama worst president ever" yields 3.4 million results, vs. 1.8 million for "Bush worst president ever" and 1.2 million for Clinton. That stat seems representative of where we have arrived as a nation and illustrative of the relationship between the incumbent President and his critics. (See the top 10 political defections.)

Conservatives from the upper echelons of elected officials in Washington and state capitals, presidential-candidates-in-waiting such as Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, 2010 stars such as Rand Paul, and testy Tea Party activists all believe they have an objective case to rank Obama as 44th out of 44 Presidents. Not only do they think his policies are misguided and out of step with America's greatest traditions of individual liberty and free enterprise, but they are convinced that his relative lack of experience and youth confirm the pre-election suspicions that he is not up to the job. (Comment on this story.)

The times of crisis in which Obama has governed only exacerbate the situation. It doesn't take a degree in psychology to recognize the explanatory formula "economic/environmental/international crises + search for a scapegoat = widespread Obama hatred." And it is evidence of how much matters have deteriorated that it's impossible to imagine conservatives rallying around Obama in the face of a new disaster, like the left did (albeit briefly) after Sept. 11 for President George W. Bush. Even if the President were to repel a Martian invasion, the right's reaction would likely be the same as it was after the Christmas Day bombing attempt, or the failed Times Square attack, or the current oil spill: denigration of Obama's competence, suspicion of his motives and implicit (or explicit) hope for his failure.

The experiences of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are instructive. Like Obama, they accomplished a fairly high percentage of their campaign promises, even as their enemies deemed them failures from those Presidents' first days in office. Both Presidents benefited by staying focused and on course, sidestepping the increasingly hostile rhetoric thrown at them by their foes. Clinton at times would explode, letting such verbiage get his goat, but Reagan did not, and in that sense, he is Obama's closer analogue. Obama has become prickly at times during these past 16 months, but he is more apt to brush off the barbs as proof positive that the opposition is losing — and losing it.

In the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, we have already seen that the anti-Obama forces are expressing their disagreements with the Administration in terms far more personal than political, tinged with an apocalyptic irrationality. The centrifugal force exerted on conservative leaders toward the extreme wing of their party is bound to lead to even more magnified rhetoric in the next few years. The contrast between those excessive attacks and Obama's famous cool will serve him, and the Democrats, well.

Within the overheated conservative bubble there is little room for discussions of serious policy alternatives to deal with America's problems, reminders that the country is typically drawn to optimistic candidates (like Reagan and Obama) and weighty appeals to the center of the electorate. If Obama is the worst President ever, as conservatives seem to believe, why do they need to say anything more than that to take control of Congress and then get rid of him? But while the conservatives' ultimate condemnation rallies their core supporters and resonates with some centrist voters, over time it is unlikely to produce a majority against the Administration.

It can't be pleasant for Obama to be the subject of such attacks. And solving the country's major problems in a bipartisan fashion will be difficult under these rancorous circumstances. But as long as those trying to beat him are blind to the fact that tens of millions of voting Americans think Obama is doing a fine job, this President has a great ally in his enemies.

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog

The Ultimate List: 100+ Twitter Statistics

6/4/2010 3:13 PM

http://www.businessinsider.com

70% of Twitter users are "dead" (empty accounts) or "lazy" (haven't tweeted in a week)

In fact, well over 70% have never tweeted more than 9 times ever!

Over 60% have 5 or fewer followers

60% of Twitter users quit…lots of them after just a month

People tweet on weekdays…

People tweet at work…

75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com

63% of Twitter users only use it at their desktop

Twitter handles 600 million search queries per day, though lots are automated

People use Twitter to link, chat, and say what they are doing at the moment

39% of Twitter is not in English

Twitter is not for the kids

Twitter users make decent money

People retweet a lot on Fridays (and hardly at all on Sundays)

Even more important than Twitter? Porn.

--

6/2/2010 7:12 AM

http://beta.thehindu.com/

Defiant Israel vows to continue Gaza blockade

“It is our duty to scrutinize each ship that approaches Gaza,” he told a news conference in Jerusalem. “I want to clarify to the citizens of the world what would happen if we don’t do that: It would mean an Iranian port in Gaza, at a distance of only a few dozen kilometres from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.” In Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning the incident, calling for Israel to lift the blockade and agreeing to send an “independent international fact-finding mission” to investigate the raid.

6/1/2010 2:02 PM

http://online.wsj.com/article

The ECB's Bank Warning

What if national governments are their own systemic risk?

The euro took another dive Tuesday, pushed down by a warning from the European Central Bank's on the state of European banks. The central message, couched as it is in central-bank-speak about "hazardous contagion channels and adverse feedback loops," is this: Europe's national governments have become their own biggest systemic risk.

The ECB's Financial Stability Review is a twice-yearly look at the condition of Europe's banking sector. According to the report, European banks need to roll over some €800 billion in long-term debt in the next two and a half years, and to do so they'll have to compete with European governments that last year borrowed some €811 billion among them. This competition for capital between the private and public domains could drive up interest rates, or even lead to a liquidity squeeze for the banks or the public fisc, or both.

The situation is made more dangerous by the rules on how bank capital is calculated. Under regulatory capital requirements, highly rated government debt owned by banks is generally considered nearly risk free, giving financial institutions a strong incentive to hold sovereign debt. According to the Bank of International Settlements, its member banks have some $2.1 trillion in total exposure to European sovereign debt. So a pan-European sovereign debt crisis would not only affect the ability of European capitals to pay their bills. It would pose a threat to the solvency of the private banking system itself.

In the fall of 2008, the worry around the world was that a crisis in bank solvency would drag down the global economy. Today, the risk has shifted. A looming crisis in national solvency could threaten the same banks that Europe and the U.S. so recently saved. Only this time, the lender of last resort could itself be bankrupt. The ECB calls this "adverse feedback between the financial sector and public finance." We call it a recipe for disaster unless governments get their finances under control.

5/31/2010 9:20 AM

http://www.chrisbrogan.com

Drilling for Certainty

In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the political debate has fallen into predictably partisan and often puerile categories. Conservatives say this is Obama’s Katrina. Liberals say the spill is proof the government should have more control over industry.
But the real issue has to do with risk assessment. It has to do with the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology.

Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.

These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.

If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand.

In the first place, people have trouble imagining how small failings can combine to lead to catastrophic disasters. At the Three Mile Island nuclear facility, a series of small systems happened to fail at the same time. It was the interplay between these seemingly minor events that led to an unanticipated systemic crash.

Second, people have a tendency to get acclimated to risk. As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in a report on the Challenger disaster, as years went by, NASA officials got used to living with small failures. If faulty O rings didn’t produce a catastrophe last time, they probably won’t this time, they figured.

Feynman compared this to playing Russian roulette. Success in the last round is not a good predictor of success this time. Nonetheless, as things seemed to be going well, people unconsciously adjust their definition of acceptable risk.

Third, people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices. More pedestrians die in crosswalks than when jay-walking. That’s because they have a false sense of security in crosswalks and are less likely to look both ways.

On the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, a Transocean official apparently tried to close off a safety debate by reminding everybody the blowout preventer would save them if something went wrong. The illusion of the safety system encouraged the crew to behave in more reckless ways. As Malcolm Gladwell put it in a 1996 New Yorker essay, “Human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.”

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

An Author’s Plan for Social Media

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

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

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

http://www.usnews.com

Why Voters Will Get a Lot Angrier

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.cbsnews.com

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

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

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

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

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

Some other gems:

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

At least they're being honest.

More from the Poll:

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

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

http://www.thedailybeast.com

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

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

5/9/2010 1:02 PM

http://www.csmonitor.com/

Tea partyers generally well-off

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

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

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

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

5/5/2010 9:53 PM

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

Greek Wealth Is Everywhere but Tax Forms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5/5/2010 9:11 AM

http://www.boston.com/

awesome pics of the oil disaster

5/1/2010 7:14 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4/30/2010 6:59 PM

http://www.latimes.com

Life has never been so good for our species

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

4/25/2010 3:35 PM

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

The Tea Party's Toxic Take on History

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

4/17/2010 7:23 AM

http://www.marketwatch.com/

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

More hiring, marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

4/15/2010 11:20 AM

http://www.bloomberg.com/

China’s March Property Prices Jump a Record 11.7%

3/29/2010 6:19 AM

http://www.nydailynews.com/

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

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

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

http://www.frumforum.com/waterloo

Hobby or Necessity?

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

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

Waterloo

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

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

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

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

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

3/29/2010 1:05 AM

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

Can ‘No’ Revive the Republicans?

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

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

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

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

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

The result of this blind ambition?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.washingtonpost.com

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3/27/2010 11:21 PM

Above water?

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

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

3/26/2010 10:21 PM

http://hbr.org/

Defend Your Research: Imitation Is More Valuable Than Innovation

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

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

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

http://www.wired.com

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

3/17/2010 3:25 PM

http://www.wired.com/

Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely

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

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

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com

Monday, March 08, 2010

Whoa There, Ebook Writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's my advice: Keep aiming high.

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

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

3/14/2010 5:28 PM

http://www.barryeisler.com

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Paper Earthworks and Digital Tides

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

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

http://www.latimes.com

Unemployment tops 20% in eight California counties

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

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

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

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

http://www.pcmag.com

15 Windows Utilities You Can't Live Without

http://www.pbs.org

Early Feminist Cartoons

http://www.wired.com

Mach 6 Cruise Missile, Ready for Prime Time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.wired.com

Half-Cocked? Hermaphrochickens Challenge Gender Identity

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

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

3/10/2010 11:47 AM

http://springwise.com/

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

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

Website: www.ultimerealite.fr

3/9/2010 12:07 PM

http://www.guardian.co.uk

Nanometre 'fuses' for high-performance batteries

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

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

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

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

3/1/2010 7:52 AM

http://www.ehow.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2/23/2010 10:07 AM

http://www.pbs.org

Ahmadinejad's import mania

by HAMID FAROKHNIA in Tehran

20 Feb 2010 22:38

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

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

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

2/17/2010 10:08 AM

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

1/19/2010 12:04 PM

Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left

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

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

http://gizmodo.com/

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

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

The Tel Aviv Cluster

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/16/2010 7:43 AM

http://online.wsj.com/

The Death of the Slush Pile

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

http://finance.yahoo.com/

America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/9/2010 10:48 AM

Contrarian Investor Sees Economic Crash in China

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

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

http://www.wired.com/geekdad

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

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

1/6/2010 6:00 AM

http://www.crethiplethi.com/

'Smartest' dog recognises more than 340 words

1/3/2010 12:51 AM

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

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

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

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

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

12/25/2009 9:19 PM

http://www.forbes.com

How To Rise Fast At Work: A True Story

The wise moves that outpaced a wily and ambitious colleague.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12/23/2009 1:47 PM

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience

Female Ducks’ Twisty Tracts Defend Against Screwy Males

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

http://www.forbes.com

Why California Is Bad For Innovation

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

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

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

http://www.washingtonpost.com

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

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

They know that the story is the original killer app.

Media makeover

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

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

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

11/19/2009 11:22 AM

The Wrong Side of History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.ft.com/

Mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust

By Nouriel Roubini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.csmonitor.com/

Nordic Countries Top 'Gender Equality' List

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

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

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

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

10/28/2009 2:14 PM

Islamic countries push a global 'blasphemy' law

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Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10/19/2009 1:58 PM

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

Ahmadinejad's theological foes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10/9/2009 11:54 AM

http://www.google.com/

Report: Global Muslim population hits 1.57 billion

By ERIC GORSKI (AP) – 1 day ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.msnbc.msn.com

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

Oral contraceptives may also dampen your sex appeal, study suggests

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

10/5/2009 4:00 AM

http://www.foxnews.com

It's 'Rape-Rape', Whoopi

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

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

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

That's forcible rape.

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

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

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

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

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

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

9/16/2009 9:00 AM

http://tehranbureau.com/nuclear/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dispatch from Tehran | 10 Sept 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://beyondgrowth.net/

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

9/2/2009 10:12 AM

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

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

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

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

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

8/25/2009 12:29 PM

http://ow.ly/kFfp

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

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

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

For more interesting statistics visit danger.mongabay.com

8/15/2009 2:34 AM

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

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

8/14/2009 3:59 PM

http://www.usnews.com/

Why a Housing Rebound Could Take 20 Years

8/4/2009 3:12 AM

http://www.breitbart.com/

Prostitutes better than officials in China: survey

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

7/26/2009 5:36 AM

http://howto.wired.com/

Reinvent Yourself Online

7/21/2009 10:33 AM

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine

The 25 Greatest Legal TV Shows

7/18/2009 2:05 PM

http://www.jpost.com/

'I wed Iranian girls before execution'

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

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

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

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

Rafsanjani: Clear up Iranian election doubts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.guardian.co.uk

French Workers Use Threat to Obtain Severance Pay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://finance.yahoo.com

California sprouts 'green rush' from marijuana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All without legalization.

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

http://www.wired.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/17/2009 10:37 PM

Martin Amis: The end of Iran's ayatollahs?

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

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

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

http://iranpoliticsclub.net/

sex after death in islam

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

Inside the Iranian Crackdown

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

Snooping through the power socket

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

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

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

The attack has been demonstrated to work at a distance of up to 15m, but refinement may mean it could work over much longer distances.
--

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8147566.stm

Cats 'exploit' humans by purring
--

http://www.gapingvoid.com/

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

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

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

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

7/10/2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they want the people to keep quiet, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://tehranbureau.com/blood/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://news51.blogspot.com

Train Versus Tornado

7/5/2009 6:34 PM

http://ow.ly/gvOH

30 Ways to Lose a Job on Twitter

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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

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

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

Was the Iranian election rigged?

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

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

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

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

When did the suspicion start?

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

Is it a coup?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/5/2009 2:41 PM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

How the Iranian Election Was Stolen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4/22/2009 9:50 AM

Can the Oil Shock Alone Explain the Financial Crisis?

http://business.theatlantic.com

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

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

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

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

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

Hamilton concludes.

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

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

1/23/2009 5:16 PM

http://www.forbes.com/

How To Market To The Modern Mom

Tips for tugging those $2 trillion purse strings.

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

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

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

In Pictures: Eight Ways To Market To The Modern Mom

In Pictures: 12 Innovative Marketing Techniques

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

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

Comment On This Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/24/2009 8:40 PM

http://en.wikipedia.org

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

Check this out for symbolism on logic

1/25/2009 5:58 PM

http://lifehacker.com

Five Best People-Search Engines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/16/2009 11:49 PM

http://edition.cnn.com/

Top Saudi cleric: Ok for young girls to wed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't Miss

Saudi judge refuses to annul marriage of girl, 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/17/2009 3:25 PM

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

awesome pics

Sources and Resources

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

1/13/2009 11:37 AM

http://flowingdata.com

Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis

http://www.marketwatch.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/5/2009 3:16 PM

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

Holes give edge to new MoD armour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/10/2009 11:44 PM

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk

Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/12/2009 3:24 PM

http://www.independent.co.uk

Does the credit crunch have a silver lining for literature?

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

Friday, 9 January 2009

Margaret Thatcher celebrates on election night in 1987

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon Prosser

Publisher (Hamish Hamilton)

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

Pete Ayrton

Publisher (Serpent's Tail)

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

Geoff Dyer

Novelist & critic

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

Carole Welch

Publisher (Sceptre)

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

Gordon Burn

Novelist & critic

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

Tom McCarthy

Novelist & critic

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

1/13/2009 9:08 AM

http://www.squidoo.com

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

1/2/2009 2:46 PM

http://news.yahoo.com/

The meaning of the 'Oval' Office

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/4/2009 12:09 AM

http://bhc3.wordpress.com/

A Blog Is Your Stake in the Ground

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

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

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

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

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

12/31/2008 8:34 AM

http://adjix.com/hxcp

How Much Money Do Bloggers Make Blogging?

Archive for Blogging for Dollars

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

How Much Money Do Bloggers Make Blogging?

Blogging for Dollars 13 comments

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

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

Increase Amazon Sales with Best Seller and Popular Product Lists

Affiliate Programs, Blogging for Dollars 22 comments

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

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

Can you REALLY Make Money Blogging?

Blogging for Dollars 98 comments

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

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

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

Blogging for Dollars, Reader Questions 104 comments

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

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

How to Find Advertisers for Your Blog

Advertising, Blogging for Dollars 71 comments

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

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

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

How Bloggers Make Money Online without Blogging [POLL RESULTS]

Blogging for Dollars, Reader Questions 49 comments

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

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

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

10 Ways to Make Money BECAUSE of Your Blog

Blogging for Dollars 86 comments

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

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

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

8 Jobs for Bloggers

Blogging for Dollars 21 comments

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

Here’s the latest batch:

Editor and cross-blog […]

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

When Should I Put Advertising on My Blog?

Blogging for Dollars 78 comments

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

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

12/30/2008 12:16 PM

http://adjix.com/j8x5

Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For

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

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

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

How to Begin

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

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

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

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

1. Buzzlogic

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

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

2. Radian6

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

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

3. TNS Cymfony

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

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

4. Nielsen

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

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

5. Trackur

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

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

6. Brands Eye

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

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

7. Reputation Defender

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

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

8. Sentiment Metrics

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

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

9. Visible Technologies

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

Interested in more resources? Check these out:

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

- “HOW TO: Build Your Online Brand”

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

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

12/28/2008 10:29 PM

http://apnews.myway.com

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

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

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

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/

How to Start Speaking at Events

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

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

How to Start Speaking at Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a Speaking Page

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

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

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

Social Proof

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

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

How to Get Paid to Speak

Ask.

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

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

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

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

Other Things to Consider

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

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

The Bonus Round

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

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

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

12/27/2008 10:52 AM

http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

Structured Procrastination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12/26/2008 11:51 PM

No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”

Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met “green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. “When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way,” he said.

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.

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 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.

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.”