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 Home, Baby! | RECYCLE BIN 2005 | RECYCLE BIN 2006 | RECYCLE BIN 2007 | RECYCLE BIN 2008

AREA 47

 

SECTION 97: RECYCLE BIN 2008

 

Other websites have ARCHIVES.

But until I get my act together,

All I've got is a Recycle Bin.

This is not "Trash,"

But rather items pulled off the Home Page

Which have not yet been Organized.

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.copyblogger.com/blog-forum/

The Perfect Pair:
3 Reasons Every Blogger Needs a Forum

When I started blogging on my own several months ago after leaving the magazine world, there were two platforms I knew I needed to get started: A blog and a forum. I learned from my previous blog for the magazine that the two platforms complement one another perfectly.

I think all bloggers should consider the benefits of having a forum linked to their blog. Here are three of the advantages I’ve found:

1. A forum is a breeding ground for ideas. To be an effective blogger, you need to know what people are chatting about to give them great content, answer their questions, and be of service. Tuning in to the chatter on a forum sparks ideas for blog posts.

For example, I knew from reading my forum threads that finding an agent was a huge concern, so I decided to start interviewing agents for my blog. The blog provides a desirable connection for my forum members, and the forum, in turn, gives the blog a built-in audience.

2. A forum fosters group dialogue. Sure, most blogs allow comments. But comments aren’t really a dialogue, they’re a response to a monologue. The blogger controls the flow of information on a blog. A forum is a far better platform for conversations and relationships to develop—and this is where community building really takes off.

3. A forum is a great place to find guest posters. This is the perfect venue to find people with compelling ideas and an engaging writing style to guest post on your blog.

I’ve had guest posts from my forum members almost since the start of my blog. One forum member posted a thread about getting duped by a shady self-publishing company. I knew that was perfect blog fodder and I asked this writer for a guest post, which he seemed happy to write for me.

Also recently, I asked several forum members to do guest posts on participating in NanoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), an event that’s important to my community, but that I wasn’t participating in. These guest posts were especially well received and commented on. I think first-hand accounts always make for better blog posts than third-person pieces.

If you are interested in starting up your own forum, there are many platforms available including open source software like phpBB. I decided to go with VBulletin, which costs $180 to own outright, because I like the interface and it offers a subscription-based forum service that I’m going to use for classes and workshops.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that a forum is an easy thing to build and manage. In fact, if it seems like too much of a commitment, you may be better off frequenting a well-run forum that caters to your subject matter. A good forum requires almost-daily TLC.

But if you’re a blogger who wants to grow your community—once you do have your own forum, you’ll never want to be without one again.

--

http://www.rhymezone.com/

rhyming dictionary!

12/10/2008 7:13 AM

http://weburbanist.com/

15 of the World’s Most Amazing Houses

http://www.marijuana-uses.com/

Mr. X

By Carl Sagan

This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana Reconsidered (1971). Sagan was in his mid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . . same scene, orange house, brown sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields . . . Flash . . . Flash . . . Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colors . . . exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly.

I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

I want to explain that at no time did I think these things 'really' were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don't feel any contradiction in these experiences. There's a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there's another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it's my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in images of human beings, both of these items have changed over the intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether I'm high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed. Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence - at least in my flashed images - of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 108 bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had an image in which two people were talking, and the words they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads, at about a sentence per heartbeat. In this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would appear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in context with the conversation; but if one remembered these red words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements, penetratingly critical of the conversation. The entire image set which I've outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and something like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights - I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I'm down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex - on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word 'crazy' to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: 'did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on cannabis I discovered that there's somebody inside in those people we call mad.

When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it's a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I've made the effort - successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can't go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its accompaniments. One night, high on cannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be very good progress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had been able to achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs.

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say 'Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!' I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.

Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high - the attractive intellectual adventures always seem to be in every other area - I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall works. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that I'm sure I would never have thought of down. I've written a paper which mentions this idea in passing. I think it's very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.

I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I've negotiated it with no difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I'm not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If you're high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you usually do. I don't advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

http://www.cnn.com/

Happiness is contagious in social networks

(CNN) -- If you're feeling great today, you may end up inadvertently spreading the joy to someone you don't even know.

New research shows that in a social network, happiness spreads among people up to three degrees removed from one another. That means when you feel happy, a friend of a friend of a friend has a slightly higher likelihood of feeling happy too.

The lesson is that taking control of your own happiness can positively affect others, says James Fowler, co-author of the study and professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego.

"We get this chain reaction in happiness that I think increases the stakes in terms of us trying to shape our own moods to make sure we have a positive impact on people we know and love," he said. VideoWatch more on how happiness spreads »

Sadness also spreads in a network, but not as quickly, the researchers found. Each happy friend increases your own chance of being happy by 9 percent, whereas each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent. This reflects the total effect of all social contacts.

When framing the question differently, the study found that you are 15 percent more likely to be happy if a direct connection is happy, 10 percent if the friend of a friend is happy, and 6 percent if it's a friend of a friend of a friend.

The study, published in the British Medical Journal, used data from the Framingham Heart Study to recreate a network of 4,739. Fowler and co-author Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School charted friends, spouses and siblings in the network, and used their self-reported happiness ratings from 1983 to 2003.

Don't Miss

Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of "Stumbling on Happiness," called the study "a stunning paper by two of the most respected scientists in the field" in a statement he e-mailed to CNN.

"We've known for some time that social relationships are the best predictor of human happiness, and this paper shows that the effect is much more powerful than anyone realized," Gilbert said. "It is sometimes said that you can't be happier than your least happy child. It is truly amazing to discover that when you replace the word 'child' with 'best friend's neighbor's uncle,' the sentence is still true."

If you are the hub of a large network of people -- that is, if you have a lot of connected friends or a wide social circle -- you are more likely to become happy, the study found.

But the reverse is not true.

"You might only have one friend or two friends or something like that, and if you become happy, you're not going to try to get more friends. You're probably going to stick with what worked in the first place," Fowler said.

The researchers are also looking at the phenomenon on Facebook, which has more than 120 million active users. This study, which has not yet been published, looked at who smiles in their profile pictures who doesn't, and whether their connections also smile or not, Fowler said.

"We find smiling profiles cluster in much the same way as happiness is clustering in the Framingham Heart Study," he said.

Health Library

It's not just happiness that spreads in a social network. Fowler and Christakis have also looked at trends in cigarette smoking and obesity using the parts of the heart study network.

They found that when someone quits, a friend's likelihood of quitting smoking was 36 percent. Moreover, clusters of people who may not know one another gave up smoking around the same time, the authors showed in a New England Journal of Medicine article in May.

Social ties also affect obesity. A person's likelihood of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given time period, Fowler and Christakis showed in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2007.

And, like happiness, both smoking behavior and obesity seem to spread within three degrees of separation in a social network, Fowler said. Beyond three, things get fuzzier.

"Eventually you get out far enough in the social network that you're competing with all these other cascades of happiness and unhappiness that are sort of duking it out," he said. "Happiness on average wins, but once you get far enough away from someone in a social network, it's not possible to detect their effect anymore.”

http://www.safenow.org/

Try to absorb as much of the radiation as possible with your groin region. The current world record is 5 minutes, 12 seconds.

If you are trapped under falling debris, conserve oxygen by not farting.

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

In the NBC interview, Mr Obama avoided going into detail about the car industry rescue plan, but said letting major carmakers such as General Motors, Ford and Chrysler go bankrupt was not an option.

"That means we're going to have to figure out how to put the pressure in the same way a bankruptcy court would... but do so in a way that allows them to keep their factory doors open," he said.

The 2008 winner of the Nobel economics prize Paul Krugman said he doubted the US car sector would survive, but that it was worth supporting it in the short term.

"In the end these companies will probably disappear," the economics professor at Princeton University said.

--

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

Brutality

Belgian control of the Congo began with the slavery and murder sanctioned by King Leopold in the late 19th Century, as he turned this vast piece of Africa into his personal possession.

It is a measure of this dysfunctional society that it should turn to the Mai Mai for defence at a time of crisis
 

One authoritative estimate has put the number killed by Leopold at 10 million.

His troops needed to account for every bullet they were given, so they would cut the hands off those they killed as proof.

And if they lost a bullet or used one to kill an animal to eat, then they would have to cut the hand off a living person - just one of the European practices that so brutalised Africa that by the late 1950s eating Belgians felt justifiable.

And now the Mai Mai are back, recruiting and indoctrinating boys and girls for another jungle war.

--

http://news.bbc.co.uk

The BBC's business correspondent, Joe Lynam, said: "The British car industry faces its biggest challenge since the 1970s.

"Car sales and production are down 37% and 25% respectively in the past month as consumers postpone or cancel big ticket purchases," he said.

12/7/2008 8:22 AM

http://lifehacker.com/

During the 1920s and 1930s (and even into the 1940s), such parties formed the backbone of Harlem nightlife, and became for many working people not only an enjoyable and affordable way to dance and socialize but also an economic necessity. For the reasonable admission price of between ten cents and a dollar, plus the cost of liquor and food, guests could dance, drink, flirt, and gamble, while the hosts collected enough money to pay the landlord for another month

http://newblogtopic.blogspot.com

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Digital Marketing in the Downturn

As we have all witnessed the economy has been fluctuating in these uncertain times. Not only do we have to worry about our personal assets, but we need to think about our clients as well.

eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey, recently hosted a webinar, "7 Strategies for Surviving the Downturn". I think the 7 points he highlighted are helpful tips to keep in mind when we are thinking about our Marketing plans going into 2009.

1. Accountability- track how online effects offline
2. Keep doing search-all research companies have double digit gains for search in the coming year
3. Don't ignore the power of branding online (branding, display and sponsorships)
-only 30% of of chief marketers considered the offline impact of online advertising
4.Stay close to the customers
-A huge push on social media. Pick the right community for your target and add real value. Regular media messages aren't going to work.
-share the love by tapping into coveted influentials and create a community
- consumers #1 trust is word of mouth about a brand.
5. Engender Trust-trust is SO important for brands
6.Engage with online video
7. Test Test Test

As we ring in the new year, why not make our marketing dollars work harder and smarter and think about these strategies as we see what challenges await us in '09!

Posted by Amy Chauvin, CPG Account Planner

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

check this out

http://www.smbc-comics.com/

http://www.smbc-comics.com

http://www.getrichslowly.org/

10 Essential Steps to Take BEFORE You’re Laid Off

Thursday, 4th December 2008 (by J.D.)   

As a nation we have enjoyed relatively low unemployment for the last five years. At the end of 2007 the unemployment rate stood at 4.6%. By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate peaked at 24.9% in 1933, during the darkest year of the Great Depression.

In October of this year the unemployment rate grew 0.4% to 6.5%, its highest rate in 14 years. Ten million Americans are now unemployed: 240,000 people lost their jobs in October, and 284,000 lost their jobs in September. That represents the biggest two-month loss of American jobs since 2001. Economists are predicting the unemployment rate will rise to 8.5% by the end of 2009, which means as many as three million more workers will be laid off in the U.S.

Because I’m a CEO who hires employees regularly, a few friends of mine who have recently been laid off have asked me for job-hunting advice. Some have asked me to review their resumes and offer suggestions. Unfortunately these folks are now in job recovery mode and aren’t able to optimally position themselves for landing on their feet.

Personally I prefer actionable advice. As such, I’m instead going to suggest ten things you can do now to be prepared for a layoff a year from now.

  1. Update your skills. It’s easy to become distracted by everything that’s going on today at home and at work. We neglect investing in ourselves. We can get away with that during boom times, but during tough times we need up to date, relevant skills. Start immediately. If you need training, get it — but don’t mistake training for application. Make sure you are practicing your skills professionally on a day-to-day basis.
  2. Reduce your household burn rate. Many people earn more than the market will bear for their services. Stock prices have fallen 50%. Home prices are falling. Salaries adjust due to market conditions, too. When finding a job is tough, don’t restrict the size of the relevant job pool because you can’t afford to work for less than you’re currently earning. We live in different times than our parents did. I personally think everyone should prepare financially for being unemployed once every five years for a period of 3 to 6 months.
  3. Start a blog that contains at least 50% professional material. If you don’t already have a blog, stop reading this one and go start one right this minute. It’s essential. Your blog is your living resume. It shows how you think. It shows how you write. It shows what’s important to you. While it is fine to blog about personal topics, devote half of your posts to professional content. What is that you do by trade? Mentor us through your blog. We employers love hiring mentors — they raise everybody’s performance.
  4. Expand your physical network. Depending on how you’re wired, networking is either a lot of fun or a lot of work. If it’s work for you, have the discipline to start now. Building a network takes time, effort and sincerity. Start attending breakfast and/or cocktail networking events. Set goals for yourself. For example: “I want to have a good conversation and exchange business cards with at least 3 people during this breakfast.”
  5. Update your LinkedIn profile. You are on LinkedIn, right? If not, do that right now. Your LinkedIn profile is a marketing tool. Be honest, genuine and show some humility, but also make yourself stand out in a crowd. Optimize your profile for the five-line preview that comes up when someone conducts a search.
  6. Expand your virtual network via LinkedIn. Future employers aren’t dumb. They’ll detect that you only decided to invest in updating your profile and expanding your network and references after you lost your job. Do it now. Like physical networking, developing your virtual network takes time too. Set goals. For example: “I want to have 100 contacts by the end of the year and 250 contacts by this time next year.”
  7. Start exercising. We all know that discrimination is illegal for most reasons and unethical for other reasons. But if you’ve watched 60 Minutes, you know that’s not how humans behave. With comparably qualified candidates, the attractive, fit people are usually offered the job. What are employers looking for in prospective employees? Someone who will get the job done. If you look like you are full of energy, the perception is that you will get the job done.
  8. Learn to use social media effectively. Learn to use Twitter and Facebook. In addition to starting your own blog, participate in some discussions online by commenting on blogs in your industry. Always link your comments back to your blog. Potential employers will Google you. Show them that you’re thoughtful and have something to say. Conversely, be careful about thinking “it’s just Twitter” before tweeting something that could embarrass you later.
  9. Do extracurricular work that showcases your abilities. What’s better than telling a prospective employer how good you are? Show them! If you’re a software engineer, contribute on an open source project, develop an iPhone application or develop a robust website. If you’re an online marketer, prove your good by showing me that you have a site that gets a lot of traffic. I met a man earlier this year who’s a program manager at Microsoft. He wanted to move into a new role as a marketer, but didn’t have any day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft that showed he could do the job. So he bought a domain and set up a website dedicated to Caribbean travel. Soon it was attracting lots of traffic and ranked high in organic search. It was a great way to show doubters that he was qualified.
  10. Avoid being laid off in the first place. Last but not least, don’t relinquish the pole position. An incumbent has an edge. It’s easier to keep a job than find one. We’re hearing about companies cutting 25% or 33% of their headcount. That means you need to be in the top 67% or 75% to avoid a pink slip. Other than an entire plant, division or office closure, the decisions about whom to keep and whom to let go are based on performance, salary and redundancy of position. Boost your performance by getting meaningful things done. Come in earlier. Stay later. Be more visible. Start sending your boss weekly status reports showing your accomplishments. Exhibit leadership.

My wife participates in a group for moms of preschoolers, and she shared a story with me earlier this week. Each table has four young moms and one “mentor” mom whose kids are now adults. One of the young moms was concerned that her sole-provider husband might lose his job and asked the mentor what she would suggest they do. Her matter-of-fact answer was, “Well, for starters, you can stop complaining when he can’t drop the kids off at school before work and be home by 6:00 for dinner.”

Nobody knows how long the current economic crisis will last or how bad it will get. But it’s already proving to be a much tougher job climate than the past few years, and the next year looks bleaker still. Start preparing today for the possibility of being laid off sometime next year. The earlier you start, the better off you’ll be.

Unfortunately layoffs are sometimes unavoidable. If you’ve been laid off, we at blist hope we can help. We’ve created a website called Land on My Feet. It’s a simple, free, one-page, opt-in site for anyone who has been laid off to enter their name and a link to their Linkedin profile.

Despite economy-wide layoffs, some companies are still hiring, and we’re promoting this site to hiring managers as a free resource to find qualified candidates. Hopefully blist can help you land on your feet.

--

http://www.getrichslowly.org

Create a secret hollow book. Find a cheap musty old classic at your nearby Goodwill or used bookstore. Glue the pages together, use an X-Acto knife to hollow out the center of the book. Now the recipient can store his treasures!

Give the gift of experience. The Gift Weblog suggests, “There’s nothing like giving someone the gift of experience, it is something they will always remember.” Sample gifts of experience: sky diving, scuba lessons, hot-air balloon rides, cooking school, lunch with a hero, etc.

One Christmas when I was a poor college student, I leafed through children’s books at the library, looking for pages and pictures that reminded me of various friends. I photocopied these pages, colored them by hand, and then framed them with construction paper. I added a little note to each friend on the back of her piece. I spent maybe $10 total for all my gifts, though it took hours of my time. That was perfect: In college, I had plenty of time, but very little money, and making these things felt like an act of love. But giving somebody a CD I bought from Amazon? Not so much.

One Christmas, our friend “Santa” Craig handed out a gourmet salt assortment. It wasn’t because we’d been bad, but because we love great food. Buy large containers of a variety of unique salts (you may have to visit a gourmet food store), and then divide the salts into small ziploc bags. Be sure to label the bags to to include a bit of info about each variety. (You can create similar gifts with other items, of course, tea leaves or…)

Similarly, you might create a spice sampler. Bulk spices can make an affordable and appreciated gift for anyone who loves to cook, or who is moving into a new kitchen. Don’t know which ones to choose? Find some tempting recipes that call for exotic spices, then include the recipes with the spices. Or, get creative and make a custom spice blend for a meat rub, marinade mix, salad dressing kit, dip, or seasoning (search the web for ideas).

Here’s an idea from Tanya: “This year [my sister and I] are making personalized mirrors with one word affirmations, like ‘fabulous’ and ‘gorgeous’. We started by picking up a bunch of the smallish (8×8) mirrors from Ikea, I think they are $5-6 for a four pack. My sister is obsessed with fonts, so we had some fun searching for fonts that fit the word we are going to use and the receiver of the mirror. We printed out the words to make stencils that we could cut out on contact paper. We used some glass etching glaze, left over from a candle holder project a few years ago, to etch the words on the mirrors. We added some cheap rhinestones to glitz up the mirrors for the girls and added a masculine etched pattern for the boys. We finished them off by attaching ribbon and twine so that they could be hung easily. I really like that we are giving them a reason to smile at themselves everyday when they leave for work or school.”

For several years, my wife and I gave each other love coupons. Sounds sappy, I know. But it was nice to be able to come home at the end of the day and redeem a coupon for a dinner out, or for a back rub, or for an evening watching a favorite movie.

Here’s another gift my wife has made in the past: teacup candles! You’ll need craft-store wicks, wax (or old candles) that can be melted down, old teacups, and maybe a fragrance or two. Pretty single teacups (with or without saucers) can often be found at thrift stores for less than a dollar. Melt the wax in a double boiler, add fragrance if desired, then support the wick standing in the teacup while carefully filling the cup with wax. As the wax cools, it will contract and form a well. You can add more melted wax of the same color or add a second shade. These are fairly easy to make, but beware cups with obvious cracking; the hot wax may cause them to shatter.

Knip has a fantastic idea for a grandparent or other older relative: a memory jar. “The most wonderful gift I’ve ever given (it’s still talked about years later) cost me almost nothing. I spent a few months contacting friends and family members and asked them to send me memories and old pictures of my grandfather. Then I wrote one memory (or printed one picture)on each of 365 business card sized pieces of cardstock. I folded each in half and secured it with a bit of tape, then placed them all in a big jar I decorated. Every morning for the next year, my grandfather would take out a paper, open it, and see what other people cherished in him. He loved it.”

Personal gift certificates also make great gifts. In essence, these are gifts of time. Give new parents a gift certificate for a night of baby-sitting so that they can enjoy a night on the town. Are you good with computers? Give your brother-in-law a gift certificate for free computer repairs.

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12/6/2008 9:23 AM

http://freep.com/

Happier people watch less TV

By Joel Hood • Chicago Tribune • November 21, 2008

CHICAGO — Does this season of “Survivor” have you down in the dumps? Is “Dancing with the Stars” not doing it for you anymore?

Here’s some sobering news for couch potatoes: A 30-year study of television habits published in the December issue of scientific journal Social Indicators Research suggests that unhappy people watch considerably more TV, vote less, read fewer newspapers and are generally less socially active than happier people.

While some of that may not be breaking news, the study’s authors took particular interest in how happiness shaped TV viewing.

The University of Maryland researchers noted that TV is more popular than many other free-time activities, considering that viewers don’t have to leave the comfort of their homes, dress up, plan ahead or expend much energy at all. Perhaps it’s not surprising that TV takes up more than half of Americans’ free time.

The study indicated that unhappy people watch about 20% more television than very happy people, after factoring in their education, income, age and marital status.

What’s still unclear, researchers said, is whether watching TV is a symptom or a cause of unhappiness.

But while viewers said TV was enjoyable in the short run, they rated their overall satisfaction as low — meaning that even they recognized what a big waste of time it can be.

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http://www.freep.com --------------------------------------- +

MARK PHELAN

7 myths about Detroit automakers

The debate over aid to the Detroit-based automakers is awash with half-truths and misrepresentations that are endlessly repeated by everyone from members of Congress to journalists. Here are seven myths about the companies and their vehicles, and the reality in each case.

Myth No. 1: Nobody buys their vehicles

Reality: General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC sold 8.5 million vehicles in the United States last year and millions more around the world. GM outsold Toyota by about 1.2 million vehicles in the United States last year and holds a U.S. lead over Toyota of nearly 700,000 so far this year. Globally, GM in 2007 remained the world's largest automaker, selling 9,369,524 vehicles worldwide -- about 3,000 more than Toyota.

Ford outsold Honda by about 850,000 and Nissan by more than 1.3 million vehicles in the United States last year.

Chrysler sold more vehicles here than Nissan and Hyundai combined in 2007 and so far this year.

Myth No. 2: They build unreliable junk

Reality: The creaky, leaky vehicles of the 1980s and '90s are long gone. Consumer Reports recently found that "Ford's reliability is now on par with good Japanese automakers."

The independent J.D. Power Initial Quality Study scored Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Ford, GMC, Mercury, Pontiac and Lincoln brands' overall quality as high as or higher than that of Acura, Audi, BMW, Honda, Nissan, Scion, Volkswagen and Volvo.

J.D. Power rated the Chevrolet Malibu the highest-quality midsize sedan. Both the Malibu and Ford Fusion scored better than the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry.

Myth No. 3: They build gas-guzzlers

Reality: All of the Detroit Three build midsize sedans that the Environmental Protection Agency rates at 29-33 miles per gallon on the highway.

The most fuel-efficient Chevrolet Malibu gets 33 m.p.g. on the highway, 2 m.p.g. better than the best Honda Accord. The most fuel-efficient Ford Focus has the same highway fuel economy ratings as the most efficient Toyota Corolla. The most fuel-efficient Chevrolet Cobalt has the same city fuel economy and better highway fuel economy than the most efficient non-hybrid Honda Civic.

A recent study by Edmunds.com found that the Chevrolet Aveo subcompact is the least expensive car to buy and operate.

Myth No. 4: They already got a $25-billion bailout

Reality: None of that money has been lent out and may not be for more than a year. In addition, it can, by law, be used only to invest in future vehicles and technology, so it has no effect on the shortage of operating cash the companies face because of the economic slowdown that's killing them now.

Myth No. 5: GM, Ford and Chrysler are idiots for investing in pickups and SUVs

Reality: The domestics' lineup has been truck-heavy, but Toyota, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and BMW have spent billions of dollars on pickups and SUVs because trucks are a large and historically profitable part of the auto industry.

The most fuel-efficient full-size pickups from GM, Ford and Chrysler all have higher EPA fuel-economy ratings than Toyota and Nissan's full-size pickups.

Myth No. 6: They don't build hybrids

Reality: The Detroit Three got into the hybrid business late, but Ford and GM each now offers more hybrid models than Honda or Nissan, with several more due to hit the road in early 2009.

Myth No. 7: Their union workers are lazy and overpaid

Reality: Chrysler tied Toyota as the most productive automaker in North America this year, according to the Harbour Report on manufacturing, which measures the amount of work done per employee. Eight of the 10 most productive vehicle assembly plants in North America belong to Chrysler, Ford or GM.

The oft-cited $70-an-hour wage and benefit figure for UAW workers inaccurately adds benefits that millions of retirees get to the pay of current workers, but divides the total only by current employees. That's like assuming you get your parents' retirement and Social Security benefits in addition to your own income.

Hourly pay for assembly line workers tops out around $28; benefits add about $14. New hires at the Detroit Three get $14 an hour. There's no pension or health care when they retire, but benefits raise their total hourly compensation to $29 while they're working. UAW wages are now comparable with Toyota workers, according to a Free Press analysis.

12/3/2008 9:48 AM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Metal prices fall further than during Great Depression

The price of key industrial metals has fallen further over the last four months than occurred during the worst years of Great Depression between 1929 and 1933, according to research by Barclays Capital.

Kevin Norrish, the bank's commodities strategist, said the average fall in the price of copper, lead, and zinc has been roughly 60pc since the peak in July this year. All three metals were traded on the London Metal Exchange in the inter-war years so it is possible to make a comparison.

Prices for the three metals fell 40pc from their highs in 1929 before touching bottom in 1933, with the bulk of the fall in 1930 as the slump spread worldwide. "Lead and zinc have already lost more than they did in the 1930s," he said.

Copper was hit hardest during the Depression, despite the electrification drive in the US and the Soviet Union, falling 70pc at one stage before creeping back in the mid-1930s. The reason was an 85pc fall in US construction, then the biggest user of the metal.

Barclays Capital said the broader equity markets are already discounting the sorts of "savage declines" in corporate profits that were last seen in the Slump. It said (trailing) price to earnings ratios are actually lower now than they were the early 1930s, with moves in credit spreads that suggest investors are anticipating depression-era levels of economic contraction.

The credit markets continued to exhibit signs of extreme stress yesterday. The iTraxx Crossover index measuring default risk on low-grade European bonds punched above 950 for the first time. The investment grade index hit 188. The spreads are now flashing the sort of danger signals seen before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September.

Each episode of the financial crisis over the last eighteen months has been preceded by a big jump in the iTraxx indexes.

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http://www.newscientist.com/

The secret sex signals in human sweat

EVER had a feeling come over you that you just can't explain? Like suddenly getting all warm and fuzzy when you meet someone for the first time, while somebody else who looks just as good leaves you cold? Or experiencing a sudden pang of fear on a plane even though you're totally at ease with flying?


These seemingly unrelated and illogical human reactions may have a reasonable explanation after all, although one that not everyone will be happy to hear. They may be reactions to other people's pheromones.
 

Pheromones are something of a sensitive subject in human biology. Though they are found across the animal world from insects to mammals, research into human pheromones has been dogged by flaky experimental designs and dubious commercial endorsements, with the result that the entire field has a whiff of the disreputable about it. "It's not so much that the jury is out, but that the jury has been dismissed before the trial has begun," says Mike Meredith, a neuroscientist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who studies animal pheromones.

In recent years, though, this has begun to change. Evidence that animal pheromones don't always work in they way we thought, backed up by a growing number of brain-imaging studies in humans, is convincing some researchers that we really do make and respond to pheromones. As a result some think it's time to stop asking if human pheromones exist and start investigating exactly how they affect our behaviour.

The term pheromone was coined in 1959 to describe chemicals released by insects to trigger hard-wired behaviours in other members of the same species. The classic example is female moths releasing sex pheromones to attract a mate. When pheromones were discovered in mammals, their more complex behaviour meant this definition no longer fitted the bill. Researchers have been debating the meaning of the word ever since (see "What are pheromones?"). One useful working definition is that pheromones are chemicals which send a message that, in evolutionary terms, benefits both sender and receiver.

Whatever definition you go for, pheromones are a big part of the animal world. Animals use pheromones to transmit useful information about themselves, such as gender or sexual receptiveness; to change others' physiology, for example by stimulating ovulation; and to directly affect others' behaviour. Examples of these behaviour-changing or "releaser" pheromones include sexual attractants and the alarm pheromones many mammals - among them rats and deer - use to put others on alert without giving away their location with an alarm call.

For many years, it was assumed that humans did not produce or respond to any of these types of pheromones. In part that was down to a reluctance to admit that humans might respond in such an "animal" way. There is also no clear mechanism for how they might act on the human brain. In animals, pheromones are usually detected by the vomeronasal organ (VNO), a pair of mini-nostrils inside the nose which detect airborne pheromones and relay messages directly to the brain. Although humans have something resembling a VNO, there are no neurons linking it to the brain. And while we have the genes required for a working VNO, they no longer code for functional pheromone receptor proteins (New Scientist, 17 May, p 42). The obvious conclusion was that we had lost this method of communication at some point in our evolution.

That hasn't stopped researchers from making claims about human pheromones. In 1971 Martha McClintock, a social psychologist at Harvard University, famously reported that women who live together gradually synchronise their menstrual cycles. McClintock, now at the University of Chicago, suggested that this might be mediated by pheromones (Nature, vol 229, p 244). In 1998, along with her Chicago colleague Kathleen Stern, McClintock found evidence to support this idea, showing that sweat from women in different stages of their menstrual cycle either extended or shortened the cycles of other women (Nature, vol 392, p 177). Despite this evidence, McClintock's conclusions remain contentious because nobody has yet isolated the actual chemicals that cause the effect.

Sexy scents

More controversial still are claims that pheromones are involved in human sexual attraction. This is partly due to some high-profile yet scientifically questionable research done by David Berliner and Luis Monti-Bloch of the University of Utah in the mid-1990s. They claimed that when they exposed people to reproductive hormones from the opposite sex, they could see an electrical response from the part of the nose where the vomeronasal organ would be.

In women, cells in this region responded most strongly to extracts containing androstadienone, a hormone related to testosterone found in male sweat. Men reacted similarly to estratetraenol, which is found in female urine. The same team also reported that releasing these compounds into the air subconsciously altered mood, having a calming effect on the opposite sex. The research was widely greeted with scepticism because of Berliner's financial interest in a brand of perfume called Realm, which was laced with the supposed pheromones. The team's insistence that the pheromones act through the VNO also raised eyebrows. With no convincing evidence for a functional human VNO, many people dismissed the research outright.

Despite this chequered past, there are still plenty of researchers who insist that human pheromones are alive and well. One is Johan Lundstrom, a neuropsychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. He has shown that women can consistently sniff out their sisters from friends and strangers even when they are not consciously aware of any difference in odour. A similar effect is our well-known ability to select mates based on genetic signatures evident in their body odour - a subconscious indicator of the compatibility of their immune system.

To Lundstrom, this is convincing evidence that human pheromones are real - it's just that most researchers have a blind spot when it comes to using the P-word. "If you asked scientists whether one human can convey some sort of social message to another in their body odour, 99.9 per cent of them would say yes," he says. "If you ask them if humans have pheromones they'll say 'that hasn't been demonstrated'. It's a semantic issue."

That may all be about to change, thanks in part to the recent discovery that some animals detect pheromones using their normal olfactory system, not the VNO. "There are several well-established examples of pheromone communication in animals that don't require the VNO," says Meredith, who specialises in the animal VNO. For example, a recent study found that mice detect alarm pheromones via a bundle of nerve cells at the tip of their nose that is wired into the normal olfactory system (Science, vol 321, p 1092).

Brain-imaging studies have also helped revive the idea that humans may respond to sex pheromones. In a series of recent experiments, neuroscientist Ivanka Savic of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, exposed people to androstadienone and watched what happened in their anterior hypothalamus, a part of the brain thought to be involved in sexual behaviour.

In one study, published in 2005, Savic found that androstadienone activated that brain region in heterosexual women and homosexual men, but not in heterosexual men or homosexual women. She later found the opposite effect with estratetraenol.

Brain-imaging studies are also providing tantalising evidence that humans release and respond to alarm pheromones. These have been less well studied than those thought to be involved in attraction, but a handful of psychological studies have claimed to show that humans can detect the "scent of fear". In 1999, Denise Chen, a psychologist now at Rice University in Houston, Texas, asked a group of volunteers to sniff sweat from people who had watched either funny or scary film clips. More than half of the volunteers successfully identified a sample of fearful sweat despite not being able to consciously smell any difference in the samples.

In a similar study in 2002, Kerstin Ackerl from the University of Vienna in Austria reported that women seemed to be able to detect the scent of fear. The 60 women rated sweat from women who had watched a scary movie as stronger, less pleasant and smelling more "like aggression" than sweat from women who had watched a neutral movie (Neuroendocrinology Letters, vol 23, p 79).

Yet these studies used relatively small sample sizes and failed to control for factors such as how strongly different people reacted to the scary movie. They also tended to use questionnaires that asked leading questions about whether the sweat smelled like someone who was happy, angry or scared.

Now, though, a study by Lilianne Mujica-Parodi at Stony Brook University in New York may have eliminated some of these problems by looking directly at what "fear" sweat does to the brain.

In the study, which is yet to be published, the team taped absorbent pads to the armpits of 40 volunteers who were about to do their first ever skydive, to collect their sweat as they hurtled towards the ground. Back in the lab, the team transferred the sweat - plus samples of normal, fear-free sweat - into nebulisers and asked a second group of volunteers to breathe samples while lying in an fMRI scanner, without telling them anything about the nature of the experiment. Sure enough, volunteers showed significantly more activity in the brain's fear centres, the amygdala and hypothalamus, when breathing fear sweat.

They put pads into skydivers' armpits to collect sweat as they hurtled towards the ground

It's not clear whether the volunteers actually felt scared after breathing it in - the researchers didn't ask them in case this biased the results. But the team say the fact that their fear circuitry lit up in response to the putative pheromone "indicates that there may be a hidden biological component to human social dynamics, in which emotional stress is, quite literally, 'contagious'".

Taken together, Savic and Mujica-Parodi's work adds considerable weight to the idea that humans produce and respond to pheromones. Yet many people feel it is too early to declare a truce in the pheromone war.

Lundstrom says there is still a missing piece of the puzzle. "To my mind, activation of brain is not enough," he says. "I use brain imaging in my work but I like to see that there is a behavioural response - and to see it consistently. Not just once, but every time."

To provide this evidence, any human pheromone will need to be identified, synthesised and - crucially - tested to see whether it triggers a reliable behavioural change. Only then will we be able to say definitively that human pheromones exist.

This is a tall order. As Lundstrom points out, human body odour contains more than 2000 different compounds. "Picking one is like putting a blindfold on someone, spinning them around and asking them to hit the centre of a dartboard," he says.

If human pheromones are identified, however, a whole new debate would open up about how they could be used. Some uses raise more concerns than others. Spraying on some bottled sex appeal may be sneaky in the battlefield of modern dating, but the prospect of synthesising a substance that can induce fear in others is another matter entirely, not least because Mujica-Parodi's research was funded by DARPA, the US military's research arm. After seeing the team present their work at a recent conference, one blogger pondered whether the military was planning to use pheromones to send people "stampeding like spooked cattle". DARPA, however, says it is not aware of any military plans for fear pheromones and has no plans to fund further research in this area.

According to Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist at the King's Centre for Military Health Research at King's College London and a health consultant to the British army, the idea is also scientifically implausible. He points to studies done by Stanley Schachter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s, in which people were injected with adrenalin to create the physical symptoms of fear. These people only became fearful if the situation became threatening, suggesting that context is crucial. "You can generate the physical symptoms of fear but people don't necessarily get scared," says Wessely.

Similarly, Lundstrom has found that women only show a reliable response to androstadienone if there is a man in the room at the time of exposure. And since none of the subjects felt compelled to jump on the male in question, it seems fair to assume that in real life any pheromone-induced effects are likely to be small and influenced by other factors (Biological Psychology, vol 70, p 197).

As for whether it's worth investing in pheromone-laced aftershave for that big night out, Lundstrom sounds a note of caution. "Most of these companies are selling andosterone - it's a pig pheromone that 60 per cent of people can't smell and the rest think smells like urine," he says. On balance, it's probably worth working on some witty conversation instead.

What are pheromones?

A major stumbling block in the debate over human pheromones is the exact meaning of the word. "Pheromone" was coined to refer to a chemical released by insects to trigger a stereotypical response that occurs every time, without fail. This definition is clearly too narrow for humans; even for insects it is proving inadequate, with many insect pheromones needing an additional environmental cue to have their full effect.Another question is whether pheromones operate strictly subconsciously, or whether detectable odours can be classed as pheromones. With tantalising evidence emerging that people respond behaviourally to each other's body odours - plus research showing that some animals can sense pheromones through the normal olfactory system rather than a specialised organ - that's an increasingly pressing issue.All this confusion is hampering serious attempts to find out how humans respond to airborne chemicals from each other, so perhaps we need a new term entirely. "Everyone agrees that there is a phenomenon that needs to be explained," says Johan Lundstrom of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "Now we need to agree on what call it."

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12/5/2008 1:10 PM

http://www.online-college-blog.com/

100 Useful Tips and Tools to Research the Deep Web

By Alisa Miller

Experts say that typical search engines like Yahoo! and Google only pick up about 1% of the information available on the Internet. The rest of that information is considered to be hidden in the deep web, also referred to as the invisible web. So how can you find all the rest of this information? This list offers 100 tips and tools to help you get the most out of your Internet searches.

Meta-Search Engines

Meta-search engines use the resources of many different search engines to gather the most results possible. Many of these will also eliminate duplicates and classify results to enhance your search experience.

  1. SurfWax. This search engine works very well for reaching deep into the web for information.
  2. Academic Index. Created by the former chair of Texas Association of School Librarians, this meta-search engine only pulls from databases and resources that are approved by librarians and educators.
  3. Clusty. Clusty searches through top search engines, then clusters the results so that information that may have been hidden deep in the search results is now readily available.
  4. Dogpile. Dogpile searches rely on several top search engines for the results then removes duplicates and strives to present only relevant results.
  5. Turbo 10. This meta-search engine is specifically designed to search the deep web for information.
  6. Multiple Search. Save yourself the work by using this search engine that looks among major search engines, social networks, flickr, Wikipedia, and many more sites.
  7. Mamma. Click on the Power Search option to customize your search experience with this meta-search engine.
  8. World Curry Guide. This meta-search tool with a strong European influence has been around since 1997 and is still growing strong.
  9. Fazzle.com. Give this meta-search engine a try. It accesses a large number of databases and claims to have more access to information than Google.
  10. Icerocket. Search blogs as well as the general Internet, MySpace, the news, and more to receive results by posting date.
  11. iZito. Get results from a variety of major search engines that come to you clustered in groups. You can also receive only US website results or receive results with a more international perspective.
  12. Ujiko. This unusual meta-search tool allows for you to customize your searches by eliminating results or tagging some as favorites.

Semantic Search Tools and Databases

Semantic search tools depend on replicating the way the human brain thinks and categorizes information to ensure more relevant searches. Give some of these semantic tools and databases a try.

  1. Hakia. This popular semantic search engine only accesses websites that are recommended by librarians.
  2. Zotero. Firefox users will like this add-on that helps you organize your research material by collecting, managing, and citing any references from Internet research.
  3. Freebase. This community-powered database includes information on millions of topics.
  4. Powerset. Enter a topic, phrase, or question to find information from Wikipedia with this semantic application.
  5. Kartoo. Enter any keyword to receive a visual map of the topics that pertain to your keyword. Hover your mouse over each to get a thumbnail of the website.
  6. DBpedia. Another Wikipedia resource, ask complex questions with this semantic program to get results from within Wikipedia.
  7. Quintura. Entering your search term will create a cloud of related terms as well as a list of links. Hover over one of the words or phrases in the cloud to get an entirely different list of links.
  8. [true knowledge]. Help with current beta testing at this search engine or try their Quiz Bot that finds answers to your questions.
  9. Stumpedia. This search engine relies on its users to index, organize, and review information coming from the Internet.
  10. Evri. This search engine provides you with highly relevant results from articles, papers, blogs, images, audio, and video on the Internet.
  11. Gnod. When you search for books, music, movies and people on this search engine, it remembers your interests and focuses the search results in that direction.
  12. Boxxet. Search for what interests you and you will get results from the "best of" news, blogs, videos, photos, and more. Type in your keyword and in addition to the latest news on the topic, you will also receive search results, online collections, and more.

General Search Engines and Databases

These databases and search engines for databases will provide information from places on the Internet most typical search engines cannot.

  1. DeepDyve. One of the newest search engines specifically targeted at exploring the deep web, this one is available after you sign up for a free membership.
  2. OAIster. Search for digital items with this tool that provides 12 million resources from over 800 repositories.
  3. direct search. Search through all the direct search databases or select a specific one with this tool.
  4. CloserLook Search. Search for information on health, drugs and medicine, city guides, company profiles, and Canadian airfares with this customized search engine that specializes in the deep web.
  5. Northern Light Search. Find information with the quick search or browse through other search tools here.
  6. Yahoo! Search Subscriptions. Use this tool to combine a search on Yahoo! with searches in journals where you have subscriptions such as Wall Street Journal and New England Journal of Medicine.
  7. CompletePlanet. With over 70,000 databases and search engines at its disposal, this is an excellent resource for searching the deep web.
  8. The Scout Archives. This database is the culmination of nine years’ worth of compiling the best of the Internet.
  9. Daylife. Find news with this site that offers some of the best global news stories along with photos, articles, quotes, and more.
  10. Silobreaker. This tool shows how news and people in the news impacts the global culture with current news stories, corresponding maps, graphs of trends, networks of related people or topics, fact sheets, and more.
  11. spock. Find anyone on the web who might not normally show up on the surface web through blogs, pictures, social networks, and websites here.
  12. The WWW Virtual Library. One of the oldest databases of information available on the web, this site allows you to search by keyword or category.
  13. pipl. Specifically designed for searching the deep web for people, this search engine claims to be the most powerful for finding someone.

Academic Search Engines and Databases

The world of academia has many databases not accessible by Google and Yahoo!, so give these databases and search engines a try if you need scholarly information.

  1. Google Scholar. Find information among academic journals with this tool.
  2. WorldCat. Use this tool to find items in libraries including books, CDs, DVDs, and articles.
  3. getCITED. This database of academic journal articles and book chapters also includes a discussion forum.
  4. Microsoft Libra. If you are searching for computer science academic research, then Libra will help you find what you need.
  5. BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. This multi-disciplinary search engine focuses on academic research and is available in German, Polish, and Spanish as well as English.
  6. yovisto. This search engine is an academic video search tool that provides lectures and more.
  7. AJOL - African Journals Online. Search academic research published in AJOL with this search engine.
  8. HighWire Press. From Stanford, use this tool to access thousands of peer-reviewed journals and full-text articles.
  9. MetaPress. This tool claims to be the "world’s largest scholarly content host" and provides results from journals, books, reference material, and more.
  10. OpenJ-Gate. Access over 4500 open journals with this tool that allows you to restrict your search to peer-reviewed journals or professional and industry journals.
  11. Directory of Open Access Journals. This journal search tool provides access to over 3700 top "quality controlled" journals.
  12. Intute. The resources here are all hand-selected and specifically for education and research purposes.
  13. Virtual Learning Resource Center. This tool provides links to thousands of academic research sites to help students at any level find the best information for their Internet research projects.
  14. Gateway to 21st Century Skills. This resource for educators is sponsored by the US Department of Education and provides information from a variety of places on the Internet.
  15. MagBot. This search engine provides journal and magazine articles on topics relevant to students and their teachers.
  16. Michigan eLibrary. Find full-text articles as well as specialized databases available for searching.

Scientific Search Engines and Databases

The scientific community keeps many databases that can provide a huge amount of information but may not show up in searches through an ordinary search engine. Check these out to see if you can find what you need to know.

  1. Science.gov. This search engine offers specific categories including agriculture and food, biology and nature, Earth and ocean sciences, health and medicine, and more.
  2. WorldWideScience.org. Search for science information with this connection to international science databases and portals.
  3. CiteSeer.IST. This search engine and digital library will help you find information within scientific literature.
  4. Scirus. This science search engine moves beyond journal articles and also includes searches among such resources as scientists’ webpages, courseware, patents, and more.
  5. Scopus. Find academic information among science, technology, medicine, and social science categories.
  6. GoPubMed. Search for biomedical texts with this search engine that accesses PubMed articles.
  7. the Gene Ontology. Search the Gene Ontology database for genes, proteins, or Gene Ontology terms.
  8. PubFocus. This search engine searches Medline and PubMed for information on articles, authors, and publishing trends.
  9. Scitopia. This "deep federated search" brings the best information from the fields of science and technology.
  10. Scitation. Find over one million scientific papers from journals, conferences, magazines, and other sources with this tool.

Custom Search Engines

Custom search engines narrow your focus and eliminate quite a bit of the extra information usually contained in search results. Use these resources to find custom search engines or use the specific custom search engines listed below.

  1. CustomSearchEngine.com. This listing includes many of the Google custom search engines created.
  2. CustomSearchGuide.com. Find custom search engines here or create your own.
  3. CSE Links. Use this site to find Google Coop custom search engines.
  4. PGIS PPGIS Custom Search. This search engine is customized for those interested in the "practice and science" of PGIS/PPGIS.
  5. Files Tube. Search for files in file sharing and uploading sites with this search engine.
  6. Trailmonkey’s Custom Search Engine. This outdoor adventure search engine will help find information such as trails, maps, and wildlife around the world.
  7. Rollyo. "Roll your own search engine" at this site where you determine which sites will be included in your searches.
  8. Webhoker.com. Use this custom search engine to find information about Northern Ireland.
  9. Figure Skating Custom Search Engine. Use this search engine to learn about figure skating. The more this search engine is used, the better the results become.
  10. Custom Search Engines. There are three custom search engines here, two of which may be relevant for anyone interested in Utah constitution or juvenile justice.
  11. Go Pets America Custom Search Engine. This search engine will help you find information on pets and animals, their health and wellness, jobs in the field, and more.

Collaborative Information and Databases

One of the oldest forms of information dissemination is word-of-mouth, and the Internet is no different. With the popularity of bookmarking and other collaborative sites, obscure blogs and websites can gain plenty of attention. Follow these sites to see what others are reading.

  1. Del.icio.us. As readers find interesting articles or blog posts, they can tag, save, and share them so that others can enjoy the content as well.
  2. Digg. As people read blogs or websites, they can "digg" the ones they like, thus creating a network of user-selected sites on the Internet.
  3. Technorati. Not only is this site a blog search engine, but it is also a place for members to vote and share, thus increasing the visibility for blogs.
  4. StumbleUpon. As you read information on the Internet, you can Stumble it and give it a thumbs up or down. The more you Stumble, the more closely aligned to your taste will the content become.
  5. Reddit. Working similarly to StumbleUpon, Reddit asks you to vote on articles, then customizes content based on your preferences.
  6. Twine. With Twine you can search for information as well as share with others and get recommendations from Twine.
  7. Kreeo.com. This collaborative site offers shared knowledge from its members through forums, blogs, and shared websites.
  8. Talk Digger. Find information on the Internet based on what others are saying about it. Members discuss web sites, blogs, and specific topics here.

Tips and Strategies

Searching the deep web should be done a bit differently, so use these strategies to help you get started on your deep web searching.

  1. Don’t rely on old ways of searching. Become aware that approximately 99% of content on the Internet doesn’t show up on typical search engines, so think about other ways of searching.
  2. Search for databases. Using any search engine, enter your keyword alongside "database" to find any searchable databases (for example, "running database" or "woodworking database").
  3. Get a library card. Many public libraries offer access to research databases for users with an active library card.
  4. Stay informed. Reading blogs or other updated guides about Internet searches on a regular basis will ensure you are staying updated with the latest information on Internet searches.
  5. Search government databases. There are many government databases available that have plenty of information you may be seeking.
  6. Bookmark your databases. Once you find helpful databases, don’t forget to bookmark them so you can always come back to them again.
  7. Practice. Just like with other types of research, the more you practice searching the deep web, the better you will become at it.
  8. Don’t give up. Researchers agree that most of the information hidden in the deep web is some of the best quality information available.

Helpful Articles and Resources for Deep Searching

Take advice from the experts and read these articles, blogs, and other resources that can help you understand the deep web.

  1. Deep Web - Wikipedia. Get the basics about the deep web as well as links to some helpful resources with this article.
  2. Deep Web - AI3:::Adaptive Information. This assortment of articles from the co-coiner of the phrase "deep web," Michael Bergman offers a look at the current state of deep web perspectives.
  3. The Invisible Web. This article from About.com provides a very simple explanation of the deep web and offers suggestions for tackling it.
  4. ResourceShelf. Librarians and researchers come together to share their findings on fun, helpful, and sometimes unusual ways to gather information from the web.
  5. Docuticker. This blog offers the latest publications from government agencies, NGOs, think tanks, and other similar organizations. Many of these posts are links to databases and research statistics that may not appear so easily on typical web searches.
  6. TechDeepWeb.com. This site offers tips and tools for IT professionals to find the best deep web resources.
  7. Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web. This article includes links to many digital image resources that probably won’t show up on typical search engine results.
  8. Federated Search 101. Learn about federated search tools in this article that will be helpful to businesses thinking about purchasing a federated search product.
  9. Timeline of events related to the Deep Web. This timeline puts the entire history of the deep web into perspective as well as offers up some helpful links.
  10. The Deep Web. Learn terminology, get tips, and think about the future of the deep web with this article.

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Advertise your business on Google

No matter what your budget, you can display your ads on Google and our advertising network. Pay only if people click your ads.

 

12/1/2008 12:34 PM

http://www.news.com.a

Papua New Guinea women kill males babies to end tribal war

• Male children mean more war
• Women sick of the conflict
• Drastic action "will end tribal war"
WOMEN in Papua New Guinea's Highland region are killing their male babies to end a tribal war that has gone on for more than 20 years.
Two women from the Eastern Highlands spoke of the slaughter to PNG's National newspaper during a three-day peace and reconciliation course in the region's capital of Goroka.
 

Rona Luke and Kipiyona Belas, from two warring tribes, said male infanticide reduced the cyclical payback violence infamous in Highlands tribal fights.

If women stopped producing males, their tribe's stock would go down and this would force the men to end their fight, the women said.

"All the womenfolk agreed to have all babies born killed because they have had enough of men engaging in tribal conflicts and bringing misery to them," Ms Luke said.

The women could not give a figure on how many male babies had been killed.

Ms Belas said getting food was hard as husbands kept fighting and mothers and children were left to fend for themselves.

The Salvation Army is working with various tribes to bring peace to the warring groups, one particular fight continues after starting in 1986 over sorcery claims.

The Salvation Army told the Australian Associated Press that women were so fed up with the ongoing violence that they were taking drastic steps.

"This situation shows the extreme frustration the women have with the men in these areas," a spokesman said.

--

http://awesome.goodmagazine.com

cost of iraq war

 

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

Use this online tool to easily create a favicon (favorites icon) for your site. A favicon is a small, 16x16 image that is shown inside the browser's location bar and bookmark menu when your site is called up. It is a good way to brand your site and increase it's prominence in your visitor's bookmark menu.

·                         Supported file formats: gif, jpg, png, and bmp.

·                         Use a gif or png with transparency if you require it.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Top 10 Bad Things Obama Learned in His Intelligence Briefing

Yesterday, President-Elect Barack Obama received his first deep intelligence briefing, also known as The Bad News. Here is what he learned:

1. Chief source of carbon emission: Printing money for the bail-out.

2. The jobless rate counts looking for work as a full-time job.

3. Loose nukes now available only in blister-packs of six.

4. The Taliban are now twice as fierce, having discovered the awesome power of a good breakfast.

5. World of Warcraft: Totally fact-based.

6. American is unprepared for any biological attack that involves nookie.

7. The fate of the earth depends upon the President taking time every summer to personally fight the invasion of demonic space aliens who look surprisingly like brush.

8. The Constitution was suspended by secret Presidential order in 2002. The country is now governed by a Magic 8-Ball in a secret annex of the National Archive. The good news: Signs point to yes.

9. Sarah Palin accidentally was briefed first. So, yes, Alaska has been engaged in a secret air war with Russia, Africa is now a country...

10. The Iraq War has actually been over since 2005. What's been going on since then is what counts in Iraq as peace.

11. As the result of extensive plastic surgery, Osama Bin Laden has successfully penetrated this country, and, what's especially awkward for you, Mr. President-Elect, is that he's been living in the Chicago suburbs under the name ... wait for it ... "William Ayers."

http://www.calopps.org/default_nojs.cfm

for exciting careers in public employment

11/25/2008 2:17 AM

http://www.copyblogger.com/

Human beings are an intensely social creature. Most of us crave connection with a group of like-minded primates.

Direct marketing guru Dan Kennedy likes to say that most people are wandering around with umbilical cords in their hands, looking for someplace to plug them in.

In rough times more than ever, customers are looking for a magical parent to solve all their problems. Show that you’re strong and wise enough to help. Show that you’re trustworthy and that you care about making their lives better. And then do just that.

Even when times are good, providing a safe harbor will always speak to people’s core needs. And when times are bad, it’s that much more powerful.

We need to feel good

The decision to buy is made in an instant: a split second Yes fueled by desire and emotion. We want the emotional benefits that the product or service will give us.

Without that emotionally-driven Yes, we would only buy logical things like healthy food, modest and adequate shelter, and efficient, inexpensive transportation.

Even in the very worst of times, people will spend money on pleasure, beauty and comfort. No matter how practical your product is, think seriously about how you can communicate the ways it makes your customers feel good.

We also need to rationalize our emotions

On the other hand, even though we make emotional buying decisions, we don’t like to think of ourselves as toddlers with wallets. We’d much rather pretend that we make logical, rational decisions.

That’s why the best emotional promise needs to be backed up with some logical, reasonable facts. Customers need to reassure themselves that there’s a good “reason why” they’ve decided to make this purchase. They’re looking for a plausible because.

Without a logical reason (although “logical” can be a stretch in some cases), customers’ fear of feeling foolish will overcome their desire for the product. Don’t just stoke their emotional desire; satisfy their need for reasonable justification.

Business is not rational

Whether you’re a multibillion-dollar company or a lone freelance copywriter, business is about human feelings. Until our customers are robots or Vulcans, emotions will always be an essential component of business success.

If you need to attract more customers and make more sales (like anyone doesn’t), become a student of core human emotional needs. Speak respectfully to those needs, and keep your words and your actions in line with them. You’ll make more money, you’ll create a stronger bond with your customers, and you’ll enjoy your business more.

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If government bailout is 7.7trillion and there are 300m Americans we are each on the hook for $25,666. At 25b auto bailout is $83 per person.

“ New sign in my office: ‘How do you want your answer? (Choose two) Immediate. Accurate. Brief.’

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/

Elsewhere: MM | 43F | 5 | YLNT | Tweet

http://www.dailyseoblog.com

How to get indexed by Google in 48 hours

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http://www.noupe.com/

13+ Fantastic Tools For Knowing How They’re Doing It

11/24/2008 5:30 AM

http://www.time.com

YouTube, Politico, Huffington Post, Twitter and Facebook became daily or hourly necessities for millions. In 2004 newspaper websites were still mostly "shovelware"--the paper edition reproduced.

In 2004 there were probably still more people reading blogs than writing them. Not so now, or so it seems. And even if most blogs are skippable, there are one or two or maybe two dozen worth checking out a couple of times--or maybe three or four times--a day just to be sure you're not missing anything. (See the Top 25 blogs.)

But many readers may be reaching the point with blogs and websites that I reached long ago with the Sunday New York Times Magazine--actively hoping there isn't anything interesting in there because then I'll have to take the time to read it.

http://sixrevisions.com/

30 Beautiful Examples of Grunge in Web Design

Grunge is a stylish design trend that gives web designs a less uniform, less structured, and more organic look-and-feel. It’s characterized by textured/gritty backgrounds, uneven/torn edges, worn, faded and aged graphic elements inspired by urban and industrial architecture and scenery. It gives a way for designers to venture away from the glossy, flashy, and rigid design elements that characterize the "Web 2.0"style – a style that still dominates mainstream web design.

In this collection, you’ll find 30 excellent examples of grunge in web design for your inspiration. From portfolios and fashion websites to online stores and church sites – you’ll find a variety of websites that choose to "dirty up" their web design.

Related Content

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http://www.noupe.com/fonts/

The web is rich with creative and amazing fonts, and the choice is enormous. So today we would like to present 50 incredible FONT which you can use for web or print design. This collection will sure help you improve your typography skills! Let’s take a close look at some of the most beautiful fonts we’ve found on the web. Some amazing fonts are missing? Let us know!

Also:

40+ Extremely Beautiful FONTS Hand-picked from deviantART

http://www.noupe.com/fonts

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http://www.toxel.com/

Creative and Unusual Lamp Designs

http://www.toxel.com/

·  Toxel.com

·  Design

·  Inspiration

·  Tech

·  Contact Us

·  RSS

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http://www.techcrunch.com/

Jerry Yang is the $1.8 billion man. The stock market thinks Yahoo is worth that much more without Yang at the helm.

That’s approximately how much the market capitalization of Yahoo’s stock went up this morning, with the first trade after last night’s announcement that Yang would be stepping down as CEO. The shares were up nearly 12 percent in early morning trading.

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11/18/2008 10:55 AM

http://www.problogger.net/

Advantages to having a blogging buddy.

  1. You can feedback on posts, prior to pressing publish. Writing without a sounding board can be difficult. Writing without a sounding board when we’re about to publish our thought for world consumption can be terrifying. Having someone with whom to send our words for perusal can make all the difference in how we feel about our work. Sometimes, feedback is as simple as a good job! or a quickly corrected comma. Other times a slow down! or a what exactly are you trying to say? might be more in order. Good or bad, a buddy can help lead us in the right direction
  2. You can have someone to vent to, who understands your situation. Blogging is difficult. No one understands this essential truth better than another blogger. Most of us suffer common setbacks. Simply knowing that someone else is feeling, or has felt, something similar, can be all we need to know our feelings are only fleeting.
  3. You can work on projects together. Collaboration is one of the great joys of blogging. Cooperation comes in many forms, and often by surprise, but pooling minds on a joint project offers pleasure like little else. Swapping ideas through email or instant message is immediate and often amusing. Inspiration will surely abound, and take you to wonderful places you were never even planning to go.
  4. You can share link love. It’s well established that links are the currency of the net. They strengthen our rating with analytic aggregators such as Technorati and Alexa, while erecting new roads for readers to reach our words. Having a buddy that we can count on to help generate links is like having a friend post flyers to our show on telephone poles across the city.
  5. You can share each others posts through social media and with other bloggers. Social media plays an enormous role in helping drive blogs toward success, and can sometimes be the difference between breaking out and blowing up. When it comes to outlets such as Twitter and StumbleUpon, every blogger brings a different audience. Even with audience overlap, a post spread by your blogging buddy will extend to a different audience than your own.
  6. You can share communities. Each post develops our community further. Every blog has its own set of readers and subscribers who drop in to say hello. Commitment is a natural byproduct of community. A buddy blogger can ask his audience to give your work a chance. A portion of the audience will be happy to comply, and that chance could make all the difference.
  7. You can help each other stay motivated as you share encouragement. The peaks and valleys of daily blogging lend themselves well to the buddy system. Just as one buddy sees a lull in subscribers, the other may be experiencing a peak. That peak could be a prompt for encouragement. Your buddy is part of your team. Success for one means success for all. All it takes is the proper mindset; choose to celebrate successes, and supersede all difficulty.
  8. You can guest post for each other. Guest posts are an excellent way to build your name brand, while continuing to refine your craft. Landing a guest post, especially in the beginning, can be difficult. With a blogging buddy, it’s as simple as trading baseball cards.
  9. You can share each others talents. People are different, and bring separate skill sets to the table. Some people tend to be more creative, while others might display a stronger technical side. Fate seems to have an odd way of laying opposites together, and often you will find that the talents of your blogging buddy, or buddies, will nicely compliment your own.
  10. You’ll have twice the blogging power at your disposal. Getting started blogging is hard, gaining momentum even more so. Having twice the reach, or at least twice the intent, can be the difference between barely eking by, and soaring through the stratosphere.

The main thing to remember is patience. As in life, true friendship cannot be forced. Be honest about who you are and what you offer, and the right buddy will find you.

11/18/2008 3:31 AM

http://www.thrfeed.com/

November 17, 2008

Study: Unhappy people watch more TV

An extensive new research study has found that unhappy people watch more TV while those consider themselves happy spend more time reading and socializing.

The University of Maryland analyzed 34 years of data collected from more than 45,000 participants and found that watching TV might make you feel good in the short term but is more likely to lead to overall unhappiness. 

"The pattern for daily TV use is particularly dramatic, with 'not happy' people estimating over 30% more TV hours per day than 'very happy' people," the study says. "Television viewing is a pleasurable enough activity with no lasting benefit, and it pushes aside time spent in other activities -- ones that might be less immediately pleasurable, but that would provide long-term benefits in one’s condition. In other words, TV does cause people to be less happy."

The study, published in the December issue of Social Indicators Research, analyzed data from thousands of people who recorded their daily activities in diaries over the course of several decades. Researchers found that activities such as sex, reading and socializing correlated with the highest levels of overall happiness.

Watching TV, on the other hand, was the only activity that had a direct correlation with unhappiness.

"TV is not judgmental nor difficult, so people with few social skills or resources for other activities can engage in it," says the study. "Furthermore, chronic unhappiness can be socially and personally debilitating and can interfere with work and most social and personal activities, but even the unhappiest people can click a remote and be passively entertained by a TV. In other words, the causal order is reversed for people who watch television; unhappiness leads to television viewing."

Unhappily married couples also watch more TV: "(Happily married couples) engage in 30% more sex, and they attend religious services more and read newspapers on more days," reports the study. "While those not happy with their marriages watch more TV."

Yet there may be good news here for broadcasters. Commenting on the study, co-author John P. Robinson said the worsening economy could boost TV viewing.

"Through good and bad economic times, our diary studies, have consistently found that work is the major activity correlate of higher TV viewing hours," Robinson says. "As people have progressively more time on their hands, viewing hours increase."

Concludes the study: "These points have parallels with addiction; since addictive activities produce momentary pleasure but long-term misery and regret. People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged, with TV becoming an opiate."

--

http://www.iphoneatlas.com

Google Voice Search Function Finally Debuts — and It Works Really Well

Days after it was expected to debut, a voice search function has been added to the Google application for the iPhone. The feature allows users to speak a search term, which is then transmitted to Google’s servers, recognized, then entered as a search term.

In initial testing, the feature works surprisingly well, easily recognizing simple, single words like “animals” and “cookies,” and even complex phrases like “what is my dog thinking” (don’t ask). In fact, despite our skepticism, this feature might actually be faster than the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard for complex phrases. Add to this well-oiled functionality the fact that search results are displayed in an iPhone-optimized format, and the app’s access to other time-saving features, Google’s iPhone offering may have actually become useful.

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http://www.wfs.org/

Each year since 1985, the editors of THE FUTURIST have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in the magazine to go into our annual Outlook report. Over the years, Outlook has spotlighted the emergence of such epochal developments as the Internet, virtual reality, and the end of the Cold War.

Here are the editors' top 10 forecasts from Outlook 2009:

1. Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030. By the late 2010s, ubiquitous, unseen nanodevices will provide seamless communication and surveillance among all people everywhere. Humans will have nanoimplants, facilitating interaction in an omnipresent network. Everyone will have a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. Since nano storage capacity is almost limitless, all conversation and activity will be recorded and recoverable. -Gene Stephens, "Cybercrime in the Year 2025," July-Aug 2008, p. 34

2. Bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible. Emerging scientific disciplines (notably genomics, nanotechnology, and other microsciences) could pave the way for a bioattack. Bacteria and viruses could be altered to increase their lethality or to evade antibiotic treatment. Another long-term risk comes from nanopollution fallout from warfare. Nanoparticles could potentially cause new diseases with unusual and difficult-to-treat symptoms, and they will inflict damage far beyond the traditional battlefield, even affecting future generations. -Barry Kellman, "Bioviolence: A Growing Threat," May-June 2008, p. 25 et seq.; Antonietta M. Gatti and Stefano Montanari, "Nanopollution: The Invisible Fog of Future Wars," May-June 2008, p. 32

3. The car’s days as king of the road may soon be over. More powerful wireless communication that reduces demand for travel, flying delivery drones to replace trucks, and policies to restrict the number of vehicles owned in each household are among the developments that could thwart the automobile’s historic dominance on the environment and culture. If current trends were to continue, the world would have to make way for a total of 3 billion vehicles on the road by 2025. -Thomas J. Frey, "Disrupting the Automobile’s Future," Sep-Oct 2008, p. 39 et seq.

4. Careers, and the college majors for preparing for them, are becoming more specialized. An increase in unusual college majors may foretell the growth of unique new career specialties. Instead of simply majoring in business, more students are beginning to explore niche majors such as sustainable business, strategic intelligence, and entrepreneurship. Other unusual majors that are capturing students’ imaginations: neuroscience and nanotechnology, computer and digital forensics, and comic book art. Scoff not: The market for comic books and graphic novels in the United States has grown 12% since 2006. -World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2008, p. 8

5. There may not be world law in the foreseeable future, but the world’s legal systems will be networked. The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), a database of local and national laws for more than 50 participating countries, will grow to include more than 100 counties by 2010. The database will lay the groundwork for a more universal understanding of the diversity of laws between nations and will create new opportunities for peace and international partnership. -Joseph N. Pelton, "Toward a Global Rule of Law: A Practical Step Toward World Peace," Nov-Dec 2007, p. 25

6. Professional knowledge will become obsolete almost as quickly as it’s acquired. An individual’s professional knowledge is becoming outdated at a much faster rate than ever before. Most professions will require continuous instruction and retraining. Rapid changes in the job market and work-related technologies will necessitate job education for almost every worker. At any given moment, a substantial portion of the labor force will be in job retraining programs. -Marvin J. Cetron and Owen Davies, "Trends Shaping Tomorrow’s World, Part Two," May-June 2008, p 41

7. The race for biomedical and genetic enhancement will-in the twenty-first century-be what the space race was in the previous century. Humanity is ready to pursue biomedical and genetic enhancement, says UCLA professor Gregory Stock, the money is already being invested, but, he says, "We’ll also fret about these things-because we’re human, and it’s what we do." -Gregory Stock quoted in "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally, Living Personally," Nov-Dec 2007, p. 57

8. Urbanization will hit 60% by 2030. As more of the world’s population lives in cities, rapid development to accommodate them will make existing environmental and socioeconomic problems worse. Epidemics will be more common due to crowded dwelling units and poor sanitation. Global warming may accelerate due to higher carbon dioxide output and loss of carbon-absorbing plants. -Marvin J. Cetron and Owen Davies, "Trends Shaping Tomorrow’s World, Part One," Mar-Apr 2008, p. 52

9. The Middle East will become more secular while religious influence in China will grow. Popular support for religious government is declining in places like Iraq, according to a University of Michigan study. The researchers report that in 2004 only one-fourth of respondents polled believed that Iraq would be a better place if religion and politics were separated. By 2007, that proportion was one-third. Separate reports indicate that religion in China will likely increase as an indirect result of economic activity and globalization. -World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2007, p. 10

10. Access to electricity will reach 83% of the world by 2030. Electrification has expanded around the world, from 40% connected in 1970 to 73% in 2000, and may reach 83% of the world’s people by 2030. Electricity is fundamental to raising living standards and access to the world’s products and services. Impoverished areas such as sub-Saharan Africa still have low rates of electrification; for instance, Uganda is just 3.7% electrified. -Andy Hines, "Global Trends in Culture, Infrastructure, and Values," Sep-Oct 2008, p. 20


All of these forecasts plus dozens more were included in the report that scanned the best writing and research from THE FUTURIST magazine over the course of the previous year. The Society hopes this report, covering developments in business and economics, demography, energy, the environment, health and medicine, resources, society and values, and technology, will assist its readers in preparing for the challenges and opportunities in 2009 and beyond.

http://www.ginside.com/

Google has been holding a few tricks up their sleeve and have been waiting to pull them out. It’s time.

Google’s Android product is a platform for mobile phones, a competitor would be Windows Mobile.

Google announced that they are rolling out some software which will allow Android-powered phones to search Google Books’ platform for physical books. It does it by utilizing the camera and built-in technology to detect the ISBN (International Serialized Book Number) of a book and, without even clicking the shutter, it will provide you options to search full text of the book.

This is a huge, HUGE, innovation. But it really brings me back to the days of education. Why would an everyday person need to search for a specific quote or line in a book? I certainly don’t have a need for it. Sure, while in school, this would have been an amazing tool to have in hand so I could easily find things in a book. But everyday application today, not so much for me. Within that context, how many students have Android-powered phones?

There are still the same limitations of Google Books Search, that not every single book ever written is indexed [yet]. Additional limitations include potential hiccups in the software. As the first release of the application, it’s bound to have a bug here or there.

But retrospectively looking at this product, did you ever think you would be able to search a book in front of you, with a device that fits in the palm of your hand? I certainly never imagined that.

This is just one product that I can see Google coming out with in the future. Let this be the start of a revolution [again] for mobile applications.

http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/

Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies

http://news.bbc.co.uk

Shares in Citigroup dropped 4.4% to $9.10 in early trading. They are down almost 70% this year.

Citigroup, one of the largest US banks, is one of nine financial institutions benefiting from the US government's bail-out programme.

The Treasury announced last month that it would be providing cash injections worth $125bn to be shared between Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street and Merrill Lynch.

Citigroup has lost more than $20bn (£13.6bn) in the past year because of the global financial crisis.

It has reported four straight quarterly losses and some analysts believe the bank will not make a profit again until 2010.

http://www.butterbeehappy.com/

Bee a bit happier

Journal your happy thoughts each day and see what's making your friends and family happy.

Harvard, UC Davis, and Miami University research has shown that jotting down 5 thoughts of gratitude each day can make you a happier person.

Gratitude makes you happier.

People are always looking for the secret to being happier. ButterBeeHappy.com doesn't claim to fix all problems, but our users do claim to feel happier after keeping a journal of gratitude and happy thoughts. ButterBeeHappy.com is based on research by psychologists Ben-Shahar, Emmons, and McCullough. Tal Ben-Shahar wrote the book Happier which directly influenced ButterBeeHappy.com. It just makes sense- most of us don't stop to think about the things that make us happy.

Who's on ButterBeeHappy.com?

Right now ButterBeeHappy.com is a fledgling community, but it is rapidly growing. All sorts of people are journaling their gratitude and happiness on ButterBeeHappy.com. You can explore what other users have posted, which is a very healthy exercise generating gratitude and happiness.

Positive emotions help you thrive.

Positive emotions and psychology help people thrive. In life there are many factors that can get people down, such as the economy. However, psychological research shows that economic factors are a poor predictor of overall happiness. Can you guess what is a good predictor of happiness? That's right, gratitude. When you jott down your 5 happy thoughts each day you are really practicing being grateful, and are thus appreciating your life to its full extent.

"The test of all happiness is gratitude"-G.K. Chesterton 1908

http://www.googletutor.com/

Google Tutor’s Google Search Manual

Running a Google query means entering your search criteria into Google’s search field and requesting the search results. This search field is found either on the main Google page:

In addition, you might find a search field on some web sites. Wherever you find it, you can use the same query for the same results (be aware that some web sites may have “site-flavored” search boxes which limit your search to certain pre-selected categories).

What criteria to use for the Search Query?

Your natural inclination is to enter whatever word you think might match up with the sites you are looking for. This word is called a keyword. After pressing enter, the search results page will display all the sites that contain the keyword you entered. The keyword could be in the text, title URL or hidden META tags. Note: that capitalization is ignored.

Unless this keyword is unique (which is difficult with gazillions of web page indexed), you are going to have a very long list of search results. For example, searching for [supercalifragilisticexpialidocious] resulted in 43,300 pages! Obviously, you need to narrow it down. Imagine if you keyed in a more popular word. Let’s say you are a golf enthusiast and key in [golf]. That will give you 147,000,000 results.

Now if you just wanted the most popular, general sites for golf, you could find some in your results list because the most popular pages rise to the top. Our search brought up golf.com, golfweb.com, golfchannel.com, golddigest.com and more on the first page. If that’s the type of popular site you need to find, that might work for you. But, usually you need to look deeper than that. So how do you do that?

Multiple Keywords

You can start by entering more than one keyword. If you key more than one, all keywords must be found on the page. To get technical, this is called a logical AND. Returning to the subject of golf, let’s say you want to find out about the golf scene in Boise, ID. Perform the search with the query [golf Boise]. This returns 1,100,000 results.

You get the basic idea. You can keep adding more keywords to narrow down the list. You might add words like spa and country club to try to find exactly the type of place you are looking for. Don’t let the huge number of pages that come up scare you; remember, the list is sorted in order of relevance. Google will display the most popular sites first. At the tail end of the results listing you might find pages in which people simply mentioning it in their family blog or something.

Keep in mind that Google gives higher priority to pages with search terms that are found in the same order as you structured them in your query, and if the words on the page are close in proximity.

Compound Words

There are quite a few compound words that are sometimes found combined into one word, sometimes separated into multiple words and sometimes connected together with a hyphen. If you are searching for one of these words, is it important which format you use to search? You bet it is, if you don’t want to miss anything.

First off, let’s make sure we all understand the types of conditions I’m talking about. I don’t know about other languages, but the English language can be very confusing in its seemingly arbitrary spelling of compound words and phrases. A word phrase can be spelled as a solid compound, a hyphenated compound or spaced words. Do you spell it database, data base or data-base, website, web site or web-site, fundraiser, fund raiser or fund-raiser? There are hundreds of words and phrases that are like this.

And then there are the acronyms or made up sets of letters/words that have an irregular use of the hyphen. Take for example the Apple operating system OS X. Or is it OSX or OS-X? There is obviously one preferred usage, developed by Apple, but it doesn’t mean everyone spells it that way.

So, how do you search for these? You don’t want to miss anything, and you certainly don’t want to perform three searches. You also don’t want to have to tale the time to build a query with the OR operator.

If you were to perform the search as spaced words, such as [left handed], you’ll get pages with ‘left handed’ and ‘left-handed’, but no ‘lefthanded’. If you search for [lefthanded] you’ll only get ‘lefthanded’.

But, if you search for [left-handed] you get it all!

ANSWER: Always search for compound words with the hyphen and you’ll pull up pages that may use all three variations..

Automatic Exclusion of Common Words, Punctuation and Special Characters

Google ignores common words and characters such as “the” and “how”, as well as certain single digits and single letters. This is done because they are virtually omnipresent and therefore slow down and expand your search without improving results. If Google considered any of your words to be common words it will note this in a message just below the search field.

If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a “+” sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the “+” sign.) Enclosing multiple words in quotes to form a phrase (more on that later) does the same thing.

Other than the special characters you’ll learn about later that have special relevance to Google, most punctuation will be ignored. There is an exception, and that is the apostrophe since it is used in contractions.

Word Variations (Stemming)

Google uses something called stemming technology. When it considers it appropriate, it will search not only for your search terms, but also for words that are similar to some or all of those terms. What it does, essentially, is match other versions of a word by chopping it down to its basic form and matching different endings. Take the word “runs”. Its most basic form is “run”. Stemming will match run, runs, running, runner and runners. These stemmed words are assigned less relevance because they aren’t an exact match. But they are still considered a match.

Google supports powerful operators which can be special characters or words that modify the search query. In this section we’ll look at the basic–not to be confused with weak–operators which include the OR operator and the special character operators:

  • OR word or “|” character
  • Double Quotation Marks (” “)
  • Plus sign (+)
  • Minus sign (-)
  • Tilde (~) character
  • Asterisk (*) character
  • Double Periods (..)
  • Parenthesis (())

As I’m explaining these, I’ll be tempted to use advanced operators (which I’ll describe later) to improve them, but I can’t until we get to that chapter. So, as you are reading, know that there are often better ways to do what I’m showing you and you’ll soon learn how.

The OR Operator

When you build your search with multiple keywords, Google searches for these as logical ANDs. This means that all of the keywords must be satisfied. For example, search query [red blue] means pages with both red and blue will be selected. But what if you wanted to search for either of the words? Do this by placing an OR between the words like this: [red OR blue]. The OR operator must be in caps; a lower case OR will be considered one of the stop words and ignored. Better yet, if you want to save a keystroke and not take the chance of keying it in lowercase, you can use the pipe character “|” instead of the word OR. These are both valid OR queries:

[Uranus OR Neptune]
[Uranus | Neptune]

OR sets the either or condition between the element preceding it and the element following it. It does not perform an OR between multiple words on either side of it (unless they are a phrase or group, which you’ll read about in a moment). So, the following query does not search for either “red couch” or “blue sofa”. What it does instead is search for “red” and “sofa” and either “couch” or “blue.” You’ll end up with pages that have “red”, “couch” and “sofa” or “red”, “blue” and “sofa”–not what you are looking for.

[red couch | blue sofa]

So, how would you request either “red couch” or “blue sofa”? By using phrases, up next…

Double Quotation Marks for Exact Phrase Search

When you enter multiple keywords, Google searches for all of those keywords. It gives precedence to finding the keywords together just as they are keyed, and those in close proximity, but it will also pull up pages having the keywords anywhere in the page.

But, you can search for only the exact set of keywords, in the order you keyed them, by enclosing them in quotation marks. The words within the quotes are called a phrase. In addition, enclosing the search terms in quotation marks will stop word stemming (finding variations of the word, not to be confused with synonyms). For this reason, you could use quotation marks to enclose a single word simply to find that exact word without Google word-stemming it.

Here is an example of using a phrase to better find pages with Crater lake Lodge in them:

[Crater Lake Lodge] 151,000 pages, not all about the Crater Lake Lodge
["Crater Lake Lodge"] 6,550 pages virtually all referencing the Crater Lake Lodge

Getting back to the “red couch” or “blue sofa” query we did earlier, you can now do that with this query that uses phrases:

["red couch" | "blue sofa"]

Using the “+” Sign to Force a Search on a Word

Google ignores certain “common words” (called stop words) because they appear too frequently in pages and would thus pull up too many pages that would not satisfy the search request properly. Using the “+” sign will force Google to treat the word following it (without a space in between) as a valid search term.

Frankly, there are not many situations that using this does any more than enclosing a word or words in quotation marks. For example, Google tells you that if searching for Star Wars Episode I you should use [Star Wars Episode +I]. Well, it would be better as ["Star Wars" "Episode I"]. This way you won’t get someone who wrote “I sure love that episode of Star Wars, the second one.” (I created two phrases in my search in case there was any punctuation between Star and Episode.)

There are valid situations in which you will need the “+” sign, and you’ll know it when you come across it.

Omitting Pages with Certain Keywords by using the “-” Sign

This special character is much more useful than the “+” sign. It tells Google to omit pages that have a particular word or phrase in it. Often words have multiple meanings and you end up with results that include pages that have nothing remotely to do with what you were interested in.

For example, let’s say that you were interested in learning about alternative energy, with the exclusion of solar energy since you already know about that. The following would satisfy that search:

[alternative energy -solar]

Powerful Synonym Search with the “~” Sign

Now this is a great search operator! By placing a “~” sign (called a tilde) right in front of a word (no space in between), you are instructing Google to search not only for the word following the tilde, but also its synonyms. Without doing this in certain types of searches you will miss many valuable sites. Let’s say that you want to find sites that offer a primer on alternative energy. You know that the word “primer” is not the only way to say “an introduction to” or “the basics of” but you don’t want to try to think up all the synonyms and build a massive OR query. So, you use the tilde like this:

["alternative energy" ~primer]

You should execute this query by clicking the link to study the results. Looking at just the first page, you’ll see pages that use the words, “tips,” “basics,” “review” and “introduction.” Although not “primer”, the sites appear to be what we are looking for. Using just one word like “primer” would have missed many sites of interest.

Wildcard Search with the Asterisk

You can use the asterisk “*” as a wildcard in your search query. It’s not the type of wildcard people are used to. It’s really more of a placeholder for a single word. It means that wherever there is an asterisk, the search will accept any word.

This works well if you know a phrase but forgot one of the words. For example, let’s say you know there is a story called Little somethingg Riding Hood, but for the life of you, you cannot remember what that missing word is. You can search for it like this:

["little * riding hood"]

Oh yeah, it was Little Red Riding Hood!

Use multiple asterisks for multiple wildcard words. For example, the following looks for pages that have the words “brown” and “cow” with three words in between them:

["brown *** cow"]

I don’t think this is extremely useful. A traditional wildcard would have been better. But, it’s there if you need it.

Grouping with Parenthesis

Another very powerful operator is the parenthesis characters, used for grouping. It means that the operator (including the always assumed invisible AND operator) is to perform its operation on the group within the parenthesis. This is is primarily used with the OR operator.

Let’s say that you wanted to search for pages that were about silver or gold coins. You could do ["silver coins" | "gold coins"] but using grouping is better if the query becomes more complicated. The following search query looks for pages that deal with silver, gold or platinum dimes or quarters. This would be too unwieldy with just OR’s.

[(silver | gold | platinum) (dimes | quarter)]

Now that is cool!

We’ve been through the basic operators that tell Google what to search for. Now we look at the advanced operators that instruct Google where in the pages or site, or even in which site, it should look to execute the query. These are essential in fine-tuning your search query.

You’ll identify these operators easily because they are a word ending with a colon. Here is a list of the operators:

  • site:
  • inurl:
  • allinurl:
  • intitle:
  • allintitle:
  • intext:
  • allintext:

Do not include a space between the operator and the word following it. Sometimes a space will work, but no space always works.

Note that all the operators that start with “all” cannot be mixed with other operators in a query, and cannot be preceded with a “-” sign.

Specify Site to Include (or exclude) with site:

The site: operator tells Google to search only within a particular site, or within sites with a certain Top Level Domain (domain suffix).

Let’s say you want to see only pages about Gmail help only in the Google site:

[gmail help site:google.com]

Maybe you’d like to see what tips (actually synonyms of tips) that sites besides Google have:

[gmail ~tips -site:google.com]

How about educational sites that discuss political correctness:

["political correctness" site:.edu]

Multiple sites require multiple site:’s–one per operator.

Specify Word in URL to Include (or exclude) with inurl:

With this operator you can restrict the results to pages that contain a word in the URL. The word can be anywhere in the URL, not just in the domain name. The following finds pages that contain “UCLA” in the URL, “prerequisites” anywhere on the page, but are not from UCLA’s own site:

[inurl:ucla prerequisites -site:ucla.edu]

Putting inurl: in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting allinurl: at the front of your query.

Specify Multiple Words in URL with allinurl:

Allinurl: works similarly to inurl: except that it can be followed by multiple words. The search will be restricted to pages that contain all of the query words in the url. For example, the following query will return pages that have either “UCLA” and “Bruins” or “UCLA” and “Football” in the URL:

[allinurl: ucla bruins | football]

Specify Word in Site Title with intitle:

Web sites insert a title in each of their pages. This is what you see in the title bar of your browser. These titles are chosen carefully so that the search engines will index their site in the way which best represents its contents. So, being able to search only the title is a very, very powerful search. The operator intitle: performs this search.

Let’s say you are looking for pages that have “Anaconda” in the title, do not have “movie” in the title (Anaconda was the name of a movie) and have the word “danger” anywhere in the page:

[danger intitle:anaconda -intitle:movie]

Specify Multiple Words in Site Title to Include with allintitle:

Operator allintitle: is to intitle: as allinurl is to inurl. It will do what intitle: does, but all the words that follow it must be in the title. For example, the following search query will find all pages that have the words “fish”, “taco” and “recipe” in the title. This will give us a better chance at finding pages that actually have the recipes in them, rather than pages that merely mention them.

[allintitle: fish taco recipe]

Specify Word in Site Text with intext:

This operator looks for pages that have the word in just the text only, and not anywhere else in the page (URL, title, META keywords). I don’t really see much use for it; you might as well do a regular search. Here’s the format:

[intext:stupid]

Specify Multiple Words in Site Text with allintext:

I’ll bet you guessed what this does. It does what intext: does, but with multiple keywords. Here’s the format:

[allintext:really stupid]

Google has many interesting ways that it handles numbers. We’ve already discussed how it treats specialized numbers in our article, Specialized Number Search. And, we’ve discussed how you can turn Google into a calculator in the article, The Amazing Google Calculator — Hidden in Plain Sight. Now, we’re going to talk about how you can search Google using a range of numbers.

Essentially, you can tell Google that you want it to search for a range of numbers within the text, or wherever else you want with the advanced operators. It will find numbers equal to, or within the range, and understands numbers it finds on pages that have commas and decimal points in them. To tell Google to do a number range search, place two periods between to numbers, with no spaces, like this:

low_number..high_number

Let’s say you were trying to figure out who was president between 1800 and 1804. You could perform the following search:

[1801..1804 president]

You can search with decimal points in the lower or higher number, but it gets confused with commas. For example:

[15,000..30,000 miles] confuses it.

but [3.1..3.9 liters] does not.

You can also leave off one of the numbers to do a equal or greater than or less than or equal. For example, the following will search for numbers greater than or equal to 50000000 miles.

[50000000.. miles]

You are supposed to be able to search dollar amounts, but it did not work for me, as it also pulled up numbers within the range that were not dollar amounts.

Now we look at the site specific search operators. These don’t serve the same purpose as the other operators but three out of four are useful nonetheless.

  • info:
  • link:
  • related:
  • cache:

Make sure that there is no space after any of these operators.

Retrieve Page Information with info:

The operator info: will present some information that Google has about the web page whose URL you specify in its value. For example, the following query will show information about the Google homepage.

[info:www.google.com]

Boring. Doesn’t show anything of value. Maybe Google has some future plans for this.

This functionality is also accessible by typing the web page URL directly into a Google search box.

Search the Saved Cache Page with cache:

Google stores on its servers a cached copy of each page it has indexed. So, if a site is down, or the page has ceased to exist, you will be able to still view the cached version of the page. This is done with the cache: operator.

Start your query with cache: followed by the page whose cache you wish to view. For example, the following will show the cached page of drudgereport.com:

[cache:drudgereport.com]

You can include words that you want Google to highlight in the cached page by listing them after the web page name. For instance, adding “population” will show the cached content with the word “population” highlighted.

[cache:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California population]

This functionality is also accessible by clicking on the “Cached” link for any page listed on Google’s search results page.

Search for Pages with Links to a Web Page

The link: operator will list web pages that have links to the specified web page. For instance, the following query will list web pages that have links pointing to the brainboost.com homepage.

[link:www.brainboost.com]

Search for Similar Pages

The related: operator will list web pages that are similar to a specified web page. For instance, the following will list web pages that are similar to the e*trade homepage.

[related:www.etrade.com]

This functionality is also accessible by clicking on the “Similar Pages” link on Google’s results page.

WHAT! THERE’S A FORM FOR ALL THIS? NOW HE’S TELLING ME!

Sorry.

It was good to learn how to use them free-form in the search field, but for more complicated queries you can save time by going right to Google’s Advanced Search page. It has the power of most of the query operators built in to a more convenient interface for easier use.

To get to the Advanced Search page follow the link the right of the search box on the Google home page.

It lets you search for pages that:

  • contain ALL the search terms you type in
  • contain the exact phrase you type in
  • contain at least one of the words you type in
  • do NOT contain any of the words you type in
  • are written in a certain language
  • are created in a certain file format
  • have been updated within a certain period of time
  • contain numbers within a certain range
  • are within a certain domain, or website
  • don’t contain “adult” material

Find Results: The blue Find Results area is the heart of your search. You can fill in just one field or up to all four. These field relate to the basic operators we discussed a few chapters back.

Language: Use the Language selection to list only web sites in your language. This has been useful for me because for some reason I’m always coming up with German web pages in my searches.

File Format: The file format selection can include or exclude one file type.

Date: The Date option is extremely useful if you are looking for timely information (and who isn’t?). Let’s say that you are searching for the latest precautions on a medication—do you really want to risk reading a seven year old report on the subject? Set the Date selection to a recent time frame. The most recent time frame page you can specify is three months.

Occurrences: I really like this option that lets you select where the search terms must be located. There are several choices, but if you really need to find pages that are created in line with your search terms, asking to find the words in just the title will find the most relevant. (The title is not necessarily what you see on the header of the web site; it is what the web designer carefully crafted and placed in a “Meta” keyword in the “code” that tells the search engine what the site title is.)

All the choices relate directly to the advanced operators we discussed ina previous lesson. Read that page for details how each choice works. Anywhere on the page runs the query without any of the “where” advanced operators, in the title of the page is equivalent to allintitle, in the text of the page doesn’t have an equivalent, in the URL of the page is equivalent to allinurl, and in links to the page is equivalent to allinanchor.

Domain: The domain selection offers a way to do a search that either searches only within a particular site or avoids a particular site. This is equivalent to the insite: operator.

Safe Search: If you are going to search for anything other than porn, turning on the Safe Search is a good idea. This uses the preferences you set in the Search Preferences page.

Page Specific: The two options here mimic the related: and link: operators. Similar will list pages that Google feels are similar to the page you enter. Link will list pages that link to the page you enter.

Using the Google Directory

You wouldn’t know it by Google has a directory system where you can browse or search by category and subcateogries. You get to it by going to http://directory.google.com/ or searching Google for [google directory] and finding the link to it at the top of the search list. Here’s what you get:

This directory combines Google search technology with the Open Directory pages, developed by the 20,000 volunteer editors from the Open Directory Project, who review websites and classify them by topic. There are currently over 1.5 million URL’s categorized.

What’s the value of using the Google Directory over the regular Google web search?

  • You can search within any category or subcategory that you’ve drilled down to. You’ll get only results that fall within that category.
  • The Google Directory is particularly useful when you’re not sure how to narrow your search, and can help you understand how topics within a specific area are related and may suggest terms that are useful in conducting a search.
  • It can give you an idea of the breath of a given category
  • You might prefer to only see sites that have been evaluated by an editor.

When you select a main category, you will be shown a list of the various subcateories, any of which you can click to drill down further.

You can continue drilling down through subcategories until you reach a list of web sites under the lowest level subcategory. Any search within Google Directory will search only the category you are currently in. This can be very useful. For example, a search of the entire web for ‘Patriots’ might return pages on any number of subjects, But is you search “Patriots” within the category Sports > Football, American > Professional >, you will see only results related to the Detroit Lions football team.

Here’s a little trick: Let’s say you are in Google’s regular web search, looking for something there but would like to switch into a targeted directory category instead. You can do this quickly by searching for the words “google” and directory”, plus a word that might be in the heading of a category you want to zero in on. The first item on the resulting search page will bring you directly to the Google Directory category page

For example, if you are looking for a site on Astronomy, search for [google directory astronomy].

Try it out by clicking it. The first item you’ll see in the search results will be the Astronomy category page. Click that and you’ll go right to the category page.

Phone Book Search

Google provides an excellent directory of residential and business phone numbers in the United States. With Google Phonebook you’ll be able to:

  • search residential listings separately
  • search business listings separately
  • search both business and residential listings together
  • perform a reverse number lookup

Looking Up Phone Numbers

There are three operators that perform the searches for a phone number (we’ll get into the reverse directory lookup later). These are:

rphonebook: Search the residential listings

bphonebook: Search the business listings

phonebook: Search both residential and business listings

The format for these operators is [operator] [name] [location]

A search beginning with any of these operators brings up Google’s Phonebook search results page. A search of both business and residential combined (phonebook:) will list up to five matches for each of the two phone books, with links to display more. The other two operators display a longer initial page of matches.

The name search word, if residential, should be [first last], [initial last], or [last]. You can include the middle initial, but if the listing does not have it, you won’t get the match. I suggest trying “first name last name” first, and if that does not work out, try “first initial last” because if it’s listed that way using the first name won’t find it. Finally, if that does not work, try just the last name. And, if you have a strange first name and a last name I cannot even pronounce let alone spell (like a doctor I know who is named Proton), you can try the first name only

If you are looking for a business, Google Phonebook will simply look for a match of your search term word or phrase (multiple words are considered a phrase–won’t be reordered) in the listing business name.

The location can be a zip code, a city or a state. If you’re looking for a Smith, you better narrow it down to zip code if you can. If you’re looking up Shiblowski, it probably doesn’t matter.

Here is an example of finding a specific individual, zip code known:

rphonebook: Aaron Smith 92101

Here is an example of finding all plumbing companies in Los Angeles; state not required due to uniqueness):

bphonebook: Plumbing Los Angeles

Here is an example of finding a CPA in Belmont; unsure if listed in business or residential

phonebook: Stevens Belmont, CA

Wildcards are not permitted and just using a portion of a word does not act as a wildcard. For example, using “Plumb” will not find “Plumbing.” However, putting in one or more full words of a multi-word listing name will work as a “wild card;” i.e. “Plumbing” shows all listings with the word “Plumbing” in the name.

You can also use a logical OR for the residential or business name, but not for the location. This could be helpful if there are several ways similar business might describe themselves. For example, if you had some clothes you need altered you might need to look up both sewing and alterations. Or, for a residential listing you might not know if a last name is spelled Fleming or Flemming:

bphonebook: (sewing | alterations) los angeles

rphonebook: john (fleming | flemming) ca

Doing a Reverse Lookup

All of the three operators can be used for a reverse number lookup using the format [operator] [phone number]. Area code is required. The following looks up the phone number 805-555-1234 in either directory:

phonebook: 805-555-1234

Asking Google to Remove Your Listing

If you aren’t happy that Google has your name listed, you can go to the Google Phonebook Removal Page to request that they remove it.

Movie and Showtimes Search

With the Google “movie” operator, you can look for movies by titles, actors, directors, genre, famous lines, plot details and more. In addition, you can find movie theaters and showtimes in your area.

The magical operator is “movie:”. If you key it into the search field (try it: [movie:]) you will get a listing of theaters in your area with showtimes. This is assuming you have already told Google Local your local area; if not, you can do so when prompted. You can also ask Google for showtimes in any area like this [movie: 92101] or [movie: new york, ny].

From this display, you can toggle the listing to display by theater or by movie. You can click on the name of a movie and it will show you every theater in the area that is playing it, along with the times. Clicking showtimes that are links will bring you to a website where you can purchase tickets for the show online. Each movie has a link to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) page for the movie, where you can find every bit of information you ever wanted to know about it.

If you already know the name of the movie that you wish look up, you can key in the movie: operator followed by the name of the movie. This will go directly to the local showtimes for that movie. Alternatively, you can even just key in the movie name alone. This will sometimes bring up a link to go to the showtimes as the first entry in the search results, like this:

Google can also provide lots of other information for a movie. First, I’ll explain all the ways you can find a movie: You can search by whatever information is part of the title, description or reviews. If the keyword–perhaps title, name of director or some other descriptive word–is found it will display a listing for that movie on the page with a short description, date and the number of reviews associated with it. Here are examples of some ways to find a movie:

[movie: Casablanca]
[movie: spielberg]
[movie: kid friendly]

It’s a really useful tool when you remember some details of the film, but you can’t remember the title. For example, let’s say that you cannot remember the name of the movie in which the U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the higher-rated Russian team. A search of [movie: hockey olympics united states Russian] pulls up the move Miracle, just what you were looking for.

From the resulting list of movies that match your search criteria, you select the movie for which want to pull up the Google movie page. This page will provide a list of the reviews (grouped by positive and negative), the average review score in stars, and a list of frequently mentioned terms in the reviews. Clicking on a review brings you directly to the source web page of the review. to try it out, click Click this link to see a movie review page for the movie Elf.

Yes, there are sites dedicated to showing you information on showtimes and the movies themselves. And, yes, they often have more information. But, as with many of Google’s special searches, there are is nothing faster than the Google way.

Stock Quotes and Information Search

You can use Google to get quick stock quotes and more stock information.

The fastest way to get a quote with some basic trading data is to simply key the stock symbol right into the search field. For example, give [goog] a try. You’ll get the following stock quotes one-box right at the top of your search results page.

It gives you a one-day mini-chart, price, volume, market cap and highs and lows for the day. I am very pleased to see that they included the real time price at the bottom, in addition to the 15-minute delayed price.

To get more detailed and complete information, you can then click in the one-box. This will produce the same result as if you wanted to go directly to the detailed stock data by entering into the search field the operator “stock:” followed by one or more stock symbols:

[stocks: goog]

Google doesn’t have it’s own stock information page (yet?) so it will pull up pages from other sites. Entering a Google stock: query, surprisingly, begins with a page from it’s arch rival, Yahoo!. Click the link above to see it in action in a new browser window.

http://www.nytimes.com/

Buying Binge Slams to Halt

Just as one crisis of confidence may be ending, another may be coming.

The panic on Wall Street has eased in the last few weeks, and banks have become somewhat more willing to make loans. But in those same few weeks, American households appear to have fallen into their own defensive crouch.

Suddenly, our consumer society is doing a lot less consuming. The numbers are pretty incredible. Sales of new vehicles have dropped 32 percent in the third quarter. Consumer spending appears likely to fall next year for the first time since 1980 and perhaps by the largest amount since 1942.

With Wall Street edging back from the brink, this crisis of consumer confidence has become the No. 1 short-term issue for the economy. Nobody doubts that families need to start saving more than they saved over the last two decades. But if they change their behavior too quickly, it could be very painful.

Already, Circuit City has filed for bankruptcy, and General Motors has said that it’s in danger of running out of cash. If the consumer slump continues, there is a potential for a dangerous feedback loop, in which spending cuts and layoffs reinforce each other.

“It’s a scary time,” Liz Allen, 29, a nursing student in Atlanta, told one of the Times reporters who fanned out across the country last weekend to ask people about the economy. “Worry can make the economy worse. If people worry too much, they won’t spend as much money. We’re seeing that happen, I think, already.”

It’s not entirely clear what anyone, including Barack Obama and his incoming administration, can do to temper the current worries. Mr. Obama has called for a stimulus package, which will make up for some of the consumer pullback. He and his advisers will also try to shore up confidence by projecting both a calm competence and a willingness to be more aggressive than the Bush administration. All of that should help.

But the stimulus package under discussion would bring no more than $150 billion in new government spending. The difference between a good year for consumer spending and a really bad one is about $400 billion.

So 2009 could turn out to be fairly miserable. The American consumer, long the spender of last resort for the global economy, may finally be spent.

You have heard such warnings before, I realize. For years, journalists and other economic worrywarts have been predicting a serious slump in consumer spending, and it did not happen. “Never underestimate the American consumer,” as a Wall Street cliché puts it.

Like most clichés, this one has some truth to it. Even before its recent housing-fueled boom, consumer spending was a bigger part of the American economy than of, say, the French or German economy. Americans like to buy things, and they also don’t tend to stay pessimistic for long.

Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, noted that his recent polls showed a sharp rise in the number of people planning to cut back on spending — but also a clear increase in the number who expected the economy to be in better shape next year. “What the American economy has going for it is the innate optimism of the public,” he said. “Americans get optimistic at the drop of a hat.”

Perhaps falling gas prices or Mr. Obama’s victory will shake them out of their torpor, Mr. Kohut said. A recent Gallup Poll found that consumer confidence rose slightly after the election. Based on recent history, it’s easy to imagine that the trend will continue and spending will soon bounce back.

Yet if the last year has proven anything, it’s that we should not assume something can’t happen simply because it hasn’t happened recently. Cold economic realities deserve the benefit of the doubt, even when they point to uncomfortable conclusions. And right now, the economic realities are pointing to a serious consumer recession.

Let’s start with the job market. It “already appears to be in worse shape than at any time during the recessions of the early 1990s or early 2000s,” says Lawrence Katz, a Harvard professor and former Labor Department chief economist. Unemployment is higher than the official rate suggests, and it is rising. Incomes, which for most families barely kept pace with inflation over the past decade, are now falling.

In all, the total amount of income taken home by American households will still probably rise next year, because the population will grow and government transfer payments (like jobless benefits) will surely increase. But total real income will rise a lot more slowly than it has been rising recently. One percent is a reasonable estimate.

The next question is how much of that income people will spend. For decades — from the 1950s through the 1980s — Americans spent about 91 percent of their income, on average, and put away the rest. In the last few years, they have spent close to 99 percent and saved only about 1 percent.

This simply cannot continue. For one thing, people need to pay down their debts and replenish their retirement accounts. For another, the psychology of spending and saving may well be changing. After the worst housing bust on record and one of the three worst bear markets of the last century, Americans are probably starting to realize that they can’t always fall back on ever-rising house values or stock values to make ends meet.

In the unlikely event that Mr. Obama decided to mimic President Bush’s post-9/11 plea for spending in the name of patriotism, it probably would not have the same impact. We’re not as flush as we were in 2001.

Economists are now busy trying to forecast how rapidly people will begin saving again, but it’s essentially an exercise in guesswork. There is no good historical analogy. A savings rate of about 3 percent seems plausible — higher, but not radically so — and that’s what some forecasters are projecting.

At that rate, consumer spending would decline about 1 percent next year, which is worse than it sounds. It would be the first annual decline since 1980, as I mentioned above, and the biggest since 1942. Relative to the typical increases from recent years, it would represent $400 billion in lost consumer spending. To find a stimulus package so big, you’d have to go to Beijing.

And get this: Spending in the last few months has actually been falling at an annual rate of 3 percent. So the seemingly pessimistic events I have sketched out here are based on the assumption that things are about to get better.

As Joshua Shapiro of MFR, an economic research firm in New York, puts it, the American consumer has quickly gone from being the world economy’s greatest strength to its Achilles’ heel. “Everything has changed,” he says. “The financial sector is deleveraging. Credit availability is severely constrained. Asset prices are deflating. And household balance sheets are severely stressed.”

It would be silly to insist that a few terrible months meant the end of American consumer culture. But it would be equally silly to assume that culture could never change. It might be changing right now.

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http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/

November 12, 2008, 11:42 am

Overreaction, or Coming Collapse?

Moody’s is out with its monthly default report today, finding that defaults among speculative-grade borrowers are rising, but are still not very high. It expects defaults to soar next year, with the global rate at or above the peak levels seen in the last two recessions.

This statistic caught my eye:

Moody’s speculative-grade corporate distress index — which measures the percentage of rated issuers that have debt trading at distressed levels — rose more than 60% from September’s 29.7% to 48.5% in October, marking the highest level since Moody’s launched the index in 1996. A year ago, the index was much lower at 4.6%.

So nearly five of every 10 risky borrowers have their debt trading as if default were likely. That could indicate panic, dysfunctional markets or impending disaster. Or it could reflect a combination of all three.

Either the economy is going to get much, much worse than anything we have lived through, or there are some bargains to be found in junk bonds and leveraged loans.

Addendum: As some commenters below note, I blew the numbers in the original version of this posting, saying 6 of 10 were in distress. My excuse is that I am home sick. Apologies.

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(Check this guy out.  The above guy!)

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11/14/2008 12:34 PM

http://searchengineland.com/

If you’re like me, you’ve noticed that Google has been making a lot of announcements this week. And last week. And the week before. And the week before that. But why? Silicon Alley Insider knows why: Google has finally started to fire slackers. That’s the word from an unnamed employee inside Googleplex who’s watched co-workers get the axe recently. (Look for plenty more announcements from non-slackers.)

Continuing the Google theme, the New York Times looks at what Google employees do after they leave the company — not the “slackers” who are getting canned, but the ones who are taking their GOOG windfall to leave and start their own companies. Some of these Xooglers have started a support group to help each other out in their post-Google lives. Says former Google product manager Avichal Garg, who recently co-founded PrepMe.com: “All of these people are leaving who are relatively young and ended up with fair bit of money. They didn’t walk away with $20 million, but they walked away with $2 million. And now the cost of running a new company is so low that essentially Google financed their start-up.”

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http://palatnikfactor.com/

80% of Adults Purchase Online

MarketingCharts.com today reports on a Nielsen rating study which shows that nearly 80% of adults make purchases online. 80%! That is a VERY significant number. How can you not be establishing your business with this high percentage?

According to this study, “The #1 online transaction category was travel, with 38% of adult online consumers making at least one travel purchase on the web in the previous six months. Credit-card account management and home banking took the #2 and #3 spots, with 36% and 35% of consumers conducting transactions, respectively.

Clothes, shoes, accessories and books were also popular online purchases.”

**About the research: The online purchase research is based on a quarterly survey of approximately 36,000 US internet users age 18+.**

As travel being the highest purchase of adults online, you can imagine the CPC prices in Google. According to the keyword tool (which is always an estimate), here are some keywords and their estimated CPC:

bargain airline tickets $2.30
cheap one way airline tickets $4.49
cheap airline tickets com $3.42
airline tickets for cheap $1.99
cheap airfare tickets $2.23

So, with those prices (and there are thousands of keywords for this “niche”) and you can build an incredible campaign targetting every city, state, country, etc (I’d probably kill it…I just got an idea) So if you’re thinking about becoming an affiliate and doing any PPC promotion, take that into consideration as you’re probably competing around 23 advertisers in Travel!

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http://palatnikfactor.com/

add a link to her from Area 47

http://www.nytimes.com/

In Tough Times, Tackle Anxiety First

With the economy in deep trouble, all sorts of people — consultants and authors among them — are offering all sorts of advice. Most of it is solid, if obvious: Find a good law firm, protect your credit, bill early and often, and perhaps the most self-evident, don’t hire unqualified workers.

Jeffrey Hull, a former corporate manager who now blends careers as an executive coach and psychotherapist, suggests a survival strategy that goes to the heart of the matter: Don’t panic.

“What I’m seeing most these days are small-business owners who are not only trying to shift gears in their business in the midst of a downturn,” he said, “but shifting their energy to stay out of fear mode, which is even more fundamental — and tougher to do.”

Mr. Hull said that when he joined Cor Business Inc., a start-up in Harrison, N.Y., as a partner five years ago, most of the clients were Fortune 500 companies like MasterCard, AT&T and Avaya. The main challenge for Cor Business back then was persuading executives to act on its recommendations, not helping them cope with angst.

This year, however, many of those customers tightened their budgets and gave bigger coaching roles to their own human resources departments or big firms like Drake Beam Morin. That, Mr. Hull said, was his first brush with fear. How were he and his partners, Morgan and Julie McKeown, who founded Cor Business in 2001, going to stanch the bleeding?

The answer was obvious, he said, though they did not recognize it at first. “We sat down and felt very negative,” he said. “We did brainstorming.” That was when they realized that almost all their growth this year had been with small businesses.

Early on, blinded by what he now calls an elitist mentality, the partners had been somewhat dismissive of the newcomers. But more and more entrepreneurs were knocking on their door, as the weakening economy prodded them to overcome their aversion to hiring outside experts. This year, firms with revenue of $1 million to $10 million account for close to half of Cor Business’s projected billings of nearly $2 million. Two years ago, firms of that size represented just 20 percent of Cor’s billings.

Better yet, said Mr. Hull, 49, small-business owners tend to be “more creative and more flexible” than sprawling, bureaucratic organizations. “They are great listeners, and act much more quickly,” he said.

Mr. Hull acknowledged that he had his own to-do list — what he calls his six-step program for “shifting yourself out of fear-based operating mode and getting back on track towards success.” The first step, he said, is to confess that you are, in fact, afraid. “Stress, worry and apprehension are all elements of fear,” he said. “It’s scary right now being in business, but that is what entrepreneurship is all about.”

The second step is to respond to that fear with calm deliberation rather than rash acts that may lead businesses into deeper trouble. “I hammer that distinction into clients,” he said.

The third is for businesses to refocus their efforts on undertakings they are good at. The fourth is to “reframe the story” by looking for new opportunities in difficult times.

The fifth is for entrepreneurs to maintain a balance between their work and personal lives. The sixth is to seek out a critic who will give unvarnished feedback about potential blind spots.

He said he used those principles in his coaching. One client, the co-owner of a real estate investment company in New Jersey, was thinking about scratching a plan to buy a warehouse and turn it into a supermarket, fearing that it would fail and he would be stuck with a lot of debt. “I asked him if he was focusing on what might not work or what could work,” Mr. Hull said. “He realized he had done a lot of research. He knew that people had to buy food, even in a recession. He turned his energy focus from negative to positive. I believe he is going to go through with the deal.”

The same client worried about his firm’s sluggish growth, Mr. Hull said. With revenue stuck at about $5 million, the client felt intimidated when he bumped into people like Donald Trump at an industry conference. “It was a classic entrepreneurial conundrum,” Mr. Hull said. “You reach a certain level of success and stop growing because you’re reluctant to change your ways.”

He urged the two owners of the investment company to start acting like a bigger company by holding regular, structured meetings instead of communicating with each other and their staff members by frequent workplace chats. He also suggested that they assume responsibilities that played to their strengths (one was a schmoozer and a visionary, the other an introvert and numbers cruncher), rather than working out every decision together.

“They agreed, he said. “They’re practicing it.”

In another case, the son of the founder of a manufacturing company in Manhattan feared that many of his employees, unhappy with his plan to move his factory to another borough, would desert him.

“I had him refocus on the truth,” Mr. Hull said. “He had asked each of them if they would come with him, and they all had said yes. He had lost sight of his homework.”

Most successful entrepreneurs will often recall their missteps, almost with pride, and tell of how they turned them into opportunities. Reinventing yourself is a mark of the entrepreneurial personality — and it is never too late.

Mr. Hull himself started his first business, a consulting firm, with a partner in 1995 when he was 35, after 15 years as a corporate human resources manager, including six years as the director of the department at Booz Allen Hamilton. Though the company was successful, the partners dissolved it in 2000 “to think about what we really wanted to do with our lives.” The other partner went to medical school, and Mr. Hull earned his doctorate in psychology in 2003, joining Cor Business that year. He opened his private counseling practice, Life-Shifting Inc., in Manhattan in 2004.

Asked whether he and his partners feel that cold stab of apprehension that he warns his clients about as revenue at Cor Business stagnates this year after six years of strong growth, Mr. Hull responded, “How could we not, in the midst of the worst economy in my lifetime?” Then he added: “How do I deal with it? By trying to practice what I preach. You have to stay optimistic.”

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http://online.wsj.com

Is Now the Time to Buy Stocks?

Here is what the historical evidence suggests.

The markets are chaotic. The stock market (S&P 500) is down 34% for the year, and 17% in October alone. Volatility, which measures how much stocks move unexpectedly in a year, is even more dramatic. It's usually around 15%, but daily volatility in October was 75% on an annual basis. Meanwhile, the financial crisis continues. Is this the prelude to further losses, as in 1929? Or is it the mother of all buying opportunities? Even if we think the market is a bit undervalued, does huge volatility pose an unacceptable risk of catastrophic losses?

No one knows for sure -- but 30 years of research does offer some experience and insights. Consider the top line in the chart nearby, which depicts the dividend/price ratio for NYSE stocks. Dividends are stable over time, so this ratio lets us compare stock prices at different points in time. Read it as an upside-down price chart. When prices rise, as in the boom of the 1990s, you can see the dividend yield decline, and vice versa. The lower line is the following seven-year return; it tells you how much total return, if you invested $1 on a given date, you would have made in seven years.

The correlation is obvious: When prices are low relative to dividends, subsequent seven-year returns are likely to be high. Stocks do not follow a "random walk." More deeply, price declines above and beyond declines in dividends over the following year have entirely rebounded. This finding is confirmed by 30 years of research, ranging from "behaviorists" such as Robert Shiller and Richard Thaler to "efficient marketers" such as Eugene Fama and Ken French, to "economists" such as John Campbell and myself. The same pattern also appears in price/earnings, book/market and other ratios, and in many other markets.

The interpretation is pretty clear too. In a recession, or following losses, many investors become more averse to holding risks. They want to sell. But we can't all sell -- a fact routinely ignored in much financial advice and commentary. Instead, prices must fall and prospective returns rise until some investors are willing to buy. Unsurprisingly, upward spikes in the dividend yield came in bad economic times.

History is not a guarantee -- this time could be different. Rather than a higher return going forward, this price decline could reflect a consensus opinion that a massive depression is coming -- a 34% permanent decline in earnings and dividends and a massive wave of bankruptcies.

But as I read the news, the "risk aversion" story seems more plausible. We are in, or headed for, a recession. Anyone whose job or business will be impacted can't take stock-market risks, and should be selling despite low prices. We are seeing lots of "deleveraging," "disintermediation" and "forced selling." As losses mount, investors or institutions that have borrowed money must sell to avoid bankruptcy. Others, such as some university endowments or defined-benefit pension funds, have backstop commitments that must be honored, and they too must "capitulate" at some point. Still others may just be less willing to take risks after suffering a huge loss, a sensible "once burned, twice shy" mentality.

All of these actors become more averse to holding risks as the market declines, so they sell. This increasing risk aversion amplifies an initial price decline -- coming from bad earnings news or the huge rise in credit spreads -- into a rout.

If this is indeed what's going on, it also means that unleveraged, long-term investors should be buying, since prospective returns are better. They must be able to suffer through further mark-to-market losses, and not have recession-sensitive jobs or businesses. They must still have some money left to invest, so they can exchange some of their valuable Treasurys for assets that the suddenly risk-averse are trying to unload. The more these investors can understand and digest slightly exotic securities being dumped by leveraged intermediaries, the better. Warren Buffett is in the news, and he should be.

But this line of thought still does not justify wild optimism. The dividend yield and S&P 500 P/E are barely back to long-term averages, and dividends and earnings will surely fall next year, justifying some of the recent price decline. (Crazy yields in debt markets are another story.)

And what about volatility? Stocks could easily fall a lot more. The standard portfolio rule says that your stock percentage should rise with the expected return (stocks and bonds) divided by squared return volatility. So, if you were happy with a 50/50 portfolio with an expected return of 7% and 15% volatility (standard numbers), 50% volatility means you should hold only 4.5% of your portfolio in stocks!

Now, I might answer that, knowing this, everyone has tried to sell, pushing down prices and pushing up expected returns. But expected returns would need to rise from 7% per year to 78% per year to justify a 50/50 allocation with 50% volatility. Prices have not fallen anywhere near enough to make this a sensible forecast. Many sophisticated investors and hedge funds who use this standard formula are getting out, waiting for at least a return of lower volatility before getting back in.

The answer to this paradox is that the standard formula is wrong. It assumes that stocks are a random walk, and the chart tells us otherwise. Stocks act a lot like long-term bonds -- when prices decline and dividend yields rise, subsequent returns rise as well.

Good bond investors know this. If you have a 10-year Treasury indexed bond, and a 10-year liability (say, you want to retire in 10 years), and you desire complete safety, you can ignore quarterly statements. If you see interest rates rise, bond prices tank, and bond volatility go through the roof, you would be foolish to call your broker and cry, "We've got to sell! I can't take any more losses." If bond prices go down more, bond yields and long-run returns will rise just enough that you face no long-run risk. (Foolish or not, many bond investors pay far too much attention to short-term returns.) Stocks are much riskier, of course. But the same logic explains why you can ignore "short-run" volatility in stock markets.

The average person must end up holding the stocks and bonds that are out there. Therefore, you should only ever buy, sell or rebalance if you're different than the average person. We all like to think we're smarter than average, but at least half of us are deluded, so that's a dangerous way to invest.

If you're less leveraged, less affected by recessions, and have a longer horizon than the average, it makes sense to buy. If you're more leveraged, more affected by recession or have a shorter horizon, it might be the time to sell, even though you might be cashing out at the bottom. If you're about the same as everyone else, do nothing and relax. If you're wrong, at least you will have excellent company.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7726439.stm

Triple whammy hits US carmakers

Strategic mistakes have been made at GM's Detroit headquarters
The city of Detroit in the US state of Michigan is famous for two things - the car industry and Motown Records.
Yet the music label which launched the careers of Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder left the motor city long ago.
Now the car industry is facing a thoroughly bleak future unless the Federal government comes to the rescue.
Of the "Big Three" American carmakers, General Motors is looking the most vulnerable.
Until recently the world's number one car manufacturer, it is moving ever closer to bankruptcy.
Last week it unveiled losses of $4.2bn in the third quarter, and admitted that without new investment it could run out of cash early next year.
Endemic problem
Its great rival Ford is also suffering.
It too is losing money rapidly - bleeding away close to a billion dollars every month. And Chrysler's future is shrouded in doubt, after the apparent collapse of merger talks with General Motors.
So why are the Detroit giants in trouble?
Part of the problem undoubtedly lies with the economic slowdown. When times are tough, people tend to rein in their spending, especially on "big ticket", expensive items like cars.
 

Large vehicles such as the Hummer have fallen out of favour

So perhaps it's no surprise that sales have been falling dramatically.
General Motors sold 45% fewer cars in October than they did during the same period last year, while Ford and Chrysler have both seen their sales fall by more than a third.
Traditionally, manufacturers respond by cutting prices, or offering cheap credit to their customers to shift unsold cars. But discounts erode profits, while the credit crunch means funding for car loans is ever harder to come by.
Costly care
But the Michigan malaise is about far more than a mere short-term economic downturn.
The big three have also been undone by a combination of factors: a hangover from their glory days, strategic mistakes and sheer bad luck.
First, the hangover.
All three manufacturers are paying a heavy price for past success. As well as paying the salaries of existing workers, they're also responsible for the pensions and healthcare costs of hundreds of thousands of former employees.
Last year, GM brokered a deal with the United Auto Workers union that will take about $50bn of these legacy costs off its books. But that won't take effect until 2010 - which may be too late.
This is a burden which the American firms' rivals, such as the Japanese carmakers Toyota, Nissan and Honda, don't have.
The burden makes the US manufacturers' cars more expensive and that is one reason why the big three have been losing market share to their Asian rivals.
Strategic mistakes
But the carmakers can also blame themselves for their troubles. Many analysts believe that over the past two decades, the big three have made serious strategic mistakes.

People are turning to greener and more fuel efficient vehicles

During the 1980s and1990s, Asian carmakers began to make serious inroads into the North American market.
They did so by offering products which were generally smaller, more efficient and more sophisticated than the gas-guzzlers traditionally favoured by American consumers.
Critics say the US manufacturers were slow to react and when they did, it was by producing more big, heavy cars, such as pickup trucks and sports utility vehicles.
Initially it was a very profitable approach. These machines were immensely popular in the late 1990s.
Green revolution
But a few years later, as sales of "green" cars such as the Toyota Prius took off, the strategy attracted a great deal of criticism - something acknowledged by GM's chairman Bob Lutz in a 2005 blog.
"It seems that ever since we announced we were bringing out our next generation of full-size trucks and utilities, people seem to think it's unwise", he wrote.
"I'll admit that on the surface it may seem incongruous to introduce vehicles like this, given today's fuel prices. But, I have to tell you, these products still make a lot of sense."
Yet in mid 2008, when fuel prices rocketed and Americans found themselves paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, GM's policy looked anything but sensible. The market for SUVs collapsed, as buyers turned in droves to more fuel-efficient options.
Of course bad luck has played a role as well.
The American carmakers were in the throes of restructuring when the downturn hit; a couple of years later the damage might not have been so great.
The carmakers could also point out that the oil price spike happened with astonishing speed, just when the credit crunch was starting to take its toll.
But it is arguable that much of the blame for the current crisis should be placed squarely on the shoulders of decision makers in Detroit.

11/13/2008 10:08 AM

http://finance.yahoo.com/

With the right mix of merchandise as well as marketing like its "save money, live better" campaign, Wal-Mart has been able to pull ahead of competitors like Target Corp. Wal-Mart shares have risen 21 percent in the past 52 weeks, while Target's have lost 40 percent of their value and J.C. Penney Co.'s have shed almost 60 percent in the same period.

Wal-Mart's shares fell 10 cents to $52.52 in morning trading Thursday.

The pronouncement signals Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott's strategy to emphasize lower prices is working, enabling Wal-Mart to win customers from Target Corp. and Macy's Inc. as shoppers curb spending. Investors have rewarded Wal-Mart with a 9.4 percent increase this year, the only one of 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average to rise.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News believe the U.S. economy will shrink at a 3 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter and decline at a 1.5 percent pace in the first three months of 2009, resulting the longest slump since 1974-75.

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20081113/D94E0KJG0.html

Study: Calif dirty air kills more than car crashes

To illustrate its point, the study noted that the California Highway Patrol recorded 2,521 vehicular deaths in the San Joaquin Valley and South Coast Air Basin in 2006, compared to 3,812 deaths attributed to respiratory illness caused by particulate pollution.

Studies have indicated a relationship between ozone and particulate pollution and asthma and other respiratory problems, including chronic bronchitis. They also have connected particulate pollution with an increase in cardiovascular problems.

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http://www.nytimes.com/

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department on Wednesday officially abandoned the original strategy behind its $700 billion effort to rescue the financial system, as administration officials acknowledged that banks and financial institutions were as unwilling as ever to lend to consumers.

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http://ap.google.com

"As the global economy continues to weaken, we're going to see further downward pressure on oil," said Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, in Singapore. "I think we'll certainly challenge the $50 threshold. We could challenge the $40 threshold."

http://www.nytimes.com/

White Houses Past

The Underside of the Welcome Mat

Published: November 8, 2008

WASHINGTON — Within days of his inauguration, as Barack Obama and his family begin to feel at home in the White House, Malia and Sasha will perhaps be scampering about the mansion’s staircases, bedrooms and formal public rooms.

As appealing as the prospect of that scene is, it is also a poignant reminder of how long it took for African-Americans to feel they had an equal place in that home.

In a pre-election conference call, Mr. Obama referred to the powerful symbolism of his daughters playing on the South Lawn of the White House, a building built with slave labor. And John McCain, in his concession speech Tuesday night, alluded to a private dinner that Theodore Roosevelt had with Booker T. Washington in 1901 that set off a poisonous controversy.

Responding to that dinner at the time, The Memphis Scimitar called it “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.” A former Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, wrote a letter to the House of Representatives, read on the floor in the election year of 1904, declaring that he had never done such a thing as invite a black man to dinner in that house.

John Stauffer, author of “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln,” observed, “The racial history of the White House is a wonderful symbol of the racial history of the nation as a whole.”

The house itself was built by crews of black laborers — both slave and free. In 1801, a year after it opened, Thomas Jefferson brought nearly a dozen slaves from Monticello, and slaves would constitute much of the house’s staff until the death in 1850 of Zachary Taylor, the last slaveholder to be president.

Many lived in the servants’ quarters on the first floor, but some slept on the first family’s second floor — an intimacy that was a frequent source of tensions with non-slave servants.

The most prominent black caller to the White House in its first century was Frederick Douglass. He came three times while Lincoln was president, and his last visit was perhaps his most important. The White House had been thrown open to the public to celebrate the president’s second inaugural, but the guards turned Douglass away — apparently on standing orders that blacks were not to be allowed in. Douglass sent in his card, and Lincoln ordered him admitted.

The president asked Douglass how he had liked the speech, adding, “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.”

“Mr. Lincoln,” Mr. Douglass answered, “that was a sacred effort.”

In those years, a black dresssmaker and former slave, Elizabeth Keckly, was Mary Todd Lincoln’s confidante. And in the next three decades, black singers, including the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Marie Selika Williams and Sissieretta Jones, entertained at the White House. But none of the singers were invited to stay for meals, a taboo that would last well into the next century.

Lou Hoover, the wife of Herbert Hoover, found that to be a problem in 1929, after Oscar De Priest became the first African-American elected to Congress since Reconstruction. She was admonished not to invite Mr. DePriest’s wife to her traditional tea for Congressional wives, so instead she arranged a separate tea party for Mrs. DePriest. But the event still drew a resolution of criticism from the Texas Legislature.

Eleanor Roosevelt, who was Theodore’s niece as well as Franklin’s wife, famously included African-Americans among her many guests at the White House, and she, too, was criticized — including when she invited Marian Anderson to follow her concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 by singing at the White House before the king and queen of England.

The postwar wave of independence that swept the world changed Washington’s diplomatic scene. Black diplomats became regular guests at state dinners, and African heads of state were invited to sleep overnight. Still, most presidents reserved the White House guest rooms almost exclusively for family and close friends.

But African-Americans were gaining in political power — in Congress, in the cabinet, as aides — and starting in the 1970s became familiar figures in and near the Oval Office.

The first African-American guests invited to sleep in the White House are believed to have been Sammy Davis Jr. and his wife, Altovise, in 1973, by Richard Nixon. Mr. Davis was struck by the history. He later joked that he turned down the chance to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom in favor of the Queen’s room. “I thought to myself, now I don’t want [Lincoln] coming in here talking about, ‘I freed them, but I sure didn’t want them to sleep in my bed.’ ” (The singer Pearl Bailey, a friend of Betty Ford, also stayed overnight, after Nixon’s resignation.)

In the 1990’s, the Clintons, unique among modern first families, widened the circle of guests and political contributors who were invited to stay over, including a range of celebrities and politicians like Quincy Jones, Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Willie Brown.

Still, there remains the enduring poignance of the not-so-distant past that was alluded to on election night — best expressed, perhaps, by an incident during Lyndon Johnson’s administration.

Bess Abell, who was Johnson’s White House social secretary, vividly remembers a state dinner at which Sarah Vaughan sang but, after dinner, disappeared.

“I found her in this office, which had been turned over to her as a dressing room, and she was sobbing,” Mrs. Abell said in an interview. “And I said, ‘Mrs. Vaughan, what’s wrong? What can I do?’ And she said, ‘There’s nothing wrong. This is the most wonderful day of my life. When I first came to Washington, I couldn’t get a hotel room, and tonight, I danced with the president.’ ”

Barclay Walsh contributed reporting.

--

http://howto.wired.com/

Google Smarter

From Wired How-To Wiki

Jump to: navigation, search

(or, Google More Smartly, if you're smart with grammar)

It's only a matter of time before you can upload the entire Internet to your brain. Until that glorious day, these tricks will save you some keystrokes.


Get good sources. Add "site:edu" or "site:gov" to limit your search to school or government domains. To target specific sites, type, say, "neutrino site:Harvard.edu."

Convert currency and units. Easy: "12 parsecs in light years" or "12 dollars in euros," for example.

Check your stocks. Take a deep breath, then enter a ticker symbol to see a real-time quote.

Narrow by file type. To find PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets, or books scanned into PDFs, add "filetype:ppt" (or any other extension) to your query.

Search ranges. Use two periods between two numbers, like "Wii $200..$300."

Expect flight delays. Type in the airline, then your flight number.

Define yourself. To get the definition for a word, just type the word define: followed by the word. Include the colon and space.


The above was contributed by Damon Tabor for Wired magazine. However, this wiki is editable by anyone. If you want to add your own Google search tool tips, log in and add them below.

Find the Answer to the Secret of Life. Ask Google directly for the answer to the secret of life. The answer might surprise those of you who haven't read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Use the Correct Search Type. There are three types of Google search keywords: [exact], "phrase" and broad terms. Exact queries are surrounded by brackets and search for the query in the exact order in which they were entered. Phrase keywords are between quotation marks and look for the terms in any order but used together. Broad terms are the default search type and results are based on any use of the keywords on the page.

Understand a Google Search URL. You can write your own search URL without having to visit Google first. Take this example: 

http://www.google.com/search/q=search+query&hl=en&btnG=Search

Everything after the "/search/" portion is fair game for editing. Take a look:

  • /q=search -- this is the search query. All spaces are converted to plus signs (+) in order to not break the URI.
  • &hl=en -- This is the language. You can use any standard internet language code here. You can find a list of internet language codes online.
  • &btnG=Search -- This does nothing except tell Google you pressed the Google search button instead of pressing Return on your keyboard.
  • &dq=Display+Query -- This little known trick will change the query in the search box of the page to whatever you'd like. The search results will remain the same. For instance, take a look at the search box over the results for "incomparable genius."


Little known search operators. Did you know the asterisk (*) can be used if you don't know exactly how to spell a word. For instance, "contagiou*" will match all articles containing words that start in "contagiou." Give it a try, it's contagious. Other operators include the pipe code (|) which acts as the word "OR." For example, a search for "this|that" will return search results for "this" OR "that."

Don't Forget. Google can search for different media such as websites, images, videos, maps etc. Select the option above the input box. An easy way to refine your search is to select the "advanced search" option next to the input box.

Exact Phrases. By default, Google searches for any of the terms you enter. To find a specific phrase, use double quotes ("). You will get different results for wired google smarter than you will for wired "google smarter".

--

11/11/2008 11:13 AM

http://www.iht.com

MOUNTAIN HOUSE, California: This town, 59 feet above sea level, is the most underwater community in America.

Because of plunging home values, almost 90 percent of homeowners here owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth, according to figures released Monday. That is the highest percentage in the country. The average homeowner in Mountain House is "underwater," as it is known, by $122,000.

A visit to the area over the last couple of days shows how the nationwide housing crisis is contributing to a broad slowdown of the American economy, as families who feel burdened by high mortgages are pulling back on their spending.

Jerry Martinez, a general contractor, and his wife, Marcie, an accounts clerk, are among the struggling owners in Mountain House. Burdened with credit card debt and a house losing value by the day, they are learning the necessity of self-denial for themselves and their three children.

No more family bowling night. No more dinners at Chili's or Applebee's. No more going to the movies.

"We make decent money, but it takes a tremendous amount to pay the mortgage," Martinez, 33, said.

First American CoreLogic, a real estate data company, has calculated that 7.6 million properties in the country were underwater as of Sept. 30, while another 2.1 million were in striking distance. That is nearly a quarter of all homes with mortgages. The 20 hardest-hit ZIP codes are all in four states: California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona.

"Most people pay very little attention to what their equity stake is if they can make the mortgage," said First American's chief economist, Mark Fleming. "They think it's a bummer if the value has gone down, but they are rooted in their house."

And yet the magnitude of the current declines has little precedent. "When my house is valued at 50 percent less than it was, does this begin to challenge the way I'm going to behave?" he said.

Mountain House, a planned community set among the fields and pastures of the Central Valley about 60 miles east of San Francisco, provides a discomfiting answer.

The cutbacks by the Martinezes and their neighbors are reflected in a modest strip of about a dozen stores in nearby Tracy. Three are empty while a fourth has only a temporary tenant. Some of those that remain say they are just hanging on.

"Before summer, things were O.K. Not now," said My Phan of Hailey Nails and Spa. "Customers say they cannot afford to do their nails." She estimated her business had fallen by half.

At Cribs, Kids and Teens, Jason Heinemann says his business is also down 50 percent. He opened the store in early 2006; last month was his worst ever. "Grandparents are big buyers of kids' furniture, but when their 401(k)'s are dropping $10,000 and $20,000 a week, they don't come in," he said.

Heinemann laid off his one employee, a contribution to an unemployment rate in San Joaquin County that has surpassed 10 percent. He dropped his advertising in the local newspaper and luxury magazines.

As Heinemann's sales sink, he is tightening his own belt. "I used to be a big spender," he said. "We're setting a budget for Christmas."

In the window of another tenant, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, a placard shows two happy homeowners holding a sign saying, "Someday we'll owe a lot less than we thought."

Someday, maybe, but not now. First American has been refining its figures on underwater mortgages, formally known as negative equity. The data company evaluated 42 million residential properties with mortgages. (Though Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming were excluded because of insufficient data, none of those states have been central to the mortgage crisis.) A computer model was used to calculate current values, using comparable sales. More than 10 million homes do not have mortgages.

The figures rank the 20 ZIP codes that are furthest underwater. The 95391 ZIP code, which includes all of Mountain House and some properties outside it, has the unwelcome distinction of being first in the country.

Out of 1,856 mortgages in the ZIP code, First American calculates that nearly 90 percent are underwater. Only 209 owners owe less on their mortgages than the homes are worth.

The first homes in Mountain House were sold in 2003, just as the real estate boom began to go into overdrive. Its relative proximity to San Francisco drew many who traded a longer commuting trip for a bigger place.

The Martinezes bought their house in early 2005 for $630,000. It is now worth about $420,000. They have an interest-only mortgage, a popular loan during the boom that allows owners to forgo principal payments for a time.

But these loans eventually become unmanageable. In 2015, Martinez said, his monthly payments will be $12,000 a month. He laughed and shook his head at the absurdity of it.

They fear the future, so they stay home. They rent movies. They play board games. (But not Monopoly — with its real estate theme, it reminds them too much of real life.)

"It's a vicious circle," Martinez said. The economy is faltering because he and millions of others are not spending. This killed his career in home remodeling this year, and threatens his current work as a contractor on commercial properties.

For the moment, the family is just trying to hold on. But Martinez acknowledges that it has entered his mind to turn his house back over to the bank. "By next June, if things aren't better, I'm walking," Martinez said.

Many in Mountain House have already taken that option. Banks took over 101 properties in the 95391 ZIP code in the third quarter, according to DataQuick Information Systems.

Even relatively recent arrivals are feeling a pinch.

Kenny Rogers, a data security specialist, moved into Mountain House last year, buying a foreclosed property on Prosperity Street for $380,000. But the decline in values has been so fierce that he too is underwater.

He has cut his DVD buying from 50 a month to perhaps one, and is waiting until the Christmas sales to buy a high-definition television. He does not indulge much anymore in his hobbies of scuba diving and flying. "Best to wait for a better price, or do without," Rogers, 52, said.

People deciding to do without are hurting a second mall close to Mountain House. There is a shuttered Linens 'n Things, part of a chain that went bankrupt. Another empty storefront used to be a Fashion Bug. Soccer World could not make it. Shoe Pavilion is festooned with going-out-of-business signs.

Chris and Janet Ackerson can survey this carnage from their own store with a certain equanimity. Their business, a member of the Vino 100 chain of wine outlets, is doing well.

The store opened at the beginning of the year, so long-term trends are not clear. But sales did not plunge in the last few months as they did for so many other retailers. Four more people joined the store's wine club last weekend.

"My house is underwater, so I'm not doing too much impulse shopping or any renovation. But I'm not cutting back on this," said Ray Lopez, a database administrator, as he placed a $24 petite sirah on the counter. "Life's too short."

--

11/12/2008 12:17 PM

http://www.cnbc.com

US May Lose Its 'AAA' Rating

The United States may be on course to lose its 'AAA' rating due to the large amount of debt it has accumulated, according to Martin Hennecke, senior manager of private clients at Tyche.

"The U.S. might really have to look at a default on the bankruptcy reorganization of the present financial system" and the bankruptcy of the government is not out of the realm of possibility, Hennecke said.

"In the United States there is already a funding crisis, and they will have to sell a lot more bonds next year to fund the bailout packages that have already been signed off," Hennecke told CNBC.

In order to solve or stem the economic slowdown, Hennecke suggested the US would have to radically reduce spending across all sectors and recall all its troops from around the world.

As for a stimulus package, there is not much of an industry left to stimulate back into life, Hennecke said.

--

http://www.salon.com/

News items: My article "Final Cut: The Selection Process for 'Break, Blow, Burn'" has just been published in the Fall 2008 issue of Arion at Boston University. It is available online at Arion or via that invaluable international site, Arts & Letters Daily. No more Mr. Nice Guy: I've taken the gloves off against John Ashbery, Jorie Graham and the rest of that insufferably pretentious crowd. For real English used in a vital, vigorous contemporary way, see the new book of poems by my colleague Jack DeWitt, "Almost Grown," which deals with cars, gals and brawls -- American culture at its finest!

--

http://education.zdnet.com/

So why is this important here in Ed Tech? Because when we talk about 21st Century Skills, one of the most important things we’re talking about is communication. How can we all stay connected and collaborate in ways that we couldn’t before with mere 20th Century skills? Again, I can’t emphasize the importance of verbal communication skills enough. The digital revolution hasn’t gotten rid of voice; it’s simply allowing us to integrate it into a variety of media: podcasts, microblogging, video conferencing, and even face to face.

11/9/2008 6:40 AM

http://books.google.com/

Members SiteToastmasters.Home 2007 March ...

...

Profile: The Ability to Advocate ... more »Cab driver uses his Toastmasters

training to implement life-saving law.

By Julie Bawden Davis

When former cab driver Arthur McClenaghan began reading self-help, motivational books several years ago, friends and co-workers snickered and told him not to bother. They doubted the effectiveness of inspirational publications and had a hard time visualizing McClenaghan as anything more than an overweight taxi driver.

“I truly was an American slob,” says McClenaghan of his former self. “I was so lazy that I needed a remote control to fetch my remote control. I was overweight, had no plans for the future and very little money. I knew, however, that I wanted something better out of life, so I began reading books by authors such as Brian Tracy, including his book about overcoming procrastination, Eat That Frog.”

The encouragement and advice McClenaghan found in such volumes drastically changed his life. He began exercising and eating well, eventually losing 70 pounds.

“The suggestions in the books taught me to ignore demotivators and concentrate on motivators,” says McClenaghan, who found references to Toastmasters in many of the books.

“Authors like Tracy highly recommended Toastmasters for building confidence and speaking skills,” he says. “At the time I was interested in increasing confidence, but I didn’t think I’d needed speaking skills; after all, I was just a cab driver.”

But he would soon become much more than a cab driver – thanks, in part, to Toastmasters.

“For over 12 years I drove taxi-cabs in downtown Las Vegas,” he says. “While driving cabs is an interesting job, it can also be dangerous. I personally knew a driver who had his throat slit and another who was hit on the head with a blunt object and died.”

Feeling sorry for family members of cab drivers who were hurt or killed in the line of duty, McClenaghan came up with the idea of putting security cameras in taxis and began pushing for legislation that would mandate their use.

“Many drivers said I was wasting my time because there were only nine owners monopolizing the whole cab industry in Las Vegas, and many people thought that they would never allow the cameras,” he says. Bolstered by the motivational books he’d read, however, McClenaghan decided to forge ahead anyway.

“I originally petitioned other drivers, and everyone – including my boss at the time – told me that it would be impossible to get the cameras installed,” he says. He continued to spread the word, however, soon getting local media attention for his cause.

When it became apparent that McClenaghan would need to speak on camera and in front of the Nevada Taxicab Board, which is a state legislative committee appointed by the governor, he became nervous.

“At first I thought, this is scary! I’m just a cabbie; what the heck was I thinking? But then I remembered reading about Toastmasters and found a club and visited right way. At my first meetings, I was very nervous. When I stood up to speak, I was so shaky, I’d hold onto the podium and had a hard time letting go. Everyone was so friendly and professional, though, that I stayed and stuck it out.”

The Toast of Sierra Toastmasters club helped McClenaghan almost immediately with speaking skills and his confidence grew every day. Just six months after joining, he had to make an important speech regarding the campaign, and he was ready.

Fellow club member Bob Dobson notes how quickly McClenaghan advanced in Toastmasters: “In an amazingly short period of time, Arthur went from being so nervous he could barely stand up, to completely self assured in front of news cameras,” says Dobson, who has been a Toast of Sierra Toastmasters member since 1990. “Considering his admirable and brave cause, club members were more than willing to help him improve, and as a result he became an excellent Toastmaster.”

-- 

http://www.guardian.co.uk

Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes

£13m shed-size reactors will be delivered by lorry

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'

Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. 'It's leapfrog technology,' he said.

The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. 'We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.'

The first confirmed order came from TES, a Czech infrastructure company specialising in water plants and power plants. 'They ordered six units and optioned a further 12. We are very sure of their capability to purchase,' said Deal. The first one, he said, would be installed in Romania. 'We now have a six-year waiting list. We are in talks with developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas.'

The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.

'You could never have a Chernobyl-type event - there are no moving parts,' said Deal. 'You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it's too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.'

Other companies are known to be designing micro-reactors. Toshiba has been testing 200KW reactors measuring roughly six metres by two metres. Designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for longer, they could power a single building for up to 40 years.

--

http://www.philly.com/

"That one picture of Obama and his wife, African Americans, holding hands with [Joseph R.] Biden [Jr.] and his wife was worth more than all of the hundreds of millions this administration has spent on public diplomacy," said panelist Paulo Sotero, former Washington correspondent for the Brazilian daily O Estado de S. Paulo.

The victory of an African American and the level of citizen involvement in the U.S. election have refurbished the nation's democratic image. It undercuts the efforts of jihadis to bill the United States as the Great Satan.

"Anti-Americanism will not suddenly, magically disappear," French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy wrote in the Financial Times, a British paper. "But it will have a harder time surviving and it will be forced to revisit its sales pitch."

--

http://www.miamiherald.com

Palin returned to her office Friday amid a brutal crossfire between detractors and defenders in the McCain camp. At the same time, however, a new national poll said 64 percent of Republicans consider her their top choice to run for president in 2012.

--

http://www.mercurynews.com

Black men hope Obama presidency shatters racial stereotypes

Bryan Ford sees a lot of himself in Barack Obama. Like the president-elect, the San Jose State sophomore was raised by a single mother. And, like Obama's long fight to the White House, Ford says being a young black man in America has often meant defying others' low expectations.

"I've been searched by the cops just for being black, for standing on the street with my friends," said the 19-year-old student, who also recalls being tailed by security guards in shopping malls. "It happened all the time."

Black men endure painful stereotypes in American popular culture, which often depicts them "singing, rapping, scoring a touchdown, dunking a basketball, hitting a home run or committing a crime," according to the group YAAMS, Young African Americans Against Media Stereotypes.

But now, and for at least the next four years, the most quoted, photographed and broadcast face and voice will be that of a Harvard University-educated black man. It is the face Americans will turn to during national crises for information and reassurance. At the annual State of the Union address, it is a black man who will outline the goals and successes of the most powerful country on earth.

The historic significance of America electing its first black president is profound. But beyond the poignant symbolism, many African-Americans hope Obama's election may begin to shatter deeply entrenched stereotypes.

"The most famous black man in America isn't dribbling a ball or clutching a microphone," writer Ta-Nehisi Coates noted in a recent essay for Time magazine. "He has no prison record. He has not built a career on four-letter words."

The significance isn't lost on 14-year-old Jordan Brown, who attends Santa Clara's Wilcox High School.

"Obama being elected shows that black people can be smart and have some class," Jordan said. "People expect black people to be athletes. Like we can run fast and play basketball, but we're not smart. Now they see that black people can be smart, and people voted for Obama because he is smart."

Many scholars note that the Obama family — his wife Michelle and daughters Malia and Sasha — is even more powerful than the image of Obama alone.

'Whole package'

"With Obama we get the whole package. He is a dedicated husband and father, and his love for Michelle and their children is front and center," said Patricia Turner, a vice provost and professor of African-American studies at the University of California-Davis who wrote "Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influences on Culture."

"Nuclear black families are almost never depicted in popular culture. I hope that now, because of the Obamas, we'll begin to see more black couples and families depicted in film and television," she said.

Turner notes that racial stereotypes often persist for generations, and take years of active advocacy work to overcome. "Stereotypes are extraordinarily tenacious,'' she said. "Once they are out there, it's a virus that lingers."

Some stereotypes are reinforced by real-life challenges. In California, nearly 42 percent of black students drop out of high school. A 2008 study by the Pew Center for the States also found that one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars.

Matthew Morgan, a senior at San Jose State University, said Obama's victory gives him a new sense of personal responsibility.

'No more excuses'

"For perceptions of black men to change, it's going to depend on how we carry ourselves,'' he said after an African-American history course this week. "I'm proud to say that I feel like I have a lot of responsibility on me, on us as a people. Obama needs support, and we all have to step up to the plate and get involved in our communities. There are no more excuses.''

Frank Gilliam, dean of the University of California-Los Angeles School of Public Affairs and a leading scholar of racial politics and mass media, said the idea of a "sea change in race relations is probably naive.'' But the fact that a black man is now the boss — of the United States — will have a huge impact on not just African-Americans but whites and other ethnic groups as well. An entire generation will come of age with a black man in charge.

"It's not going to be any easier for me to get a cab in Manhattan," Gilliam said. "But we're all going to experience a black man in the ultimate authority position, and a black family is on the way to the White House. Racial stereotypes will stay with us, but we're chipping away at it."

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/34147009.html

Oregon town elects nation's first transgender mayor

SILVERTON, Ore. (AP) - Plenty of politicians reinvent themselves. But none quite like Mayor-elect Stu Rasmussen.

Rasmussen, 60, has been a fixture in Silverton politics for more than 20 years, and had twice before been the mayor of this small city 45 miles south of Portland. Those terms, however, were before the breast implants and before the once-discreet crossdresser started wearing dresses and 3-inch high heels in public.

In a week when America loudly chose its first African-American president, Silverton quietly made Rasmussen the country's first openly transgender mayor, according to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, a group that works to help openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people win elected office.

Rasmussen unseated incumbent mayor Ken Hector, with whom he had long clashed — 1,988 votes to 1,512. Because Rasmussen's appearance is no secret, it was policy issues that dominated the campaign.

"I've blackmail-proofed myself," said Rasmussen.

The story of Rasmussen's election was first reported by JustOut, a bimonthly publication for Portland's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities.

"Stu never sought this recognition out," said Stephen Marc Beaudoin, the reporter who broke the story. "He's interested in doing a great job for the community that he loves. The gender identity thing is just a total backseat thing."

That comes across when Rasmussen speaks in his decidedly masculine voice. Though he dresses more like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Rasmussen describes himself with a word assigned to Todd Palin.

"I am a dude," he said. "I am a heterosexual male who appears to be a female."

His longtime live-in girlfriend, Victoria Sage, told The Oregonian newspaper that she and Rasmussen have been an item for almost 35 years.

"I heard a quote, and I don't know who said it but I think it's fabulous, that Silverton is a place where Mennonites and transvestites can get along," she said.

The quote rang true when two cowboys came across the new mayor on a downtown sidewalk. "Good job, Stu," one of them said to the man wearing a leather skirt and maroon stockings.

"Congratulations, Mr. Mayor," called the other.

http://online.wsj.com/

As Giant Rivals Stall, Porsche Engineers a Financial Windfall

FRANKFURT -- Porsche is proving you can still make lots of money in the car business, especially if you know how to wield derivatives.

The German sports-car maker said Friday that its pretax profit in the fiscal year ended July 31 soared 46% to €8.57 billion euros, or about $10.9 billion. Eighty percent of that came not from making cars but from sophisticated financial instruments connected to a protracted takeover bid Porsche Automobil Holding SE has been pursuing for a company many times its size, Volkswagen AG.

Porsche's profits on those trades totaled more than the current combined market values of beaten-down General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. The outsize gains were scored by a potato-loving chief executive and his Kafka-reading chief financial officer. They teamed up with the offspring of the Beetle creator to engineer an audacious takeover bid -- and outfox hedge funds at their own game.

Porsche is raking in money through a form of options that helped it build up a huge stake in VW since 2005, while keeping other market participants in the dark. The strategy led late last month to a soaring price for VW shares after a Porsche disclosure showed the company, had, in effect, cornered the market on most VW shares.

That put investors who had bet against VW stock in the classic bind called a short squeeze. This one was acute: VW's stock spiked so high that VW briefly was the most valuable public corporation in the world.

Hedge funds that had shorted VW shares -- borrowing them and selling them, hoping to replace them later with cheaper shares -- lost billions over a few frantic hours last week as they wrestled each other to buy the few remaining shares available and unwind their bets. Funds affected, according to people familiar with them, include Greenlight Capital, SAC Capital, Glenview Capital, Marshall Wace, Tiger Asia, Perry Capital and Highside Capital.

Porsche's earnings report provided the latest evidence that the old-economy manufacturer has been taking a page from hedge funds' playbooks, and seemingly beating them at their own game. Thanks to its trading gains, Porsche's net profit for the year rose 51%, to €6.39 billion, at a time when many auto makers are churning out profit warnings, or worse. And those results don't reflect a potentially massive windfall from its trading activity last month.

The final chapter of the drama hasn't been written. German regulators have launched an investigation into whether there was manipulation of VW shares, after some investors accused Porsche of misleading markets. Porsche says that it hasn't done anything wrong and that the fault for the VW share gyrations lies with short sellers. Porsche, meanwhile, faces other obstacles as it tries to clinch control of VW, a company that boasts 15 times as much revenue and builds 60 times as many cars.

Porsche's moves point to the resilience of Deutschland AG, the decades-old network of elaborate cross-holdings that kept companies in domestic hands but had been unraveling. Porsche's VW chase is a kind of corporate German reunification drama: Wolfgang Porsche and Ferdinand Piëch, the board chairmen of Porsche and VW, respectively, are grandsons of Ferdinand Porsche, who created the VW Beetle and founded Porsche before World War II.

The affair traces back to 2005, a time of concern in Germany that VW could be a takeover target of non-German investors and broken up. Private-equity firms, many from the U.S. or U.K., had snapped up more than 5,000 German companies since the late 1990s. Adding to the nervousness, the European Union was trying to strike down a decades-old "VW Law" that capped any single shareholder's voting rights at 20%.

'Swarms of Locusts'

In April 2005, Franz Müntefering, the chairman of the then-ruling Social Democratic Party, called non-German financial investors "swarms of locusts" that land on companies and "strip them bare." Wendelin Wiedeking, Porsche's combative CEO, chimed in, telling a newspaper that Germany needed to stick to a "social market" economy that avoided putting shareholders' interests before those of customers, employees, and suppliers.

Mr. Wiedeking had helped steer Porsche out of trouble after taking the wheel in 2003 and pushed profit margins to industry highs. He slashed about a fifth of the work force and imported Japanese-style lean-inventory methods. Once, to drive home the point, he strode across a factory floor and smashed shelves bulging with spare parts.

Mr. Wiedeking cultivates a populist persona, even as Porsche sells pricey cars such as the 911. The 56-year-old executive owns a working-class tavern and a small farm, where he harvests potatoes with the help of an old Porsche tractor, distributing sacks of potatoes to employees.

In September 2005 Porsche surprised investors by announcing it would buy a 20% stake in VW, becoming its biggest shareholder in a "German solution" that would avoid any foreign takeover. VW and its home state of Lower Saxony, which held a bit under 20%, welcomed the move by Porsche -- which, significantly, didn't signal that it was interested in a majority stake.

Behind the scenes, Porsche Chief Financial Officer Holger Härter was crunching numbers. An economist, Mr. Härter had joined the company in the 1990s after Mr. Wiedeking recruited him from a floor-products firm in a town where they both lived.

Mr. Härter is known as a fan of Franz Kafka and Ludwig II, the 19th-century Bavarian king whose fanciful castles inspired Walt Disney. He also is the chairman of Stuttgart's derivatives exchange, and in the 1990s he developed sophisticated models to hedge Porsche's foreign-exchange exposure. Now he is being credited with drafting the financial road map that put Porsche, which makes 100,000 cars a year, in position to take over VW, which makes six million.

'Cash-Settled Options'

The vehicle: "cash-settled options." The buyer of regular stock options gets the right to buy or sell stock at a certain price by a certain date. But in cash-settled options, as the name implies, the buyer gets the right not to stock but the cash difference between the options' "strike price" and the market price of the shares when the options are exercised.

Porsche began buying cash-settled options tied to VW stock in 2005, when VW's share price was below €100. If the price rose, Porsche could exercise the options and receive the difference between the lower strike price and the higher market price. It could then use the money to buy VW shares.

In Germany, an investor needn't disclose ownership of any size holding of options if they are the type settled in cash instead of shares. That allowed Porsche to build a large stake in VW while keeping the rest of the market unaware of its activity.

Such options have one other important twist: Banks that underwrite them typically hedge their exposure by holding actual shares. That takes these shares out of circulation.

By March 2007, Porsche had boosted its stake in VW to 30%. That triggered a German rule requiring it to make a full tender offer for VW shares. The company said it wasn't interested in a takeover of VW. Forced to make a tender offer, Porsche offered the legal minimum price the law let it offer, which was €100.92 for each voting share. Only 0.6% of the remaining VW shares were tendered.

That November, Porsche announced that for the fiscal year ended July 31, 2007, it had booked a pretax profit of €5.86 billion, including €3.59 billion from "the very positive effects" of VW options. Compensation for Porsche's six-person management board more than doubled, to €112.7 million. Mr. Wiedeking pocketed more than half of that.

Green Light

This past March, Porsche's supervisory board gave the green light to take the VW stake above 50%, and this goal was announced. For the six months ended Jan. 31, Porsche disclosed a pretax profit that included €850 million from "hedging transactions in connection with the acquisition of the VW stake." But Porsche denied growing talk that it was gunning for 75% of VW. In a news release, the company said the possibility of that was "very small indeed" and dismissed it as "speculative mind games of analysts and investors."

In mid-September, Porsche disclosed it had raised its VW stake to just above 35%. At the Paris Auto Show in early October, Mr. Wiedeking told reporters a 75% stake was a "purely theoretical option." On Oct. 24, a Friday, VW's share price closed at €210.85 on Frankfurt's stock exchange.

That Sunday, Porsche dropped a bombshell: In a news release, the company disclosed that it owned 42.6% of VW's shares as well as cash-settled options linked to an additional 31.5% of the shares. Porsche also said that it planned to acquire a 75% stake in VW.

Trouble for the 'Shorts'

When financial markets opened Monday Oct. 27, all hell broke loose. Funds that had borrowed VW shares and sold them, expecting no takeover offer and betting the stock would decline, raced to purchase shares to unwind the bets.

There weren't enough to go around. Part of the reason is that underwriters of cash-settled options typically hedge their risk by owning the shares of the company involved. The shares they owned, combined with those Porsche had acquired, added up to 74.1%, and Lower Saxony state owned 20.1%

The result was that while some 12.8% of VW shares were on loan, mostly to short sellers, those that for practical purposes were in circulation amounted to only 6% of VW shares.

As hedge funds fought for the remaining VW shares, they drove the stock's price ever higher -- deepening their losses. At the height of the short squeeze on Oct. 28, VW stock briefly topped €1,000, nearly five times as high as on Oct. 24, making VW the biggest company by stock-market value for a few hours.

VW's share price, more recently, has been returning to earth. It ended at €398.21 in Frankfurt Friday, less than half its record high but still nearly twice as high as on Oct. 24.

Analyst's Speculation

Theories abound about how much money Porsche has made in the process -- and whether its strategy might have gone beyond exercising options when the share price rose. Max Warburton, a senior analyst in London at Bernstein Research, has speculated on a multipart strategy Porsche may have executed, given the company's huge derivatives profits and the way VW's share price has continued to rise in recent months, in contrast to the rest of the auto sector.

Mr. Warburton speculated that Porsche may have lent VW shares it owned to short sellers who were borrowing in order to sell; that when they sold, Porsche may have been the buyer; that when the "shorts" desperately needed to buy shares to close their bets, Porsche may have been a seller at the elevated price; and finally, confident the price wouldn't fall, Porsche may have profited by safely selling put options that convey the right to sell at a set price.

A Porsche spokesman said such theories were "not true" because they suggested Porsche broke laws or manipulated markets, and that it didn't. Porsche addressed some specifics of Mr. Warburton's speculation, but not others; it said that the company didn't lend shares -- that, in fact, it considers doing so to constitute market manipulation.

Porsche's CEO, Mr. Wiedeking, has been quiet of late, but a remark that he made in January suggests he isn't likely to get sentimental about hedge-fund losses. "This world is not a playground where children at play are pampered by friendly nannies," he told the company's annual shareholder meeting.

Earlier this summer, German auto-parts supplier Schaeffler Group did something similar, secretly cornering about a third of the shares of larger rival Continental AG. Some investors complain that Porsche and Schaeffler have crossed the line of fair play, taking advantage of disclosure rules that are too loose and regulators that are too tentative.

"We need a different approach, with efficient supervision,'' says Christian Strenger, a board member at DWS, the asset management arm of Deutsche Bank AG, Germany's biggest financial group.

Bafin's Stance

But Bafin, Germany's securities regulator, the body investigating Porsche's actions, already has given Schaeffler's conduct a clean bill of health. The German finance ministry says it is considering proposing legislation that would force disclosure in the future of cash-settled options. Any such law could take several months to go into effect.

Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück last month reiterated long-standing calls by the German government for increased international regulation of hedge funds. He also has suggested that "detrimental" short-selling be banned. He has shied away from commenting on the VW case.

Some 80% of Germans disapproved of hedge funds in 2005, and that hasn't changed, according to Manfred Güllner, head of Forsa, a polling firm. He also reckons that many Germans like the idea of VW and Porsche, which worked closely together in the 1930s but went their separate ways after WW II, joining forces. "It's history coming together again," he says. "It fits together."

--

http://www.bloomberg.com/

The economy will shrink at a 3.5 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter and at a 2 percent pace in the first quarter of 2009, nearly twice prior estimates, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists led by Jan Hatzius wrote yesterday in a note. That would be the biggest back-to-back contraction since 1982.

Goldman’s call reflects mounting concern that growing numbers of companies and consumers will lose access to credit as the worst financial crisis in seven decades prompts banks to rein in lending.

--

http://www.timesoftheinternet.com

Analyst: China headed for major slowdown


BEIJING, Nov. 8 (UPI) --

China could be headed for a major economic downturn, an analyst's report indicates.

Eric Fishwick, chief economist at CLSA, an Asia specialist private equity firm, said China's growth in 2009 could dip to 5.5 percent, The Times of London reported Saturday.

The newspaper reported that already China's electricity sector is lagging, with monthly national power output in October falling for the first time in a decade. More than 70 percent of the electricity generated in China is consumed by industry.

Investors need to analyze China as 'just another capitalist country' and question whether government policy will actually work, Fishwick said. China is revealed as extremely cyclical with the volatile expenditure components much larger compared with the stable ones. Our 5.5 percent GDP forecast has already factored in a broad and aggressive government stimulus.

In a separate report, Goldman Sachs said Friday the Chinese economy will likely stabilize in the second half of 2009.

Deng Tishun, Goldman's China strategist, said Chinese stocks listed in Hong Kong could rise more than 50 percent next year.
Copyright 2008 by United Press International
All Rights Reserved.

--

11/8/2008 3:50 PM

http://www.foxnews.com

CLEVELAND —  A contractor who found $182,000 in Depression-era currency hidden in a bathroom wall has ended up with only a few thousand dollars, but he feels some vindication.

The windfall discovery amounted to little more than grief for contractor Bob Kitts, who couldn't agree on how to split the money with homeowner Amanda Reece.

It didn't help Reece much, either. She testified in a deposition that she was considering bankruptcy and that a bank recently foreclosed on one of her properties.

And 21 descendants of Patrick Dunne _ the wealthy businessman who stashed the money that was minted in a time of bank collapses and joblessness _ will each get a mere fraction of the find.

"If these two individuals had sat down and resolved their disputes and divided the money, the heirs would have had no knowledge of it," said attorney Gid Marcinkevicius, who represents the Dunne estate. "Because they were not able to sit down and divide it in a rational way, they both lost."

Kitts was tearing the bathroom walls out of an 83-year-old home near Lake Erie in 2006 when he discovered two green metal lockboxes suspended inside a wall below the medicine chest, hanging from a wire. Inside were white envelopes with the return address for "P. Dunne News Agency."

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

Monsoon link to fall of dynasties

The demise of some of China's ruling dynasties may have been linked to changes in the strength of monsoon rains, a new study suggests.

The findings come from 1,800-year record of the Asian monsoon preserved in a stalagmite from a Chinese cave.

Weak - and therefore dry - monsoon periods coincided with the demise of the Tang, Yuan and Ming imperial dynasties, the scientists said.

A US-Chinese team report their work in the journal Science.

Stalagmites are largely made up of calcium carbonate, which precipitates from groundwater dripping from the ceiling of a cave.

Chemical analysis of a 118mm-long stalagmite from Wangxiang Cave, in Gansu province, north-west China, told the history of strong and weak cycles in the monsoon - the rains that water crops to feed millions of people in Asia.

It also shows that, over the last 50 years, greenhouse gases and aerosols have taken over from natural variability to become the dominant influence on the monsoon.

Death of dynasties

Small variations in the forms, or isotopes, of the stalagmite's oxygen composition reflected variations in rainfall near the cave.

Proportions of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium in the deposit allowed the researchers to date the stalagmite layers to within an average of two-and-a-half years.

By comparing the rain record with Chinese historical records, Pingzhong Zhang of Lanzhou University in China, and colleagues, found three out of five "multi-century" dynasties - the Tang, the Yuan and the Ming - ended after several decades of weaker summer monsoons with drier conditions.

"Summer monsoon winds originate in the Indian Ocean and sweep into China," said Hai Cheng, co-author from the University of Minnesota, US.

"When the summer monsoon is stronger, it pushes farther north-west into China."

These moisture-laden winds bring rain necessary for cultivating rice. But when the monsoon is weak, the rains stall farther south and east, depriving northern and western parts of China of summer rains.

This could have led to poor rice harvests and civil unrest, the researchers speculate.

"Whereas other factors would certainly have affected these chapters of Chinese cultural history, our correlations suggest that climate played a key role," the researchers write in Science.

But a weak monsoon could also be linked to changes further afield. The researchers say a dry period between 850AD and 940AD coincides not only with the decline of the Chinese Tang dynasty but also with the fall of the Mayan civilization in America.

Human influence

Subsequent strengthening of the monsoon may have contributed to the rapid increase in rice cultivation, a dramatic increase in population and general stability at the beginning of China's Northern Song Dynasty.

The monsoon record also matched up nicely with the advance and retreat of Swiss glaciers.

Scientists say the natural archive shows that climate change can have devastating effects on local populations - even when this change is mild when averaged across the globe.

In the cave record, the monsoon followed trends in solar activity over many centuries, suggesting the Sun played an important role in the variability of this weather system.

To a lesser extent, it also followed northern hemisphere temperatures on a millennial and centennial scale. As temperatures went up, the monsoon became stronger and, as they dropped, it weakened.

However, over the last 50 years, this relationship has switched. The researchers attribute this to the influence of greenhouse gas emissions and sulphate aerosols released by human activities.

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11/8/2008 9:34 AM

http://www.informativepost.com/

The "Bush Connection"

Like it or not, John McCain just could not get away from being associated with President George W. Bush, now blamed for the majority of ills of our nation.  Despite his efforts to distance himself from the unpopular George W.,  the fact that McCain supported 90% of his policies made people reluctant to vote for 4 more years of the same kind of administration.

 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7714950.stm

Green spaces 'reduce health gap'

A bit of greenery near our homes can cut the "health gap" between rich and poor, say researchers from two Scottish universities.

Even small parks in the heart of our cities can protect us from strokes and heart disease, perhaps by cutting stress or boosting exercise.

Their study, in The Lancet, matched data about hundreds of thousands of deaths to green spaces in local areas.

Councils should introduce more greenery to improve wellbeing, they said.

This study offers valuable evidence that green space does more than 'pretty up' the neighbourhood
 

Dr Terry Hartig
Uppsala University, Sweden

Across the country, there are "health inequalities" related to income and social deprivation, which generally reflect differences in lifestyle, diet, and, to some extent, access to medical care.

This means that in general, people living in poorer areas are more likely to be unhealthy, and die earlier.

However, the researchers found that living near parks, woodland or other open spaces helped reduce these inequalities, regardless of social class.

When the records of more than 366,000 people who died between 2001 and 2005 were analysed, it revealed that even tiny green spaces in the areas in which they lived made a big difference to their risk of fatal diseases.

Although the effect was greatest for those living surrounded by the most greenery, with the "health gap" roughly halved compared with those with the fewest green spaces around them, there was still a noticeable difference.

Stress buster

The change was particularly clear in areas such as heart disease and stroke, supporting the idea that the presence of green spaces encourages people to be more active.

However, the researchers, Dr Richard Mitchell from Glasgow University, and Dr Frank Popham, from the University of St Andrews, said that other studies had suggested that contact with green spaces also helped reduce blood pressure and stress levels, perhaps even promoting faster healing after surgery.

They wrote: "The implications of this study are clear - environments that promote good health might be crucial in the fight to reduce health inequalities."

They called for planning authorities to consider making more green spaces available to improve the health and wellbeing of their residents.

In an accompanying article in The Lancet, Dr Terry Hartig, from the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University in Sweden, wrote: "This study offers valuable evidence that green space does more than 'pretty up' the neighbourhood - it appears to have real effects on health inequality, of a kind that politicians and health authorities should take seriously."

David Tibbatts, from GreenSpace, a charity which promotes parks in urban areas, said that they were threatened by "decades of decline" in some areas.

"The study confirms what we have been saying for many years - parks are important for health and everyone should have access to high quality, beautiful and vibrant green spaces. "Unfortunately, despite the benefits green spaces bring to communities, our research has shown a decline in park services that has spread across more than 30 years.

"Despite increase recognition of their role in areas such as improved health, far too many parks teams find their revenue budgets are still under continuous threat."

Professor Barbara Maher from the Lancaster Environment Centre said her research had shown that roadside trees improve health by protecting people from pollution.

"Urban and roadside trees may be an under-used resource both in terms of acting as natural 'pollution monitors' and actively screening people, especially, children and the already ill, from the damaging health effects of particle pollution," she said.

http://www.bestwaytoinvest.com

Now the stock market will continously try to anticipate an imminent turnaround but I'm finally starting to hear some sensible reality from some of the Kool Aid bulls in various media outlets. They still are far more bullish than I am; but at least they are not spouting the same level of nonsense they were even 6 months ago. If you are too young to have been aware of it, and choose not to read up on it - go ask your parents how the 70s to very early 80s were and then prepare for it. We're heading there; I believe a new round of panic will ensue as states face reality in their budgets for fiscal summer 09 to summer 10. I believe the federal government will be "bailing out" states - but we're going to see service cutbacks (i.e. jobs) of a very large scale in many states. We've outlined this many times over the past year and a quarter - I am only now seeing this seep into consciousness of some media. This along with the personal bankruptcy wave of 2009 will be next year's twin crisis. Yet another reason I have to look away when the Kool Aid folk scream that the U.S. got into trouble first so will rebound first. That's call first in, first out in accounting land. Unfortunately the U.S. economy is not a balance sheet.

 So based on what I wrote about, one should just close up shop and not be in the market for at least 18 months. But again, the stock market is not the economy and there have to be some ways to make money - always. How? I'm working on that part ;) But first I need all these hedge funds to kill off each other with their computer models and after that great cleansing is over with we might have a playing field that makes a little sense. Until then, we like a hefty portion of cash.

--

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7716207.stm

Surgery beneficial in heartburn

People with persistent heartburn should be considered for early surgery to prevent a lifetime of popping pills, NHS research suggests.

A year after keyhole surgery, only 14% of patients were still taking medication, compared with 90% of those treated with drugs alone.

The £1m trial of 800 patients suggests surgery should be done more routinely in patients with chronic acid reflux.

Experts said there was a view among GPs that surgery was "too extreme".

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen co-ordinated the trial of laparoscopic fundoplication at 21 hospitals around the UK.

For some people, it is a serious problem which could potentially mean a lifetime of tablet taking
 

Professor Roger Jones, King's College London

The results so far suggest the procedure, although expensive at £2000 per patient, is cost-effective because reflux sufferers no longer have to take medication and their quality of life improves.

But they are following the patients for five years to check the benefits are long-term.

The operation involves wrapping a piece of the stomach around the oesophagus to create a new valve to prevent acid backing up from the stomach.

It used to be done by opening up the chest cavity, but with the advent of keyhole surgery is now a lot safer.

Common problem

Reflux is a very common condition with 20% of the population experiencing it at some point in their lives.

Those at the more severe end of the spectrum end up taking tablets for the rest of their lives - potentially for 20 to 30 years in younger patients - and few currently receive surgery.

Study leader, Professor Adrian Grant, said: "It looks pretty promising.

"I think these results will mean that surgeons will be suggesting the operation in those patients who are not quite so bad."

He added: "Like all surgery, fundoplication has some risks, but the more troublesome the symptoms, the greater the potential benefit from the operation."

Professor Roger Jones, head of general practice at King's College London and chair of the Primary Care Gastroenterology Society said surgery was often regarded as "too extreme" for something which is not a serious problem.

"But for some people, it is a serious problem which could potentially mean a lifetime of tablet taking."

http://www.bestwaytoinvest.com/

The economic news was horrid this week - as always the questions are how much is priced in? I expect the news to get much worse in the half year ahead but the bulls will grasp any positive piece of data as "the turning point!" so expect some 180 degree turns (in pre market of course) as somewhere in the ocean of reports coming will be an outlier that can be used to thrash the short side. The greater trend is obviously still down and within that trend will come some short lived, but strong, rallies - but only the nimble can even attempt to bother. Friday alone the nimble with a crystal ball could of made 2 full round trips in and out. For most it won't be worth trying to tempt fate because if you bite on the cheese for even a day too long you get stuck in a trap. This remains a black hole for investors and longer term oriented traders; the Wild Wild West is left in the hands of the daytraders and HAL9000.

http://www.marketwatch.com/

This whip-saw trading pattern may stem from big investors looking to raise cash by selling stocks, commodities, futures and anything else that's easily unloaded. A rally encourages these investors to sell; when stocks are beaten down enough, other investors step in.

"The hedge funds and highly leveraged funds are unwinding positions. Every rally you get tends to encourage more liquidation," said Bill O'Grady, chief market strategist at $500 million Confluence Investment Management LLC in St. Louis, Mo.

But there's more to the market than hedge funds, he notes.

"Let's face it, if you're a value manager, you're a kid in a candy store. You have no trouble finding stocks that are at historically cheap values," he said.

--

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081107/bs_nm/us_berkshire

Buffett has committed more than $27 billion of Berkshire's money this year to make acquisitions, finance takeovers and invest in blue-chip companies such as General Electric Co (GE.N) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N).

The investments give Berkshire new ways to grow as the credit crisis drives asset values down and makes it harder for other companies to borrow.

Despite the investments, Berkshire increased its cash stake to $33.37 billion as of September 30 from $31.16 billion in June, although it was down from $44.33 billion at the end of 2007.

"When you can move money from cash earning 2 percent to distressed assets that can earn 20 percent, it creates a lot of value," said James Armstrong, president of Henry H. Armstrong Associates in Pittsburgh, which owns Berkshire stock. "Buffett isn't doing it with an eyedropper."

--

http://www.bestwaytoinvest.com/stories/the-random-markets-nonsense

One of my larger fears in this market is seeing a complete detachment from fundamentals as "large pools of money" seem to dominate the trading. I call this casino action; and it's been growing over time but really accelerating of late. In the past it was the increasingly silly lemming reaction to earnings reports - if a company misses by 1 cent in a 90 day period (which is nothing in the bigger picture) it's enterprise value shall drop 20-30% overnight. Or vice versa - all driven by a culture of traders who never even bother to open an earnings press release - whatever Briefing.com or Reuters screams at them (miss! beat!) drives a company valuations by hundreds of millions, sometimes multi billions within seconds. Nonsense.

That has now grown over the past year even further - now companies are changing value by 10-15% on a daily basis - multi billion dollar companies. Not some fly by night dot coms or companies with no defensible business model. I see 50, 75 year old companies trading as if they are small caps with $5 million in revenue. It really creates a circus atmosphere and makes the stock market lose a lot of credibility. If its hedge funds, if its the power of ETFs, if its an A.D.D. video game generation of traders now in their 20s, 30s and early 40s who now dominate trading desks - I don't know. But it is what's been created.

The long term result of this is people will completely abandon the markets as there is no advantage to actual thinking. I personally don't like casinos because I have little to no advantage - the idea is in financial markets you can if you put in the grunt work. Now it appears that this is not the case. And it is not just equity markets - I wanted to pass along some conversation on Realmoney.com today, by someone who has been a long time oil trader.... again none of this is healthy and until (if) it stops there is no investing to be had. Just trading. Mostly by computers based on programs written by PhDs. And we're just onlookers.

How ridiculous is this? What will the 'experts' (like me, supposedly) DO to give 'expert insight' into such a market? What can anyone say? Crack spreads for gasoline have been NEGATIVE for the last few weeks -- does anyone perceive what this means? It means that the refining product is WORTH LESS than the raw product that makes it -- it's like buying raw iron and losing money manufacturing it into steel girders, buying coffee beans and getting less for a cup of coffee ....... How many industries can survive under these conditions and for how long? That's what the refiners are laboring under ---

RIDICULOUS.

I have noticed the same thing Daniel, which is probably due to program trading... I think normal supply and demand momentum is dead, its all hedge fund program trading lately based on emotion and hype..

11/7/2008 9:24 AM

http://www.cbsnews.com

The money rolled in quickly -- more quickly than is usual for a new member of Congress. On his 2003 disclosure, he listed $9,678,775 from the firm, enough to force a footnote that specified he had earned the money before his election.

His stock listings on the same form are filled with the all-too-familiar companies from the economic collapse: Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac, J.P. Morgan.

--

http://news.cnet.com/

Feature films coming to YouTube

YouTube will begin offering feature films produced by at least one of the biggest Hollywood movie studios possibly as early as next month, according to an executive with a major entertainment company.

For months, Google, YouTube's parent company, has been talking to the major film companies about launching an ad-supported, streaming movie service, two execs with knowledge of the negotiations told CNET News. "It's not imminent," said one of the executives. "But it's going to happen. I would say you can expect to see it, if all goes well, sometime within the next 30 to 90 days."

To be sure, not all the studios are prepared to give YouTube full-length movies. Canadian film company Lionsgate agreed in July to give YouTube access to only short movie clips. At least one other studio is trying to cut a similar deal for short-form content with Google, said a separate high-level industry insider.

There's skepticism in some circles about whether enough ads can be placed into a streaming movie to make it profitable without also overloading viewers with commercials. Another sticking point with some of the film companies is Google's insistence on using a specific ad format for feature films, according to two studio sources. They declined to specify which ad unit Google prefers--whether it's prerolls or postrolls or something else--but said some of the studios want the final say on how to advertise to viewers.

Google declined to discuss specifics, but a company spokeswoman issued this statement: "We are in negotiations with a variety of entertainment companies. Our goal is to offer maximum choice for our users, partners, and advertisers."

What is certain is that YouTube's original hope of building a behemoth business exclusively around short, homemade videos is, to this point at least, a bust. The company captured the world's imagination by showcasing 10-minute long user-generated videos but the strategy hasn't yielded much in the way of profits. Three years later, the company is turning to professionally made content.

YouTube vs. Hulu
By choosing this route, YouTube must go head-to-head against the Web's reigning king of streaming long-form video: Hulu.

A showdown between Hulu and the 3-year-old YouTube was inevitable. Consider that Hulu, the joint video venture formed by NBC Universal and News Corp., attracts only a fraction of the 80 million people who visit YouTube each month, but Hulu still managed to generate nearly the same revenue in its first year in business, according to reports.

Over the past year, Hulu's advantages over YouTube have become clear. Hulu attracts more ad revenue because advertisers are more comfortable with full-length TV shows and films more than they are with user-generated fare. Something else Hulu has going for it is a superior viewing experience. Hulu's player offers some of the clearest images found on the Web.

YouTube's new wide-screen player presents video in a less pixilated 16:9 format than the site's standard player, but it falls short of providing Hulu-esque quality.

But here's what YouTube offers that Hulu can't: 80 million monthly visitors. No other video site comes close to reaching an audience of that size.

"We'd love to have our long-form content in front of that audience," said an executive with a studio close to reaching an agreement with YouTube.

YouTube's move to join the growing number of competitors trying to deliver movies over the Internet isn't entirely unexpected. Last month, CBS, parent company of CNET News, announced it had agreed to post full-length TV shows on YouTube. That same month, Google rolled out a new wide-screen video player built to display long-form content.

In addition, Google has lamented publicly YouTube's inability to generate significant income. Some people, including me, predicted it was only a matter of time before Google began obtaining rights to TV shows and films.

But I didn't believe Google could manage to shore up relations with Hollywood as quickly as it did.

Kinder, gentler relations?
YouTube was supposed to be despised by the entertainment industry. Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman last summer called YouTube a "rogue company." YouTube became the Web's No. 1 video site and amassed an enormous following, partly by becoming a favorite place for people to post pirated clips of TV shows and movies. YouTube got rich on the backs of filmmakers, or so it seemed to many content owners.

It didn't help that Google often took a hard line in negotiations with the studios, according to multiple sources. Things got hostile enough for Viacom, parent company of Paramount Pictures, to file a $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google last year. That case continues to play out in the courts.

But then Google's approach to Hollywood changed. Google actually began wooing the studios. The search company, which has said often that it doesn't want to be a media company, won over many a bitter studio suit by developing systems that help them either thwart piracy or profit from it. Google representatives also became more flexible about sharing ad revenue, according to insiders.

How far the relationship between Hollywood and Google will go is anybody's guess. It's going to be hard for YouTube to land Universal or 20th Century Fox because each has a parent company that owns a stake in Hulu.

"Will (Google) try to get into the same space as Hulu, of course," said one studio executive. "Lots of people will."

Google also wants to deliver all the ads and this is problematic because some other companies do a better job, according to one of the executives. He singled out Auditude, which enables a content owner to insert ads into clips wherever they might appear on the Web. This means that if someone posts a pirated copy to some blog or message board, Auditude can slip an ad within the player and allow the rightful owner to turn a buck.

The one thing that Google and YouTube should be encouraged about is the growing number of Hollywood executives who believe there is plenty of interest in viewing films on PCs.

"Our movies are consumed frequently and for long periods of time on the net," said the exec whose company is in talks with Google. "We're big believers in long-form feature film content on new media platforms."

11/2/2008 8:20 AM

http://news.yahoo.com/

NO TURNING POINT YET

Despite a stellar weekly performance, world stocks did have their worst month ever in October, falling almost 20 percent.

There is little debate that stocks are cheap. State Street estimates that adjusted for leverage and cyclicality, the U.S. earnings multiple is 26 percent below its 147-year average.

It also reckons the 30-year history of MSCI equity index suggests global equities are 39 percent cheaper than their long-term average.

However, even with cheap valuation, the U.S. financial firm's cross-border institutional investment in developed equity markets remains at a record low in the past month.

"These long-term allocators of capital are already the biggest players in equity markets, though flows suggest they are not yet adding to their holdings," State Street said in a note to clients.

"The point at which institutions start buying may mark the turning point in the current market crisis. There have been false dawns."

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http://www.marketwatch.com/

But the dollar's recent ascent should not be mistaken for a vote of confidence in U.S. economic fundamentals, he said, but rather as a symptom of how bad it is everywhere.

The appreciation "does not reflect the strength of the U.S. economy, but a flight to safety in an international financial crisis and possible worldwide recession," said Chernick, adding, "so that's not good for anyone.

Dollar is 'everyone's friend'

The U.S. Federal Reserve's latest half-percentage point interest rate cut this week didn't derail the dollar's strength.

The benchmark fed funds rate is now at a 1%, second only to Japan's 0.3% key rate as the lowest among industrialized nations.

Although lower rates usually weigh on a currency, because they erode the return on assets denominated in that currency, the opposite is true in times of risk aversion. When investors perceive risky times, they tend to shed the higher-yielding investments funded in the lower-yielding currencies.

At a time of illiquid interbank markets, the need to fund domestic balance sheets around the world is adding to dollar demand, said Andrew Wilkinson, senior market analyst at Interactive Brokers Group in Greenwich, Conn.

"Today, it seems that the dollar is everyone's friend. Its role as the world's reserve currency is once again a factor," he said. "It's easier to acquire dollar funding, which can be swapped into the desired currency of choice rather than source a willing lender of that currency in the first place. Knowing this helps understand why the dollar has been in demand despite the fantastic liquidity push from all central banks under the sun."

The recent flight into dollars belies what some analysts and investors fear will be a longer-term loss of confidence in the U.S. economy.

"The move is caused by global investment deleveraging, in which major financial players are reversing (unwinding) risky trades and piling into what is erroneously perceived as the safest haven they can find," such as U.S. Treasury bonds, wrote Peter Schiff, the president of Euro Pacific Capital in Darien, Conn., in emailed comments.

"The main lesson our creditors will learn from this crisis is not to lend American consumers any more money," he said. "While the rest of the world absorbs their losses and moves on, we will be digging our way out of the rubble for years to come."

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http://www.marketwatch.com

In August, U.S. consumers reduced their debt load by a record amount, with total seasonally adjusted consumer debt dropping by $7.9 billion, a 3.7% annual rate, to $2.58 trillion. That was the first decline since January 1998.

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http://news.yahoo.com/

It wasn't long ago that many of these countries – known as "emerging markets" in finance lingo – were thought to be immune to financial problems in the developed world. Their governments had decent balance sheets, had paid back international loans, and even stored up funds in "rainy day" reserves. In fact, they were being talked about as engines that could pull America and other wealthy countries out of recession.

But now they're suffering, too. Demand for their goods and commodities is drying up as the great consumer market of the world – the US – folds its wallet.

Even worse, jumpy foreign investors are pulling out of the emerging-market countries, and that's caused currencies in Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Turkey, South Africa, Hungary, and elsewhere to plummet. With weak currencies as well as foreign capital on the run, banks and companies in such countries – and in some cases, governments themselves – are unable to borrow or pay off loans.

There are multiple dangers here. For starters, America's climb out of recession will be all the more difficult without emerging markets to grab on to. At the same time, banks in Western Europe are neck-deep in shaky loans to these countries. One example: Austrian banks' outstanding loans to Eastern Europe are worth more than half of Austria's economic output, or gross domestic product. Default on these loans would spell financial disaster for East and West Europe.

And don't forget the geopolitical considerations. Several of the former Soviet states that are now democracies are in serious financial trouble. And nuclear-armed Pakistan – a weak democracy that is home to Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists – needs close to $5 billion just for short-term survival.

Thankfully, the world is not standing idly by. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), made up of 185 countries and their donations, is acting with speed, muscle, and flexibility.

Last week, it agreed to loan $2 billion to Iceland and $16.5 billion to Ukraine. This week, it worked with the World Bank and European Union to assemble a hefty $25.1 billion rescue package for Hungary. It is in talks with Pakistan.

One complaint about the IMF is that it sets stringent austerity conditions on its loans, just when countries are hurting. This week, however, it announced $100 billion in short-term credit for countries that are basically sound, but have become victims of capital flight and currency devaluation. No strings attached. That's a wise and welcome move.

The IMF is doing exactly what it was set up to do, but will likely need more help. It has a total of $250 billion that can cover small- and medium-sized countries. But economists predict 15 to 20 emerging markets will need assistance, and if a big one like Brazil comes knocking, the IMF won't have enough.

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http://www.nytimes.com/

The Reckoning

From Midwest to M.T.A., Pain From Global Gamble

On a snowy day two years ago, the school board in Whitefish Bay, Wis., gathered to discuss a looming problem: how to plug a gaping hole in the teachers’ retirement plan.

It turned to David W. Noack, a trusted local investment banker, who proposed that the district borrow from overseas and use the money for a complex investment that offered big profits.

“Every three months you’re going to get a payment,” he promised, according to a tape of the meeting. But would it be risky? “There would need to be 15 Enrons” for the district to lose money, he said.

The board and four other nearby districts ultimately invested $200 million in the deal, most of it borrowed from an Irish bank. Without realizing it, the schools were imitating hedge funds.

Half a continent away, New York subway officials were also being wooed by bankers. Officials were told that just as home buyers had embraced adjustable-rate loans, New York could save money by borrowing at lower interest rates that changed every day.

For some of the deals, the officials were encouraged to rely on the same Irish bank as the Wisconsin schools.

During the go-go investing years, school districts, transit agencies and other government entities were quick to jump into the global economy, hoping for fast gains to cover growing pension costs and budgets without raising taxes. Deals were arranged by armies of persuasive financiers who received big paydays.

But now, hundreds of cities and government agencies are facing economic turmoil. Far from being isolated examples, the Wisconsin schools and New York’s transportation system are among the many players in a financial fiasco that has ricocheted globally.

The Wisconsin schools are on the brink of losing their money, confronting educators with possible budget cuts. Interest rates for New York’s subways are skyrocketing and contributing to budget woes that have transportation officials considering higher fares and delaying long-planned track repairs.

And the bank at the center of the saga, named Depfa, is now in trouble, threatening the stability of its parent company in Munich and forcing German officials to intervene with a multibillion-dollar bailout to stop a chain reaction that could freeze Germany’s economic system.

“I am really worried,” said Becky Velvikis, a first-grade teacher at Grewenow Elementary in Kenosha, Wis., one of the districts that invested in Mr. Noack’s deal. “If millions of dollars are gone, what happens to my retirement? Or the construction paper and pencils and supplies we need to teach?”

The trail through Wisconsin, New York and Europe illustrates how this financial crisis has moved around the world so fast, why it is so hard to tame, and why cities, schools and many other institutions will probably struggle for years.

“The local papers and radio shows call us idiots, and now when I go home, my kids ask me, ‘Dad, did you do something wrong?’ ” said Shawn Yde, the director of business services in the Whitefish Bay district. “This is something I’ll regret until the day I die.”

Selling Risk

Whitefish Bay’s school district did not intend to become a hedge fund. It and four nearby districts were just trying to finance retirement obligations that were growing as health care costs rose.

Mr. Noack, the local representative of Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, a St. Louis investment bank, had been advising Wisconsin school boards for two decades, helping them borrow for new gymnasiums and classrooms. His father had taught at an area high school for 47 years. All six of his children attended Milwaukee schools.

Mr. Noack told the Whitefish Bay board that investing in the global economy carried few risks, according to the tape.

“What’s the best investment? It’s called a collateralized debt obligation,” or a C.D.O., Mr. Noack said. He described it as a collection of bonds from 105 of the most reputable companies that would pay the school board a small return every quarter.

“We’re being very conservative,” Mr. Noack told the board, composed of lawyers, salesmen and a homemaker who lived in the affluent Milwaukee suburb.

Soon, Whitefish Bay and the four other districts borrowed $165 million from Depfa and contributed $35 million of their own money to purchase three C.D.O.’s sold by the Royal Bank of Canada, which had a relationship with Mr. Noack’s company.

But Mr. Noack’s explanation of a C.D.O. was very wrong. Mr. Noack, who through his lawyer declined to comment, had attended only a two-hour training session on C.D.O.’s, he told a friend.

The schools’ $200 million was actually used as collateral for a complicated form of insurance guaranteeing about $20 billion of corporate bonds. That investment — known as a synthetic C.D.O. — committed the boards to paying off other bondholders if corporations failed to honor their debts.

If just 6 percent of the bonds insured went bad, the Wisconsin educators could lose all their money. If none of the bonds defaulted, the schools would receive about $1.8 million a year after paying off their own debt. By comparison, the C.D.O.’s offered only a modestly better return than a $35 million investment in ultra-safe Treasury bonds, which would have paid about $1.5 million a year, with virtually no risk.

The boards, as part of their deal, received thick packets of documents.

“I’ve never read the prospectus,” said Marc Hujik, a local financial adviser and a member of the Kenosha school board who spent 13 years on Wall Street. “We had all our questions answered satisfactorily by Dave Noack, so I wasn’t worried.”

Wisconsin schools were not the only ones to jump into such complicated financial products. More than $1.2 trillion of C.D.O.’s have been sold to buyers of all kinds since 2005 — including many cities and government agencies — an increase of 270 percent from the four previous years combined, according to Thomson Reuters.

“Selling these products to municipalities was pretty widespread,” said Janet Tavakoli, a finance industry consultant in Chicago. “They tend to be less sophisticated. So bankers sell them products stuffed with junk.”

From the Wisconsin deal, the Royal Bank of Canada received promises of payments totaling about $11.2 million, according to documents. Stifel Nicolaus made about $1.2 million. Mr. Noack’s total salary was about $300,000 a year, according to someone with knowledge of his finances. And Depfa received interest on its loans.

In separate statements, the Royal Bank of Canada and Stifel Nicolaus said board members signed documents indicating they understood the investments’ risks. Both companies said they were not financial advisers to the boards but merely sold them products or services. Stifel Nicolaus said its relationship with the boards ended in 2007. Mr. Noack now works for a rival firm.

“Everyone knew New York guys were making tons of money on these kinds of deals,” said Mr. Hujik, of the school board. “It wasn’t implausible that we could make money, too.”

A Bank Goes Global

By the time Depfa financed the Wisconsin schools’ investment, it had already become an emblem of the new global economy. It was founded 86 years ago as a sleepy German lender, and for most of its history had focused on its home market.

But in 2002 a new chief executive, Gerhard Bruckermann, moved Depfa to the freewheeling financial center of Dublin to take advantage of low corporate taxes. He soon pushed the company into São Paulo, Mumbai, Warsaw, Hong Kong, Dallas, New York, Tokyo and elsewhere. Depfa became one of Europe’s most profitable banks and was famous for lavish events and large paychecks. In 2006, top executives took home the equivalent of $33 million at today’s exchange rates.

Mr. Bruckermann was a gregarious leader who joked that he hoped to make all employees into millionaires. He divided his time between a London home and a vast farm in Spain, where he grew exotic medicinal plants. And his success fueled an arrogance, former colleagues say.

Mr. Bruckermann once told a trade publication that Depfa, unlike German banks, understood how to benefit from the global economy. “With our efforts, we are like the one-eyed man who becomes king in the land of the blind,” he was quoted as saying.

Mr. Bruckermann, who left the bank earlier this year, did not respond to requests for an interview.

But as Depfa grew, other European banks began competing with the firm. So executives stretched into riskier deals — the sort that would eventually send shockwaves across Europe and the United States.

Some of Mr. Bruckermann’s employees grew concerned about deals like one struck in 2005 with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York, the agency overseeing the city and suburban subways, buses and trains.

For years, municipal agencies like the M.T.A. had raised money by issuing plain-vanilla bonds with fixed interest rates. But then bankers began telling officials that there was a way to get cheaper financing.

Bankers said that cities, like home buyers, could save money with adjustable-rate loans, where the payments started low and changed over time. What they did not emphasize was that such payments could eventually skyrocket. Such borrowing — known as variable-rate bonds — also carried big fees for Wall Street.

The pitches were very successful. Municipalities issued twice as many variable-rate bonds last year as they did a decade earlier.

But variable-rate bonds had a hitch: many investors would purchase them only if a bank like Depfa was hired as a buyer of last resort, ready to acquire bonds from investors who could find no other buyers. Depfa collected fees for serving that role, but expected it would rarely have to honor such pledges.

Mr. Bruckermann’s salespeople traveled the world encouraging officials to sign up for variable-rate loans. And bureaucrats and politicians, including some in New York, jumped in.

By 2006 Depfa was the largest buyer of last resort in the world, standing behind $2.9 billion of bonds issued that year alone. It backed a $200 million bond issued by the M.T.A.

But as Depfa grew, it became more reliant on enormous short-term loans to finance its operations. Those loans cost less, and thus helped the bank achieve higher profits, but only when times were good. Indeed, some employees were worried about that debt.

But Mr. Bruckermann plowed ahead, and it paid off. In 2007, even as the global economy was softening, Mr. Bruckermann persuaded one of Germany’s biggest lenders, Hypo Real Estate, to purchase Depfa for $7.8 billion. Mr. Bruckermann’s cut was more than $150 million. He left the company to grow oranges on his Spanish estate.

The Risks Turn Bad

Last March the delicate web tying Wisconsin, Dublin and Manhattan became an anchor dragging everyone down.

Mr. Yde, the director of business services for the Whitefish Bay district, began receiving troubling messages indicating the district’s investments were declining. Worried, he started coming into his office at dawn, before the hallways of Whitefish Bay High School filled with students.

As the sun rose, Mr. Yde searched for explanations by the light of his computer screen. He Googled “C.D.O.’s.” He called bankers in London and New York. Each person referred him to someone else.

Then notices arrived saying that the bonds insured by Whitefish Bay’s C.D.O.’s were defaulting. It became increasingly likely that the district’s money would be seized to pay off other bondholders. Most, if not all, of the $200 million would probably be lost.

As other districts received similar notices, panic grew. For some boards, interest payments on borrowed money were now larger than revenue from the investments. Officials began quietly warning that they might have to dip into school funds.

“This is going to have a tremendous financial impact,” said Robert F. Kitchen, a member of the West Allis-West Milwaukee school board. Officials say some districts may have to cut courses like art and drama, curtail gym and classroom maintenance, or forgo replacing teachers who retire.

Problems were emerging elsewhere, as well.

Depfa’s executives were realizing that their loans to the Wisconsin schools were unlikely to be repaid. Additionally, bonds all over the world were declining in value, exposing the company to the possibility they would have to make good on their pledges as a buyer of last resort. And Depfa was still borrowing billions each month to cover its short-term loans. By autumn, the short-term debt of the bank and its parent company, Hypo, totaled $81 billion.

Then, in mid-September, the American investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Short-term lending markets froze up. Ratings agencies, including Standard & Poor’s, downgraded Depfa, citing the company’s difficulties borrowing at affordable rates.

That set off a crisis in Germany, where officials worried that Depfa’s sudden need for cash would drag down its parent company and set off a chain reaction at other banks. The German government and private banks extended $64 billion in credit to Hypo to stop it from imploding.

“We will not allow the distress of one financial institution to endanger the entire system,” Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said at the time.

That crisis spread almost immediately to the M.T.A.

The transportation authority, guided by Gary Dellaverson, a rumpled, cigarillo-smoking chief financial officer, had $3.75 billion of variable-rate debt outstanding.

About $200 million of that debt was backed by Depfa. When the bank was downgraded, investors dumped those transportation bonds, because of worries they would get stuck with them if Depfa’s problems worsened. Depfa was forced to buy $150 million of them, and bonds worth billions of dollars issued by other municipalities.

Then came the twist: Depfa’s contracts said that if it bought back bonds, the municipalities had to pay a higher-than-average interest rate. The New York transportation authority’s repayment obligation could eventually balloon by about $12 million a year on the Depfa loans alone.

On its own, that cost could be absorbed by the agency. But, as the economy declined, the M.T.A. had lost hundreds of millions because tax receipts — which finance part of its budget — were falling. And its ability to renew its variable-rate bonds at low interest rates was hurt by the trouble at Depfa and other banks. The transportation authority now faces a $900 million shortfall, according to officials. It is “fairly breathtaking,” Mr. Dellaverson told the M.T.A.’s finance committee. “This is not a tolerable long-term position for us to be in.”

In a recent interview, Mr. Dellaverson defended New York’s use of variable bonds.

“Variable-rate debt has helped M.T.A. save millions of dollars, and we’ve been conservative in issuing it,” he said. “But there are risks, which we work hard to mitigate. Usually it works. But what’s happening today is a total lack of marketplace rationality.”

In a statement, the transportation authority said that it was exploring options to reduce the cost of the Depfa-backed bonds, that its variable-rate bonds had delivered savings even during the current turmoil and that the agency had remained within its budget on debt payments this year.

However, the transportation authority has already announced it will raise subway and train fares next year because of various fiscal problems, and may be forced to shrink the work force and reduce some bus routes. Some analysts say fares will probably rise again in 2010.

The Depfa fallout doesn’t end there. Rating agencies have downgraded the bonds of more than 75 municipal agencies backed by Depfa, including in California, Connecticut, Illinois and South Dakota. Officials in Florida, Massachusetts and Montana have cut budgets because of C.D.O.’s or similar risky bets.

And Hypo, the German company that bought Depfa, last week asked the German government for financial help for the third time. Depfa has frozen much of its business, according to Wall Street bankers, and though it continues to honor its commitments, some wonder for how long.

The Wisconsin school districts have filed suit against the Royal Bank of Canada and Stifel Nicolaus alleging misrepresentations. Board members hope they will prevail and schools and retirement plans will emerge unscathed. The companies dispute the lawsuit’s claims. Mr. Noack is not named as a defendant and is cooperating with the school boards.

In Mrs. Velvikis’s classroom at Grewenow Elementary in Kenosha, students have recently completed a lesson in which each first grader contributed a vegetable to a common vat of “stone soup.” The project — based on a children’s book — teaches the benefits of working together. The schools have learned that when everyone works together, they can also all starve.

“Our funding is already so limited,” Mrs. Velvikis said. “We rely on parent donations for some supplies. You hear about all these millions of dollars that have been lost, and you think, that’s got to come out of somewhere.”

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http://www.nytimes.com

In Mexico Drug War, Sorting Good Guys From Bad

MEXICO CITY — Many of the mug shots of drug traffickers that appear in the Mexican press show surly looking roughnecks glaring menacingly at the camera. An anticorruption investigation unveiled last week in the Mexican capital, however, made it clear that not everybody enmeshed in the narcotics trade looks the part.

There was a gray-haired, grandfatherly type who was pushing 70, as well as an avuncular figure with a neatly coiffed goatee and wire-rimmed spectacles perched upon his nose. Some of the five men who found themselves on the front pages of newspapers on their way to jail wore suits, which made them look more like bureaucrats than bad guys.

Among the greatest challenges in Mexico’s drug war is the fact that the traffickers fit no type. Their ranks include men and women, the young and the old. And they can work anywhere: in remote drug labs, as part of roving assassination squads, even within the upper reaches of the government.

It has long been known that drug gangs have infiltrated local police forces. Now it is becoming ever more clear that the problem does not stop there. The alarming reality is that many public servants in Mexico are serving both the taxpayers and the traffickers.

The men in suits, it turns out, were both bureaucrats and bad guys, officials say, corrupt employees high up in an elite unit of the federal attorney general’s office who were feeding secret information to the feared Beltrán Leyva cartel in exchange for suitcases full of cash.

Their arrest, and the firing of 35 other suspect law enforcement officials, represents the most extensive corruption case that this country, which knows corruption all too well, has ever seen. And it raises a question that is on the lips of many Mexicans: how does one know who is dirty and who is clean?

“I’m convinced that to stop the crime, we first have to get it out of our own house,” President Felipe Calderón, who has made fighting trafficking a crucial part of his presidency, said in a speech on Tuesday, after the arrests were announced.

That house is clearly dirty. There is ample evidence that Mexicans of all walks of life are willing to join the drug gangs in exchange for cash, including farmers who abandon traditional crops and turn to growing marijuana and accountants who hide the narco-traffickers’ profits.

There was sporadic evidence in the past that such corruption extended into high-level government offices. An army general who commanded Mexico’s anti-drug unit was arrested and convicted in 1997 after the discovery that he was working for a drug lord on the side. In 2005, a spy working for a drug cartel was discovered working in the president’s office and accused of feeding traffickers information on the movements of Vicente Fox, then the president.

But the abundance of law enforcement officials now believed to be on the take has made Mr. Calderón’s drug war all the more difficult to execute. Traffickers often know beforehand when raids are going to occur. Sometimes dealers plant their people on the teams that carry out the raids to act as saboteurs.

The traffickers’ networks are not foolproof. Mr. Calderón’s government did manage to capture Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, a cartel leader, in January even though the group was receiving inside information. What appears to have happened, officials say, is that the army carried out the raid without involving the attorney general’s office, inadvertently keeping the corrupt officials out of the loop.

The cartel’s leaders, who operate out of Sinaloa State and have been implicated in the killing of a top police commander in Mexico City, were described in local press accounts as being furious that their government moles had not informed them of the raid.

Still, the reach of the drug networks is so extensive that even winning a court conviction against a kingpin is not always enough to claim victory.

Many prison wardens and guards have shown themselves to be corrupt, allowing prominent detainees not only to operate their crime networks from their cells, but also to use their illicit drug proceeds to be as comfortable as possible behind bars, paying for everything from pizza to prostitutes. The cartel leaders sometimes even use their money to escape. The most notorious case was in 2001, when Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the country’s most wanted drug lord, managed to slip out of a maximum security prison in a laundry cart.

The porous nature of Mexican penitentiaries has prompted Mr. Calderón to increase the number of transfers of drug lords to the United States prison system. The United States has already filed the paperwork to extradite one of the officials accused last week of corruption. The official, Miguel Colorado González, 68, was a top manager in the government organized-crime office known by the Spanish acronym Siedo.

Mr. Calderón is not the first president to try to root out corruption. President Ernesto Zedillo reorganized the nation’s federal police at least twice; each time traffickers quickly infiltrated the force and bought off leading officials. His successor, Mr. Fox, tried and failed to clean up law enforcement as well.

Mr. Calderón’s efforts have been sustained enough that the traffickers have begun a vicious counterattack; so far this year, about 4,000 people — including police officers, soldiers, criminals and civilians — have been killed in an extraordinary wave of violence linked to organized crime.

The latest corruption scandal has prompted President Calderón’s attorney general to order a restructuring and purging of his office, and specifically of Siedo, which was formed from another agency that was shut down after being infiltrated by drug spies.

The government has ordered more lie detector tests for officials in delicate posts, beefed-up background checks and better salaries for underpaid police officers. But the amount of cash that the traffickers throw around — which Jorge Chabat, a security analyst, calls “enough money to buy part of the state” — makes government salaries seem laughable. Clearly, the government cannot compete peso for peso.

In some cases, finding out who has strayed from the straight and narrow should be a simple matter of following the money. Mr. Colorado González is reported to have bought four luxury vehicles in one year. Expensive jewelry was found in his home. His bank account was bulging.

In Tuesday’s speech, a clearly frustrated Mr. Calderón said that the fight to clean up Mexico depended on citizens putting their country first and respecting the law above all else. He suggested that the small bribes so often demanded by the officer on the beat, and accepted by the public as normal, for infractions real and imagined, were not disconnected from the government official receiving millions of dollars in drug profits.

“We need a stronger society, a society that lives the principle of legality with conviction, that encourages, promotes, spreads and educates its children with values,” Mr. Calderón said. In other words, there has to be a line people will not cross, even for a suitcase full of cash.

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http://www.forbes.com/

You can expect to see more serious consequences for missing a payment. Some lenders are lowering credit limits or hiking up interest rates after just one missed payment. When credit scoring companies, such as Fair Isaac Corp. (FICO) see these negative shifts in your credit, your credit score is probably going to go down. Be aware that some credit cards are decreasing credit limits or increasing interest rates even if you're not at fault. Be sure to monitor your credit card statement. Lenders are allowed to increase your interest rate without even telling you.

You will find that your credit score is going to matter more now than it ever did before, and you'll want to protect it. Credit card companies are not the only suddenly more cautious lenders out there. For example, you may find it harder to get a car loan and you may see student loan interest rates going up. "Lenders are going to be cherry-picking customers," says Gerri Detweiler, author of The Ultimate Credit Handbook: How to Cut Your Debt and Have a Lifetime of Great Credit. You're probably going to need a decent credit score to get a good deal on a loan. Expect to need a credit score about 100 points higher than what you may have needed in the past for a particular loan.

You shouldn't stop using credit cards altogether, as we're realizing our credit score is going to be more important as lenders get choosier. In fact, now may be the time to prove yourself to lenders as a trustworthy investment. Keep your debt low and your credit strong, and lenders will be eager to work with you. You may find you'll get benefits with good credit that you haven't been able to get in the past.

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http://www.forbes.com

Digging into the pharmaceuticals sector, we find several potential candidates that appear primed for bearish trading opportunities. One stock that has performed particularly poorly is Biovail (nyse: BVF - news - people ). As you might suspect, the company develops, manufactures and distributes pharmaceutical products. BVF also provides a wide range of services from research and development, through clinical testing and regulatory filings to full-scale manufacturing.

Technically speaking, the stock has been in a steep decline since July 2007, falling more than 68% from its highs near $26.50 per share. The equity is currently struggling to hold onto support at the 7 level as it battles resistance at its descending 10-week and 20-week moving averages. What's more, short-term resistance is building at the 8.5 level, which has held BVF in check since early October.

Despite this weak performance in the shares, options players are betting on a rebound. The SOIR, which compares put open interest against call open interest among options that expire in less than three months, stands at 0.18. This low reading indicates that call open interest more than quintuples put open interest among near-term options. What's more, this ratio is lower than 96% of all those taken during the past year, indicating that options traders have been more optimistic only 4% of the time in the prior 52 weeks.

Another pharmaceutical company in trouble is Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ). This member of the Dow Jones industrial average has produced some of the most well-known drugs in the industry, including Propecia, Singulair, Vioxx and Zocor. Despite the company's notoriety, the security has been trapped in a downtrend under its 10-week and 20-week moving averages since January. During this time frame, MRK has plunged more than 48%, tagging a fresh multi-year low in early October. But, while the shares have since rebounded from these lows, MRK continues to be capped by its 10-week moving average. This trend line has taken up residence in the 30-31 region, an area that has provided stiff short-term resistance for the equity since mid-October.

Schering Plough (nyse: SGP - news - people ) is another struggling pharmaceutical stock that could make for a nice bearish play. Since setting a near-term peak of 33.40 in mid-October 2007, SGP has plunged more than 57% while battling overhead resistance from its 10-week and 20-week moving averages. The shares are now trading in the teens and have bounced between support at the 13-level and resistance at the 15-level since mid-October 2008. The equity is currently trading near the upper rail of this trading range and could be poised for another drop to the 13-region or below.

Options players are smitten with the drug czar. The SOIR sits at 0.65 in the 35 percentile of its annual range. Meanwhile, Zacks.com reports that six of the 11 analysts following the shares still rate them a "buy" or better. Should the shares be rejected by resistance at the 15-level, it could prompt an unwinding of this lingering optimistic sentiment, creating a downdraft of selling pressure for SGP shares. To take advantage of a retreat in the security, traders should consider the January 2009 17.50 put.

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11/3/2008 10:57 AM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Revenge of the Left across the world

Whatever the exact result of the US elections tomorrow, we must assume that the whole governing machinery of Washington and the state capitols will soon be hostile to laissez-faire thinking.

It is not just that the Democrats will win a crushing victory in both houses of Congress, perhaps reaching the 60-seat Senate threshold that lets them steam-roll legislation. It is also that the incoming class of 2008 is of a new creed. Many no longer believe – or actively reject – the free trade and free market catechisms.

As commentator Markos Moulitsas put it in Newsweek: "The big question is, will Democrats nationwide simply 'win' the night–or will they deliver an electoral drubbing so thorough that it signals the utter rejection of conservative ideology and kills the notion that America is a 'center-right' country?" he said.

No matter that statist policies were responsible for this global crisis in the first place. It was Western governments that set interest rates too low for too long, encouraging us all to abuse credit.

It was Eastern governments that held down their currencies to pursue mercantilist trade advantage, thereby accumulating vast foreign reserves that had to be recycled. Hence the bond bubble. This is the deformed creature known as Bretton Woods II. Protectionist Democrats are right to complain that the game is rigged. Free trade? Laugh on.

But at this point I have given up hoping that we will draw the right conclusions from this crisis. The universal verdict is that capitalism has run amok.

In any case the damage caused as credit retrenchment squeezes real industry is likely to be so great that Barack Obama may have to pursue unthinkable policies, just as Franklin Roosevelt had to ditch campaign orthodoxies and go truly radical after his landslide victory in 1932. Indeed, Mr Obama – if he wins – may have to start by nationalizing the US car industry.

For those who missed it, I recommend Edward Stourton's BBC interview with Eric Hobsbawm, the doyen of Marxist history.

"This is the dramatic equivalent of the collapse of the Soviet Union: we now know that an era has ended," said Mr Hobsbawm, still lucid at 91.

"It is certainly greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s. As Marx and Schumpeter foresaw, globalization not only destroys heritage, but is incredibly unstable. It operates through a series of crises.

"There'll be a much greater role for the state, one way or another. We've already got the state as lender of last resort, we might well return to idea of the state as employer of last resort, which is what it was under FDR. It'll be something which orients, and even directs the private economy," he said.

Dismiss this as the wishful thinking of an old Marxist if you want, but I suspect his views may be closer to the truth than the complacent assumptions so prevalent in the City.

To those who still think that business can go on as normal now that EU taxpayers have had to rescue the financial system, I can only say: what will happen to London if EU exchange controls are imposed, or if leverage is restricted by draconian laws – as demanded by the German, Dutch, and Nordic Left?

Does the UK still have a blocking minority under EU voting rules to stop a blitz of directives that could shut down half the activities of the City – or the 'Casino' as they say in Brussels? I doubt it.

Who thinks that the three key Commission posts – single market, competition, and trade – will still be held by free marketeers when the new team comes in next year?

In Germany, Oskar Lafontaine's Linke party now has 23pc support in Saarland on a Marxist pledge to nationalize banks and utilities. Needless to say, the Social Democrats (SPD) are shifting hard Left to protect their flank.

"The rule of the radical market ideology that began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan has ended with a loud bang," said Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister and SPD candidate for chancellor next year.

"We need a comprehensive new start, so we can reestablish our society on fresh foundations. People create value, not locusts," he said.

France has its own Gaullist version on this, seizing on the crisis to launch the most far-reaching strategy of state intervention since the 1970s.

"Laissez-faire, c'est fini," said President Nicolas Sarkozy. "We will intervene massively whenever a strategic enterprise needs our money."

Such language can now be heard daily across Europe. It can only intensify as the fall-out from the EU's €1.8bn trillion (£1.4 trillion) bank rescue becomes clearer, and as Europe's elites discover that their own banks are the most leveraged in the world and have played their own Wagnerian part in Gotterdammerung.

European and UK banks are five times more exposed to emerging markets than US banks. They alone hold the collective time-bomb of $1.6 trillion (£990bn) in hard currency loans to Eastern Europe – now starting to detonate in Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, and even Russia.

At some point, Europe's political class will face the awful truth that their own credit bubbles are just as bad – and perhaps worse – than the excesses of US sub-prime property. As that occurs, the shock will move by degrees from revulsion to political rage.

Professor Hobsbawm, who spent his youth watching Hitler's rise in Berlin, has a warning for those who think this will help the Left in any recognizable form. "In the 1930s, the net political effect of the Depression was to enormously strengthen the Right," he said.

America was the great exception, as it may prove to be again. I for one will take the enlightened "socialism" of Barack Obama any day over the Hegelian broth nearing the boil in Europe.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has covered world politics and economics for a quarter century, based in Europe, the US, and Latin America. He joined the Telegraph in 1991, serving as Washington correspondent and later Europe correspondent in Brussels. He is now International Business Editor in London.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

The talk of combined fiscal and monetary stimulus helped lift Tokyo's Nikkei stock index above 9,000, ending its seemingly unstoppable slide. The bourse is still trading at levels first reached in 1983 – a warning to the rest of the world of what can happen to equities once a country succumbs to debt deflation.

Japan held rates at zero for nearly six years in its decade-long struggle against deflation. When that was not enough it resorted to "quantitative easing", a technical term for what amounts to printing money on huge scale.

The Bank of Japan had hoped to nudge the country to normal rates over time but the violence of the global credit crisis has now brought the fragile recovery to a standstill. The economy began to contract in the second quarter. The trade ministry said industrial output is likely to fall 2.3pc in October, and 2.2pc in November.

Leading exporters Toyota, Honda, Sony and Canon have all slashed earnings forecasts, while the electronics companies Hitachi and Toshiba both reported a loss over the last three months. e_SClB"We think that Japanese rates will be cut all the way to zero again, most likely in January," said Mark Williams from Capital Economics. "We expect a return to deflation next year in the wake of the collapse in global commodity prices."

Japan remains the world's top creditor nation by far with a $15 trillion pool of savings and some $3 trillion in net overseas investments. The ups and down in Japanese sentiment can have a powerful effect on world markets.

A mixed army of life insurers, pension funds, and housewives with margin trading accounts, as well as foreign hedge funds, borrowed at near zero rates during the credit bubble to chase higher yields across the world, pushing up asset prices from Australia to South Africa, Brazil and Britain.

This yen carry trade – estimated at $1.4 trillion in all its forms – has now reversed violently as flight from global markets leads to yen repatriation. This has forced up the currency by almost 40pc against the euro and sterling since August, and by almost 50pc against the Australian dollar

Those playing the carry trade with high leverage have been caught in a brutal squeeze as margin calls force investors to liquidate assets. This in turn has pushed the yen even higher, setting off a vicious circle. The yen has fallen back this week as US rate cuts and swap agreements with emerging market economies help restore a degree of global confidence, but few in Japan are yet convinced the coast is clear.

Michael Taylor, from Lombard Street Research, said Japan had enough leeway to "turn on the fiscal tap" after pursuing a tight budgetary policy in recent years, but doubted whether the latest spending package will achieve much over time.

"Japan is clearly in recession so this will help," he said. "But you need continual, increasing doses to keep things going, otherwise its just a one-shot gain."

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Currency pegs are being tested to destruction on the fringes of Europe’s monetary union in a traumatic upheaval that recalls the collapse of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

“This is the biggest currency crisis the world has ever seen,” said Neil Mellor, a strategist at Bank of New York Mellon.

Experts fear the mayhem may soon trigger a chain reaction within the eurozone itself. The risk is a surge in capital flight from Austria – the country, as it happens, that set off the global banking collapse of May 1931 when Credit-Anstalt went down – and from a string of Club Med countries that rely on foreign funding to cover huge current account deficits.

The latest data from the Bank for International Settlements shows that Western European banks hold almost all the exposure to the emerging market bubble, now busting with spectacular effect.

They account for three-quarters of the total $4.7 trillion £2.96 trillion) in cross-border bank loans to Eastern Europe, Latin America and emerging Asia extended during the global credit boom – a sum that vastly exceeds the scale of both the US sub-prime and Alt-A debacles.

Europe has already had its first foretaste of what this may mean. Iceland’s demise has left them nursing likely losses of $74bn (£47bn). The Germans have lost $22bn.

Stephen Jen, currency chief at Morgan Stanley, says the emerging market crash is a vastly underestimated risk. It threatens to become “the second epicentre of the global financial crisis”, this time unfolding in Europe rather than America.

Austria’s bank exposure to emerging markets is equal to 85pc of GDP – with a heavy concentration in Hungary, Ukraine, and Serbia – all now queuing up (with Belarus) for rescue packages from the International Monetary Fund.

Exposure is 50pc of GDP for Switzerland, 25pc for Sweden, 24pc for the UK, and 23pc for Spain. The US figure is just 4pc. America is the staid old lady in this drama.

Amazingly, Spanish banks alone have lent $316bn to Latin America, almost twice the lending by all US banks combined ($172bn) to what was once the US backyard. Hence the growing doubts about the health of Spain’s financial system – already under stress from its own property crash – as Argentina spirals towards another default, and Brazil’s currency, bonds and stocks all go into freefall.

Broadly speaking, the US and Japan sat out the emerging market credit boom. The lending spree has been a European play – often using dollar balance sheets, adding another ugly twist as global “deleveraging” causes the dollar to rocket. Nowhere has this been more extreme than in the ex-Soviet bloc.

The region has borrowed $1.6 trillion in dollars, euros, and Swiss francs. A few dare-devil homeowners in Hungary and Latvia took out mortgages in Japanese yen. They have just suffered a 40pc rise in their debt since July. Nobody warned them what happens when the Japanese carry trade goes into brutal reverse, as it does when the cycle turns.

The IMF’s experts drafted a report two years ago – Asia 1996 and Eastern Europe 2006 – Déjà vu all over again? – warning that the region exhibited the most dangerous excesses in the world.

Inexplicably, the text was never published, though underground copies circulated. Little was done to cool credit growth, or to halt the fatal reliance on foreign capital. Last week, the silent authors had their moment of vindication as Eastern Europe went haywire.

Hungary stunned the markets by raising rates 3pc to 11.5pc in a last-ditch attempt to defend the forint’s currency peg in the ERM.

It is just blood in the water for hedge funds sharks, eyeing a long line of currency kills. “The economy is not strong enough to take it, so you know it is unsustainable,” said Simon Derrick, currency strategist at the Bank of New York Mellon.

Romania raised its overnight lending to 900pc to stem capital flight, recalling the near-crazed gestures by Scandinavia’s central banks in the final days of the 1992 ERM crisis – political moves that turned the Nordic banking crisis into a disaster.

Russia too is in the eye of the storm, despite its energy wealth – or because of it. The cost of insuring Russian sovereign debt through credit default swaps (CDS) surged to 1,200 basis points last week, higher than Iceland’s debt before Götterdammerung struck Reykjavik.

The markets no longer believe that the spending structu