THE $5m prize for “achievement in African leadership” created by Mo Ibrahim five years ago has at last found a new recipient. After two years of not deeming anyone worthy enough, the committee that picks winners on behalf of the Anglo-Sudanese telecoms billionaire chose Pedro Verona Pires. Never heard of him? He used to be the president of Cape Verde, deep in the Atlantic Ocean. Population—half a million; life expectancy—71 years. After two terms of office totalling ten years, Mr Pires allowed himself to be voted out last month. The prize committee praised him for helping his nation to become “only the second African country to graduate from the United Nations’ Least Developed category” and winning “international recognition for its record on human rights and good governance”.



Mr Ibrahim himself agreed, saying: “President Pires embodies the type of leadership the prize is designed to recognise.” Not since 2008 (Festus Mogae of Botswana) has the prize gone to a continental African, presumably the place that the award was mainly designed to recognise. Still, Mr Pires is a worthy winner. Cape Verde once again...

We are delighted that you have such good genes

IN BRITAIN, those who live to be 100 years old receive a birthday card from the queen. In the future, centenarians everywhere may also receive a call from a geneticist. If they do, he or she will be seeking a sample of DNA that might, eventually, help to reveal the genetic components of extreme longevity. The more immediate use, however, will be in a competition. For on October 26th the X Prize Foundation, based in Playa Vista, California, unveiled its latest carrot to the world’s scientists.The foundation has already put up prizes in areas as diverse as cleaning up oil spills and landing a robot on the moon. The idea of a genomics X prize is not new. It has been around since 2006. But the latest announcement, in the pages of Nature Genetics, has a particular goal in mind.The foundation is offering $10m to the first team to sequence the genomes of 100 centenarians. The winners will have to do it accurately, making no more than one mistake per million base pairs (the chemical letters in which genomic information is...

THE house at 963 Calle Neptuno, in the centre of Havana, was small, but Laura Pollán kept it beautifully. The grey floor-tiles with their snowflake motif were always swept clean, even though her fluffy mongrel terrier shed his long hair everywhere, and though the door was kept open to get some air in from the bike-filled, rowdy, dusty street. In the front living room she had cane chairs with heart-shaped backs, and triangles of lace decorated the shelves. Outside, the tiny back yard was a jungle of pot plants and climbers, with neatly folded washing hung against the ochre walls. And the tower of the Iglesia del Carmen watched over it all.But her house was also a cell for liberty. The living-room walls were hung with lists of the names of political prisoners, their photos, and a huge chart that showed them bursting from their chains when her group notched up a success. Prisoners’ wives and daughters crowded there for her monthly Literary Teas. She once got 72 women in, under the slowly turning ceiling fan, and put up 25 overnight. They came from all over Cuba: Pinar del Rio, Santa Clara, Las Tunas, Manzanillo (in...

"There may be no greater tribute to Steve Jobs' success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented." -Barack Obama The world is full of visionaries. We are, as a species, endlessly blessed with numerous beings...

(cross posted to Gordon's Notes and Gordon's Tech)Google Reader shares are gone.I'm not going to switch to sharing via G+.I will, however, be sharing via Twitter: John Gordon (jgordonshare) on Twitter.That Twitter stream used to consist of feed-generated tweets from GR shares. Now it's the closest thing I have to an archive of those shares.Now it will be the primary place I share -- with the help of the Twitter share bookmarklet.

Microsoft is pushing out new Bing for Mobile apps in the next day that are built on HTML5 and blend the best of native apps with a robust mobile web experience. Bing for Mobile Hybrid Apps will allow user to get a consistent experience across all platforms because the core Bing app is written in HTML5 and will be essentially the same across all native clients and the web. But it will be able to tap specific hardware features on each device so users will be able to take advantage of services such as Bing Vision and voice search.
Microsoft gets a lot of advantages by leveraging HTML5. It can launch features on various platforms quickly because they’re built off the same base and it can keep a consistent experience between different platforms. And it eliminates the need to keep downloading updates for native apps because Microsoft can keep the core of the apps up to date. Some improvements that first appeared on the mobile web version of Bing, such as Bing Deals, and transit directions sh

Half the people I know in Beijing have been writing, Skyping, Tweeting, blogging, and rasping about the dire air-pollution situation these past few days. A few data points:Readings today from the indispensable (and highly controversial) @BeijingAir feed:For explanation of the readings, see this chart from the EPA and other government health agencies. Take-home message: air quality readings in the high 300s, like those prevailing in Beijing recently, are defined as "Hazardous" and only rarely occur in North America or Western Europe: In case you can't read the "Hazardous" description, it says that readings over 300 "would trigger a health warnings of emergency conditions. The entire population is more likely to be affected." For real-time reading of comparable US AQI levels, see this map.A view this weekend of the Central Business District of Beijing, near our former apartment:A few days ago near the former Olympic district north of town:The punch line in this Olympic-zone picture is that on the left side of the shot you should be able to see a huge office-tower complex, and on the right the Olympic Birds Nest stadium, but they're lost in the "haze."For reference, Here's how things looked from our apartment a month before the Beijing Olympics:And a wider-angle shot out the same window during the miraculous several-month clear spell that followed (a) the Olympic clean-up and (b) the dramatic slowdown in factory operations in late 2008 and early 2009 because of the world economic crisis.Here is why this matters:1) Environmental catastrophe is, far and away, the main destructive side-effect of China's economic miracle of the past three decades, and the main threat to its continuation.2) The Chinese government has been doing more to address the problem than most Westerners recognize, but less than it has to. And -- the underappreciated point -- it has been much less "transparent" about its environmental problems than it needs to be.A major failure of transparency is one I've mentioned several times before, and that even became the subject of a Wikileaks controversy: the Chinese government's refusal even to measure the most hazardous form of air pollution.* This is the fine-particulate matter known as "PM 2.5," which covers particles small enough to penetrate into the deepest recesses of the lungs and do damage there. China's official readings instead cover "PM 10" -- the much larger particles that can make the sky look dark but are less injurious to people. The BeijingAir feed is the only known source of PM 2.5 readings in China, and it is controversial because its instruments are on the roof of the US Embassy in Beijing. Some Wikileaked cables reveal how angry Chinese officials at the US "embarrassing" them by letting people know how bad the air situation really was. But now even the China Daily thinks the Chinese officials should be telling their people more. Barbara Demick of the LA Times updates that controversy this past week. More background in this series of posts: #1, #2, #3, #4.*[ Should say "refusal until now," since there have been rumblings of a plan to start measuring and reporting PM 2.5 levels. As the valuable China Dialogue has reported and I meant to include. I'm not aware of any sources of PM 2.5 measurements yet available other than @BeijingAir. ]"Hey, Beijing has bad air!" is not a news flash. But this is a truly dire challenge for China and the world more generally and worth even more attention than it gets.

Google has completely destroyed its RSS Reader. Suggestions for alternatives are appreciated. Non-Mac only. 

On the off chance that you have not yet seen the post by the Atlantic's Derek Thompson about the impact on different income groups of the Rick Perry tax plan, plus Herman Cain's 9-9-9 proposal, please go see it now.If for some reason your link-clicking finger is disabled, you can get the idea by scrolling down in this post right here, which includes the two central charts. They show who would pay more, and less, in taxes under the Perry and Cain proposals. Here goes. First, Perry. Income groups from left to right, and change in tax burden shown on the vertical scale. For more details, go to Derek's post:Now, Cain and 9-9-9:And now if you combine this with the CBO's latest study of where the gains in American wealth have gone over the past 30 years, you have a really great combination:That combination is: America, banana republic in the making. If that's the plan, it's working.

Cameron is pointing to a decline in rates that’s happening world-wide, except among countries that have given up their currencies, and claiming that he sees the confidence fairy.

I'm not sure "trainwreck" really captures the totality of Herman Cain's day. I'm thinking something like meteor making high velocity impact into Earth. I believe Herman Cain just said that he doesn't know whether the National Restaurant Association made a cash payment to his accusers. He "hopes not." But he doesn't know. Is he going to go to them to find out? I think he said no, because it's confidential. Not certain on that last point. He may have meant that it's confidential so he's not able to get the information and make it public.

The prison in Tripoli where Ghaith Abdul-Ahad spent two weeks in solitary confinement. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad for the Guardian



I remembered that Hatem was tall and wore spectacles and had a pudgy, smiling face that didn't seem to fit his profession. But I was not prepared for the warmth he showed. Meeting him again was like encountering an old friend. The questions came tumbling out. "How are you? How did you find me? What happened after you left?"
In the early days of the Libyan revolution, Hatem had been the officer in charge of my custody in during two weeks of solitary confinement inside one of Gaddafi's notorious Tripoli prisons. The last time I saw him we had been separated by an iron door. Only his face and his hands had been visible as he passed food through the tiny hatch.
Outside, the revolution was fermenting in the mountains and the streets of the coastal cities, but inside the prison the officers had been confident. Hatem was angry, frustrated, and sometimes deluded, ranting against the rebels – "the rats", as Gaddafi had dubbed them – the agents of Nato, and the crusaders plotting against his country. He accused journalists of being spies and enemies of Libya.
"What do you want from us?" he would ask every night as he stood outside my cell, drinking coffee. Sometimes, in a sudden burst of generosity, he would pass a small cup through the hatch for me. But he never came inside. "We love Gaddafi. We love him. What's happening is all because of you journalists. It's a plot by Nato and Arab reactionary countries."
Months after I had been released, and after Tripoli had fallen to the rebels, I went to look for Hatem. I wanted to ask him if he believed in what he was telling me or if it was all part of an act. Through him I wanted to tell the story of the security apparatus of the regime in its final days and what's happening to them now.
The mood in Tripoli was jubilant. In Martyrs' Square car horns were honking, children waved flags, women ululated and celebratory bursts of gunfire peppered the sky.
But the signs of the difficult relationship between the old and the new were surfacing. In front of ministries and public buildings there were small demonstrations against old regime officials. In my hotel room I spread my clues out on the bed. I knew what Hatem looked like. I knew he worked in a prison of one of the many security services, but that was it. How do you look for the defeated in the city of victors?
For a city with a single main hospital and one university, Tripoli was well-equipped when it came to prisons. There was the infamous Abu Salim prison, where 1,200 inmates were killed in 1996; the military police prison; the criminal investigation prison. In the last days of the revolution, farms and company offices were converted into prisons and every military or security unit ran its own detention centre.
We drove to the prison of the external security service, where other journalists had been held. The main building was like a dead animal, its spine broken in half by a massive bomb. Around it were manicured lawns and a basketball court and pleasant gardens, smaller white buildings scattered among the shrubs and trees.
With a government guard I went into one of the smaller buildings. Inside, it was efficiently divided into small cells. But they were bigger and lighter than my cell. We walked into another building. During my incarceration I was blindfolded all the time while outside my cell. But I had drawn a map of the place in my mind. I thought I'd recognise it when I saw it. I didn't. Instead, recognition came in flashbacks. I am crouching blindfolded facing a wall, three men in military uniform sifting through our belongings. The room smells of hospital detergent. I can see a man in a surgical mask and rubber gloves. The Brazilian journalist I was captured with [Andrei Netto, who was released a few days later] is led away. A big door slams ...
Now the realisation hits me. I'm in that room again. A few bits of furniture lie overturned on the dark grey, mottled carpet. I can taste the feeling of terror that came over me in this place a few short months ago.
Flashback: three faceless officers interrogating me for hours. "You can tell us what we need to know or we can make you talk."
We walked further, into a long neon-lit corridor, huge black doors lining one side. Behind them lay dark cells with grimy mattresses, filthy, broken toilets. The ghosts of guards and their captives lingered in the air. Here, then. It was here.
I walked into different cells and wondered what had happened to the other inmates: the man who screamed all night, the Egyptian, the Tunisian, the American. "That building was called the Market," a former intelligence officer told me later. "There were food and clothing shops for the members of the service, officers who had to spend weeks without leaving would shop there. Then they converted it into a prison for high-value people, VIPs."
What about torture?, I asked him. "Sometimes they would put the detainees in dog cages, just to scare them. It depended on the officer. Some would go out of their way to harm prisoners."
I was not beaten or tortured but I could hear the sounds of people getting beaten through the walls. The doctor had told me that the foreigners were treated differently. "Where they kept you the treatment was considered luxury compared to the guys who where kept in the back prison or the with the dogs. "The foreigners were not beaten but they beat and tortured the locals. They wouldn't beat the prisoners in front of me, but I did see officers walking with sticks made of palm tree reeds. But even without beating life was horrible, the dark, small dungeons, the fear, the sounds of the dogs. They terrorised the people in these dark cells. You lose your humanity, you lose your respect."
I asked Saleh, a former intelligence officer who spent some time in jail for aiding the rebels in the first days of the uprising, to help me track some of the former officers who worked in the "Market" prison. Two days later we managed to locate one of the guards that I knew. Abdul Razaq was lean and medium height, handsome with grey hair. I remembered him to be always in a good mood but now he looked years older. Dark, sagging rings had formed under his twitching eyes.
We sat outside his house in a small, dusty lane of low, brick houses in Tajoura. The metal shutters of shops were down but neighbours stood outside the high gates of their houses talking. He was scared and anxious. He didn't know why I had come to see him, and he was worried that I might be seeking some form of revenge. His daughters were playing around him like three little kittens. He sent one inside to bring tea. She came back carrying a white plastic tray, that had a silver teapot and three very small cups. He held the teapot high while pouring.
"Look, I am still in charge of feeding you," he said, attempting to break the awkwardness of sharing tea with his prisoner. "When you were there things were good, after you left [mid-March) the prisons started filling. In the small cells we started putting five or six. The big ones held up to 60. The corridors were filled with detainees. It became horrible."
For you or the prisoners?, I asked, half-jokingly. "For us," he said seriously, handing me the small cup. "Imagine the smell, of all those people squeezed together, we went there with masks on.
"When Nato started bombing us, I knew it was over. We can detain people and put them in jail but we can't resist Nato. We all started to defect."
"I couldn't handle the pressure after that," said Razaq. "I asked for a medical leave and I stayed in my house from June.
"I didn't sign up for this, I didn't join the service to be under Nato bombing. Now in the middle of the night I jump. My wife says, what's happening? I say, bombs, bombs. She says, go back to sleep, these are your dreams."
I asked him if he knew the officer I was looking for. He said yes. He asked one of his daughters to bring him his phone and made a call and 10 minutes later the officer came. Tall and striding confidently, it was Hatem.
He was smiling. Abdul Razaq offered him a glass of tea. He drank it and kept asking how I found him.
It was a strange moment. We were meeting like old friends. There was some kind of shared camaraderie between us. Yet can I draw a line between the man and his job? Can you befriend your jailer? He told me about what happened to the jail after I left. He spoke about it fondly, as if it was a place filled with happy memories.
"We knew Nato was going to bomb us, we sent most of the prisoners to another place, a company compound. But we stayed in the headquarters. Most of the nights you can hear the sound of missiles and then you hear the explosion. That night we just heard a huge explosion, the floor underneath my feet went and then there was another explosion, everything was covered with smoke and dust, all the doors burst open from the explosion. The building that was hit was our communication centre. The monitoring equipment was there and we could listen to any phone number we wanted. How do you think we found you?" he smiled.
"We could have [survived] if it was Nato alone, but Libya was infested with spies," Hatem added bitterly. "So many people here defecting in the end – not because they didn't agree or benefit from the regime, but because they knew it was game over."
Burst into the cell
I asked the two officers about another jailer. He was short, stocky and rude and used to burst into the cell in the middle of the night asking random questions. A couple of times he blindfolded me and handcuffed me and marched me around the corridors, just to then bring me back to the cell.
"This guy had a psychological problem," said Hatem. "Sometimes he was nice, and then sometimes something in him clicks and he becomes very aggressive, making life for prisoners hell. In the last days there was paranoia. They[…]

I ran into this bug after restoring my new 4S from a backup of my iPhone 4. Resetting the network settings did the trick.

 ★ 

As if there weren't enough problems for Herman Cain today, there's a pretty damning report out of Wisconsin that suggests -- actually, it comes very close to establishing -- that a not-for-profit run by Cain campaign manager Mark Block was paying for Cain's campaign expenses earlier this year after Cain had already set up his official presidential campaign committee, which would be a violation of all kinds of election and campaign finance laws.

In no particular order:

TPM, and a lot of others, has been reporting for the last few weeks on how Herman Cain doesn't have any kind of campaign apparatus in the traditional sense. Boy, does that show now. You would expect past sexual harassment allegations to get a thorough vetting from within the campaign very early on in the process, by which I mean the campaign would do its own due diligence and, if not figure out the underlying facts, at least determine the scope of what is known and unknown, knowable and unknowable, and have a plan for how to respond when the time came. From reading Politico's account of the back and forth with the campaign over the 10 days before it published last night's story, it's clear the Cain campaign was scrambling to determine the nature and extent of the allegations. From a strictly practical political perspective, that's an awfully bad position to be in.
In fact, the campaign's response was so bad over the last 10 days and even after the story broke last night that I don't think we got a full-throated denial that any sexual harassment involving Cain has ever occurred from anyone associated with the campaign until this morning. The campaign got bogged down in denying whether there had been any such allegations made, what Cain had told the campaign about them, and other peripheral issues -- and seemed to fail to grasp that the underlying allegations are what make this potentially very serious.

I've seen the purported payments from the National Restaurant Association to the two women Cain allegedly harassed described as hush money. That's silly and comes at the problem only from the point of view of the NRA. There's little upside in female employees going public with these kinds of allegations. That's especially true in the insular world of DC trade associations, where the number of employers is relatively small and employment opportunities can be limited. So keeping it quiet could have certainly been in their interest, too.

One last point: No question that the NRA paying some kind of settlement to employees under Cain because of harassment allegations is newsworthy when it involves a guy running for president. But I'd be careful about jumping from the apparent fact that the NRA settled to the conclusion that the allegations were credible and well-founded. The two don't always go hand in hand. We need more facts on that score than what are in the Politico story.

Sprint has network problems. Major problems. And they've gotten a lot worse lately. Really, really bad. Not all areas are affected - and in fact some have improved already, but more and more areas are getting so bad that Sprint's 3G data is completely unusable there, especially since the introduction of the iPhone. Troubleshooting and update my phone's "profile" and PRL didn't help, as evident from the screenshot #2 you see below.
Earlier this week I contacted Sprint's customer service, followed by an email to an executive and CEO Dan Hesse himself (or whoever...
Official Android Police t-shirts are now on sale, with over 25 designs to call yours.
Done With This Post? You Might Also Like These:Sprint Confirms 4G LTE Deal With LightSquaredUnderstatement: T-Mobile Does An Amazing Ninja Act With HSPA+ RolloutSprint 4G In The San Francisco Bay Area To Launch December 28th, 2010Amazon Wireless Finally Starts Selling Sprint PhonesVerizon Gets Serious About 4G: 25 Markets Scheduled To Begin Rollout November 15th, Phones To Follow Shortly ThereafterWhat I Learned About Sprint's Past And Current Data Problems As Well As Future Upgrade Plans After Reaching Out To CEO Dan Hesse was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Tabulating Inequality Trends

The CBO released a report on income inequality earlier this week. This means that the "inequality deniers" are having a more difficult time arguing that widening spreads an wages, compensation, or overall income are merely statistical artifacts dreamt up by liberals (see e.g. here). What is of most interest is (i) real after-tax income of the top 1 percentile has risen about 275%, and (ii) the pre-transfers/pre-tax income share of the top 1% has increased most profoundly.

Summary Figure 1, Growth in Real After-Tax Income from 1979 to 2007, from "Trends in Income Distribution," CBO Director's Blog, 25 October 2011.

Summary Figure 2, Shares of Market Income, 1979 and 2007, from "Trends in Income Distribution," CBO Director's Blog, 25 October 2011.

The CBO Director's Blog observes:

The rapid growth in average real household market income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income was a major factor contributing to the growing dispersion of income. Average real household market income for the highest income group tripled over the period, whereas such income increased by about 19 percent for a household at the midpoint of the income distribution. As a result, the share of total market income received by the top 1 percent of the population more than doubled between 1979 and 2007, growing from about 10 percent to more than 20 percent.

The foregoing is completely consistent with the views laid out in Lost Decades (by me and Jeffry Frieden), as well as Add-Figure 6-1 highlighted in this post, as well as this post.

Interpreting the OWS Protests

Against this backdrop, powerful forces have been deployed against raising tax rates at all on the top one percentile (and instead want to raise taxes on the lower quintiles).[1] [2]. The OWS protests can be interpreted in ths context. From TPM:

...Harvard Government Professor Jeffry Frieden said...

“Every debt crisis leads to major political conflicts over who will pay the price of dealing with the debt burden,” Frieden wrote. “One way or another, the accumulated debts will have to be addressed — either by writing some of them off, or by paying them off. Will the burden be borne by taxpayers? Government employees? Financial institutions? ... I think that, in the context of our financial difficulties, OWS may reflect the fact that many Americans feel that too much sacrifice has been demanded of working people and the middle class, and too little of the financial community and the wealthy.”

Diane Lim Rogers, Chief Economist at the fiscally hawkish Concord Coalition, made similar points about the more reckless economic policies of the past decade: Much of the distaste with both Washington and Wall Street comes back to fact that DC is simply unwilling to change course.

“The difference is that during the Clinton years the rising tide was lifting all boats,” Lim Rogers said in an interview with TPM. “Low-income households were still doing better. Even then, the rich did really well, despite their taxes being raised.”

But what’s different now is that income inequality isn’t a political tenet of the left: it’s truly hurting people. Lim Rogers said the poverty rate is actually of more concern than the rich doing better given the circumstances.

“The outrage is not that the rich are richer,” she said. “It’s that the poor have gotten poorer — the inequality has become bipolar.”

Interestingly, Lost Decades, which makes many of these points, has been cited approvingly in at least one OWS document.

This is of course in contrast to views such as that of Econbrowser reader Brian who commented:

I honestly fail to see why some on the left are so concerned about how much money those at the top of the income distribution earn. Why not focus instead on why poor people are poor? And please, blaming that on the rich is a non-starter. People make bad choices in life. They get pregnant before they finish school and have a career started. They use drugs. They get tattoos and body piercings all over themselves and then wonder why no one will hire them for an entry-level job. They do not take school seriously. They have parents who never should have bred in the first place. I really, honestly and truly feel for the poor people and hope they can lift themselves out of poverty. But throwing more money at the problem, and taking it from the "rich", is not the solution.

This worldview is apparently not rare; see this quote:

I don't have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations (Occupy Together) are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don't blame Wall Street. Don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself! ...

I think the defenders of the interests of the top income percentile will continue to harp on these arguments: The unemployed are deservedly unemployed; the poor are deservedly poor. This will help distract the electorate from the issue of whom will bear the burden of adjustment to the aftermath of the financial crisis(including stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio), and the response to secular trends in income inequality.See more on tax policy here.

Julie Irwin Zimmerman in The Atlantic looks at evidence for high value which home buyers place on bike trail proximity. The research, by planning professor Rainer vom Hofe and economics professor Olivier Parent, looked at houses along a 12-mile stretch of the Little Miami Scenic Trail, a former rail line that cuts across the northeastern portion of Cincinnati. The pair found that home buyers were willing to pay a premium of $9,000 to be within 1,000 feet of access to the trail. It so happens I've spent a lot of time in Google Maps in one example city with a good few mile long bike trail comparing commute times by car, bike, and mass transit. If you haven't ever done...

Short answer: It’s because he’s black and a Republican. Let me explain.   Republicans have long had a conflicted relationship with African Americans. Their party came into existence for the purpose of ending slavery. The Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act were widely viewed throughout the North as sell-outs to slave owners and there was revulsion against the Whig Party for failing to mount any meaningful opposition to them. In the election of 1854, the Whigs collapsed and Democrats suffered heavy losses throughout the North.   At that point, the Democrats largely became a sectional party based in the South and dedicated to the preservation of slavery. The Republican Party arose from the ashes of the Whig Party and was dedicated to the abolition of slavery. It ran its first presidential candidate in 1856, electing former Whig congressman Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860, after the Democrats split into a pro slavery faction headed by Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois and a really pro slavery faction headed by former Vice President John Breckenridge of Kentucky.   After the Civil War, Republicans in Congress passed a number of measures to aid the former slaves, many over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat who Lincoln put on the ticket in 1864 to show that the fight to preserve the Union was bipartisan. In addition to the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, Republicans established a Freedmen’s Bureau to assist the former slaves and protect them from their former masters. In 1875, Republicans enacted a civil rights act very similar to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Unfortunately, the 1875 act was later gutted by the Supreme Court and Democratic congresses.   By 1876, the Democrats had made a significant comeback and almost won the presidency. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was forced to make a deal with southerners to gain the White House that involved a pull-out of federal troops from the South and an end to aggressive efforts to aid former slaves. Supreme Court decisions throughout the late 19th century restricted the ability of the federal government to protect the rights of southern blacks, which led to the reestablishment of de facto slavery during the Jim Crow era. Southern blacks were routinely denied the right to vote, terrorized by racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, and discriminated against in ways too numerous to mention.   Republicans were sympathetic to the plight of African Americans, but Supreme Court rulings gave the president very little authority to help them. And Senate filibusters by southern Democrats blocked Republican efforts to enact new laws to protect voting rights and prosecute the awful practice of lynching.   Restrictions on the voting rights of blacks caused the Republican Party in the South to disintegrate following the end of Reconstruction and that region was solidly Democratic until the 1970s. Unfortunately, one consequence is that Republicans had little to gain, politically, from helping African Americans since the bulk of them lived where they could not vote.   Nevertheless, blacks voted Republican wherever they could because the GOP was the party of Lincoln, who freed them from bondage. Sadly, this led Republicans to take their votes for granted. In the 1930s, blacks had enough with Republican indifference and a majority of them became Democrats. But Republicans continued to get a third of the black vote until 1964, when it fell to just 6 percent. No Republican presidential candidate has gotten more than 15 percent since that time.   The cause of the collapse of the Republican black vote was 1964 Republican presidential nominee Sen. Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on constitutional grounds. He had been advised by both Yale law professor Robert Bork and prominent Phoenix attorney William Rehnquist, later chief justice of the Supreme Court, that the 1964 act was unconstitutional for the same reasons the 1875 act had been found unconstitutional.   Many libertarians, including Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, still believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of racists to exclude blacks from service in restaurants, hotels and so on. They believe that the free market would eventually make such discrimination too costly to continue and it would die out. But it lasted for 100 years with no evidence of decline until the federal government stepped in and ended it.   As liberal Democrats from the North gained strength, they became increasingly hostile to their southern brethren. Richard Nixon and other Republicans saw an opening and began reaching out to disaffected Southern conservatives. After the huge Democratic victory in the 1974 elections, liberal Democrats began purging southern Democrats, taking away their committee chairmanships in Congress and otherwise making them feel unwanted. This began the migration of southerners out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party, a process that was virtually complete by 1994.   Liberals uniformly believe that the switch of southern Democrats into the GOP meant that Republicans had essentially become what the Democratic Party in the South had been for a century: the party of racial discrimination. Republicans counter that they merely welcomed conservatives from the South, who agreed with them on issues such as taxes and spending, that the Democrats had shunned.   Republicans really hate it when Democrats accuse them of racism simply because they oppose liberal policies for reasons that have nothing to do with race. And in their hearts they truly believe that cutting back government spending and regulation will do more to help African Americans than a continuation of liberal policies such as the minimum wage that actually harm blacks under the guise of helping them.   One problem for Republicans is that they haven’t really competed for the black vote for so long that they really don’t know how. When they try they tend to come across as callous and indifferent to the problems of the black community. One of the few who didn’t was my late boss, Rep. Jack Kemp, who cared deeply and tried, without much success, to get his party to be more responsive the problems of African Americans and work harder to devise policies that would help them.   This brings me back to Mr. Cain. He is the first black Republican in memory to really connect with the way white Republicans think about race. Cain is living proof that the GOP is open to blacks and that Republican policies will benefit them. And with our first African American president in the White House, many Republicans crave an opportunity to finally have a real debate on which party’s policies are better for racial minorities. The thought of a presidential debate between Cain and Barack Obama excites many Republicans to the point of extasy.   Unfortunately, Mr. Cain has a very long way to go before becoming a viable presidential candidate. His knowledge of foreign policy is nonexistent and most of his program seems to consist of little more than clever slogans and sound bites. Political professionals note that Cain’s political operation is amateurish at best and few think he stands a chance of winning the Republican nomination. They also note that Cain’s race wouldn’t necessarily help him against Obama, who beat a black Republican named Alan Keyes to win his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004.   Whatever happens to the Cain campaign, I think it is good for African Americans to have a foot in both parties. They will be better off if both parties compete for their votes. If Cain helps Republicans think more about blacks and articulate themes and policies that attract their votes, then that is something to be applauded.   Note: Those wanting to know more about the political history of race in America may find of interest my 2008 book, “Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past,” which is available from any online bookseller.  

People who provide care to their own families and others deserve better protections from the government, an economist writes.

Both at work and at home i've been studying our current toolkit for sharing knowledge. At work I'm supporting our software development, at home I'm looking at a ways to share knowledge to support lifelong education of persons with cognitive disabilities, including formal public education and home schooling. Naturally I'm looking at similar technologies in both environments.
I've summarized a few of the components I'm thinking about in a table. I compared best of breed solutions to the best (not free!) suite I know of and to Google's offerings.
Function
Best of breed
Atlassian Confluence
Google
commentary, notices
Wordpress
yes
Blogger
Q&A
StackExchange
no
no
collaborative hypertext document
TWiki?
yes
Sites
PDF, other
FTP/HTTP server
yes
Docs, Share
Calendar/event
Google Calendar
no
Google Calendar
Social, networking
Facebook
no
G+
Subscribe/notify
RSS
RSS
?
Looking at this solution set it's clear that each has its advantages and weaknesses.
Atlassian Confluence is the best integrated knowledge sharing and collaboration solution I know of. It's not at all free, but it's inexpensive for 10 or fewer users and anonymous users can have read only access. I give Atlassian extra marks for actually publishing an easily discoverable price list. Unfortunately I don't think I can get Confluence running at Dreamhost, my net hosting provider.
Google, like Atlassian, is free for a small number of users and provides high performance anonymous access. Sadly, Sites is a great disappointment. On the other hand, I'm not impressed with any of the currently available open source wiki solutions. In many ways FrontPage 98 was better.
Lastly the best of breed solutions have advantages in terms of data freedom and ease of switching providers or changing knowledge base ownership. An integrated approach can also leverage StackExchange -- the net's best technology for question/answer based information sharing. Likewise a Facebook Page can engage customers and provide a secondary notification solution in addition to RSS/Twitter.
Any thoughts? Comments are most welcome.
PS. I've been looking at collaboration technologies for about 20 years -- starting with BBS software and a long string of innovative solutions. The functional list would have had answers 20 years ago. What's different is that the audience today is vastly larger.

In China, it’s a form of defiance – and the government is not amused.

Mobile development firm appMobi is launching a new HTML5-powered browser for iOS on Monday which will bring additional capabilities typically found only in native apps to the mobile Web. The MobiUs Web App Browser, as it’s being called, works both as a standalone browser alternative or in conjunction with Apple’s mobile Safari, similar to the way browser extensions work on the desktop Web.

Although HTML5 can already tap into some of a smartphone’s sensors, like the GPS and accelerometer, for example, appMobi’s MobiUs Web App Browser will go beyond HTML5′s current capabilities to provide access the smartphone’s camera, the ability to scan QR codes and barcodes, support for augmented reality, accelerated graphics, the ability to lock the rotation of the device and more.

The browser integrates two full sets of APIs from both appMobi and from PhoneGap (1.0) to give the Web apps a native look-and-feel, plus the ability to access all the hardware features of the smartphone. Like native apps, the mobile Web apps can work online or off, deliver push notifications and offer in-app purchasing capabilities. AppMobi’s DirectCanvas game acceleration technology is included as well, for optimized HTML5 gaming.

Users won’t have to switch from using Safari as their primary Web browser in order to take advantage of the new functionality, says appMobi. Instead, when a user encounters a webpage that requires the capabilities provided by MobiUs, the Web app in question will prompt you to install the MobiUs iOS app from iTunes. The experience is similar to how online users are prompted to install the Flash plugin to watch online videos. Except in this case, the additional software is not a browser plugin – it’s an app.

After the initial installation, any future Web apps requiring MobiUs’ technology will be able to seamlessly switch over from Safari to MobiUs as need be, without any user intervention. Mobile Web app developers will be able to configure various settings affecting the user experience during the transition, including the customization of the splash screen. And when MobiUs launches, it will be in full-screen mode.

AppMobi knows that, eventually, HTML5 will be able to do what its MobiUs browser is doing today, but those APIs won’t be added to the standard for years. Other solutions, like the HTML5 capabilities chipmaker Qualcomm is working on bringing to mobile, operate lower in the stack than what appMobi offers, and will be provided to OEMs to be sold on new handsets. That’s another way to solve the problem, but on a slower cycle than what appMobi is now doing.

The company had a few developers testing the technology pre-launch, but unfortunately, we couldn’t go hands-on.  It remains to be seen how truly seamless the experience is for the end user or how “native-like” the apps really feel. However, the launch is interesting in terms of its potential to bring that long sought after “write once, run anywhere” ability to Web developers. Now they can write for the desktop, Facebook, iOS and soon, Android, using HTML5, without having to sacrifice so much functionality when porting the codebase to mobile.

The MobiUs app is available here. The Android version will arrive early next year.






Crunchbase





APPMOBI






Company:
appMobi


Website:
appmobi.com


Launch Date:
February 1, 2006


Funding:
$8.1M



appMobi is a leading vendor of cloud-based cross platform mobile development and deployment tools and services. The company has focused on products that advance the mobile market’s shift from proprietary native tools and services to industry standards HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript.

While the emerging HTML5 standard offers the mobile industry ease of app development and freedom from fragmentation, it lacks a number of key features that drove Apple’s rapid ascent to market leader. appMobi’s mission is to provide the...






Learn more

The Archon Genomics X Prize is a $10 million contest to see what company or organization can develop a low-cost accurate sequencing technology. The AP's Malcolm Ritter reports that the testbed sequences will be 100 centenarians ("Secrets of long life sought in DNA of the elderly"), which is a pretty interesting test cohort.

Protective features of a centenarian's DNA can even overcome less-than-ideal lifestyles, says Dr. Nir Barzilai of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. His own study of how centenarians live found that "as a group, they haven't done the right things."

Many in the group he studied were obese or overweight. Many were smokers, and few exercised or followed a vegetarian diet. His oldest participant, who died this month just short of her 110th birthday, smoked for 95 years.

"She had genes that protected her against the environment," Barzilai said. One of her sisters died at 102, and one of her brothers is 105 and still manages a hedge fund.

I doubt they'll be able to explain much of the variance in longevity with 100 genomes, but they'll surely find some things that make a small difference and will lead to a newsworthy outcome. Larger samples will find more of the genetic pathways that influence lifespan, as will adding a wider range of elderly samples from other populations.

Tags: sequencingbiotechlongevityaging

Alfredo Astiz and 11 other former military and police officers in Argentina have been sentenced to life in prison for crimes committed during the 1976-83 military dictatorship.

— What are the best ways to combat homelessness?

— Strangely enough, rating agencies tend to give the highest ratings to companies that pay the most for their services.

— “It is now possible to scan someone’s brain and get a reasonable idea of what is going through his mind.”

— Imagining a world without the tea party.

— Jon Huntsman’s daughters parody Herman Cain’s “Smokin’” campaign ad.

Brian Krebs has done the analysis; it's something like 760 companies that were compromised. Among the more interesting names on the list are Abbott Labs, the Alabama Supercomputer Network, Charles Schwabb & Co., Cisco Systems, eBay, the European Space Agency, Facebook, Freddie Mac, Google, the General Services Administration, the Inter-American Development Bank, IBM, Intel Corp., the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),...

EFF reports on the security of SSL: The most interesting entry in that table is the "CA compromise" one, because those are incidents that could affect any or every secure web or email server on the Internet. In at least 248 cases, a CA chose to indicate that it had been compromised as a reason for revoking a cert. Such...

Defense budgets go up and down.  They have ever since the end of the Second World War. We are in a build down today, one that is likely to continue for the next decade, reardless of what the Super Committee does, and regardless of the hard court press coming from the Pentagon, its allies in Congress (Chairman McKeon of the House Armed Services Committee), and, especially, the industry that manufactures weapons for the Department of Defense.
In fact, were defense budgets to decline by $465 billion from the current DoD projections, it would be the most moderate and shallow build down we have ever experienced since the end of the Korean War.  The last three build downs saw defense resources fall, on average, 30% in constant dollars over ten years, as the Stimson Center's project on Budgeting for Foreign Affairs and Defense pointed out a month ago.  The currently projected decline (from the DoD projection), would be around 8%, hardly the end of the world.  Even a round trillion dollars from that forecast would be only 17% of the total, just over half as far as the last three build downs.
So there is little reason to fear, little reason to cry "doomsday" as we manage this build down.  That hasn't stopped hair tearing, garment rendering, and teeth gnashing.  Once again, as with every build down in the past, the stalwarts of high spending step in warning that this build down will cause a terrifying loss of one million jobs in the economy, something we can ill afford in a soft labor market with high unemployment.
The jobs argument, flagrantly advanced by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) last week, is both flawed and hypocritical.  On both counts, it ought to be dismissed for what it is - a side show about the economy, rather than a straight-up argument about whether defense needs to be part of deficit and debt reduction, and whether we can or need to continue spending the highest sums we have ever spent on defense, peacetime or wartime, since the end of World War II.
First, let's examine the merits of the claim that a million jobs would be lost if the defense budget declined a mere 17% over the next ten years.  First, the truth some critics of the high level of defense spending don't like to acknowledge: of course defense industry and technology employment would go down if defense acquisition budgets go down.
And then, the truth the "Second to None" crowd, supported by AIA, won't admit: every reduction in federal spending reduces employment somewhere, whether it is cops, teachers, defense workers, or public sector employees.  That is no surprise at all to economists. (In fact, the impact of non-defense cut backs on direct employment is probably more serious, as the average wage in these sectors is lower than that in the defense sector.)
Moreover, to add to the partial, and hypocritical argument AIA is making, the defense industry has no difficulty shedding employees in the service of its well-being, rain or shine, if shedding employees helps the bottom line.    The AIA no longer provides long-term historical data, but back thirty years ago AIA data showed that well over one million people worked in the aerospace part of the defense industry in the United States. Today in a market that has more than doubled over the past decade, that sector's employment has shrunk to 621,000, according to AIA data. 
In the mid-1980s, moreover, overall defense industry employment peaked at over 3.5 million, according to a GAO study.  Using a different base, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated defense industry employment in 2010 at less than 1.4 million and, noted that defense industry employment had shrunk by 42% from its Cold War peak in the 1980s.  The Machinists Union, who backed the AIA study last week, know this full well; their defense industry membership has shrunk continuously over the past fifty years.
The politicians who want to exempt defense from anything more than what the Budget Control Act would already mandate, have been equally hypocritical, using the jobs argument to support their campaign.  At the same time as they argue for exempting defense, they have no difficulty arguing that non-defense discretionary and entitlement spending need to be cut further, while revenues remain unchanged.  The consequence, of course, of cutting non-defense discretionary and entitlement spending is that public sector workers - fire-fighters, police, teachers, health workers - will lose their jobs. 
So, hypocrisy abounds in this jobs argument.  It is not about defense, it is about defending the defense budget.
Just for a second, let's take the Fuller study seriously, but just for a moment.  It is not very useful for policy judgement.  In brief, it is a static analysis of projected lower spending in one sector of the federal budget, running the implications out in a model as far as they would go, and assuming the worst.  Good for AIA's purposes, not very good analysis. 
In order to really know the impact of change in one vector of federal spending, any model holds other economic variables constant.  Meaning, in plain English, in the Fuller analysis, nothing else happens; just that sector of federal spending gets cut.
In reality, defense spending changes take place in a dynamic context of overall federal spending, revenues, and, especially, non-governmental economic activity.  In other words, something else happens to the foregone resources, the $1 trillion that would go away from the current DOD forecast over the next ten years. 
Assume, for a moment, that reducing defense budgets, along with other spending, and holding revenue policy constant had, as Republican economics assume today, a healthy impact on economic growth and job creation.  Private capital is liberated to invest, risk-takers abound, interest rates remain low, the government gets smaller, and, voila!, the economy starts to surge, creating millions of jobs.  If Republcans really believe this stuff, every reason to reduce defense, along with everything else, and see if the theory works.
This is where the Fuller analysis is flawed.  In projecting out into the economy the "indirect" and "induced" jobs that would be lost from defense cuts, the analysis seems to accept the notion that nothing else is happening to the economy.  In the real world, the same third tier "induced" jobs they attribute to defense are attributed by economists to every other economic activity, as well. Add up all the induced jobs forecast in static forecasts, and you may have more induced jobs than exist in the US economy.
A look at history suggests the importance of looking at a dynamic economy.  While defense industry employment shrank in the 1990s, overall economic activity surged, creating millions of new jobs, including opportunities for defense industry employees.  An economic recovery, however stimulated, would have this effect today.*
But, of course, a theory of economic growth is not what this is all about.  It's really about grabbing any available argument and partial analysis to justify protecting the defense budget.  So we have the side show of jobs, because, to the advocates, the large economic theory doesn't matter. Defending the defense budget, and pushing a scary jobs scenario to reenforce that defense, is what really matters.
Ultimately, defense budgets, programs, and spending, are not about jobs, even if the politicians (and the industry) think so. They are about what is needed for our security and those needs have to be set against all the other public needs for which the government has responsibility.  That's what the argument should really be about.
 
* In 1987, New School economist David Gold and I wrote a lengthy analysis of the economic consequences of defense spending, reviewing much of the then current literature on the subject.  The study included considerable discussion of the employment impact of defense.  This publication is no longer in print, but still timely.  It may be available through inter-library loan.

Existing users tend never to be happy with changes, and all the services out there, Google Reader is particularly vulnerable 

Ever since Google announced changes to its RSS aggregator last week, the stream of shared items in my Google Reader has been swamped with petitions opposing the changes, guides to working around them, and articles about Iranians who use the service to dodge their government's prying eyes. The service's sharing function has become an echo chamber of the oppostion, and as the week has come and gone, that opposition has intensified.
But where are the changes? When Google made the announcement, it said the changes would roll out in the coming week. So far at least, Google Reader looks the same to me, and I've yet to find anyone who has seen anything different. I've contacted Google for comment but have not received a response.
For users of any cloud-based service, changes in design and functionality can come as unwelcome surprises. Alexis Madrigal wrote about this phenomenon, which he dubbed the cloud's "my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem" back in our Tech Report in September. He wrote:

Netflix, Twitter, and Google make unasked-for, unanticipated, and
unstoppable change in their products, which also happen to be our work
and play spaces. Whether or not people like what the change did, they
don't like how it happened. Facebook notoriously pushes changes out,
most recently the new News Feed and Timeline profile pages. While they
think of it as improving their product, in effect, they redesign what
has become the default Internet startup screen for millions without
asking.So, of course people howl their protests. They remind us
that we're all just children in the eyes of the cloud services provider
and as long as we're under their roof, we play by their rules.

Existing users tend never to be happy with changes, because they're the people who use (and therefore presumably like) the service as it is. Bur for companies looking to improve their service's appeal, they have to think about the audience beyond those they already have. Of all the services out there, Google Reader is particularly vulnerable to this sort of logic. Those who use it, do so for free, and, because of it's minimal advertising, Google can't make very much money from it. Google has little to lose if Reader users are unhappy. But Google does have a lot to gain if they can get Reader die-hards to roll their content over to Google+, the social-networking site that Google has placed its bets on.
But nevertheless, the delay in the roll-out raises the possibility (however slim) that Google is tweaking its proposal. Google's announcement revealed drastic changes: "Many of Reader's social features will
soon be available via Google+, so
in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and
shared link blogs inside of Reader." But why? It makes sense to
integrate Google+ and Reader. It seemed strange from the get-go that
there was no easy way to +1 a Reader post directly in the RSS feed. Why
can't Google provide that functionality but leave Reader's social
features untouched for their devoted users?
Companies don't have to force changes upon users. They could give people options, the ability to toggle between interfaces and to add or delete features to their liking (much like Google Labs did though it has now been discontinued). But they don't do that because they don't have to. This is what the cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem reveals: In the cloud, we don't have control over our things.
Image: Google

We're launching (relaunch actually) a Facebook page on special education resources in the MSP region - all ages. If you're interested please "like" the page: https://www.facebook.com/hpspecialedMinneapolis St Paul Special Education FamiliesShare information about special education among parents and students across the Minneapolis St Paul metro area

The St Paul school district includes a page of public online learning resources. The parts that caught my eye include: - Full access to the academic edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica (http://search.eb.com.proxy.elm4you.org/) - EBSCO host: journals, periodicals - Business source: country economic data - Research resources from the Gale group - Ask MN - librarian research - OCLC search: more journals It appears to be a substantial resource. We've had kids in the SPPS district for 9 years and this is the first I've come across this. I found it only because of a chance mention in an assignment. Speechless I am.http://connect.spps.org/resources.htmlconnect.spps.orgBRITANNICA ONLINE SCHOOL EDITION - Rich encyclopedia content plus news headlines, safe Web sites, engaging multimedia.

Kiyoshi Tanimoto was a Christian minister who survived the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. My son was asked to write about his life.
In the course of research we came across a 1950s television program called "This is your life: Kiyoshi Tanimoto". The program included Reverend Tanimoto meeting the man who piloted the Enola Gay.
It starts with a realtime advertisement for cleaning products and cosmetics, though, mercifully, the sponsor omitted some later commercials. They did manage a nail commercial after the conclusion of the most intense part of the program. "Not a chip anywhere ... Hazel Bishop long lasting nail polish ...".
The word surreal was created to describe this program. 1950s America was both yesterday and a very long time ago.

When Maryland educator and artist  Hasan Elahi was erroneously flagged as a would-be terrorist and investigated by the FBI, he decided to cooperate and given them all the information they needed to clear himself… and more, much much more. He found that overwhelming them with irrelevant meticulous edtail about your life protects your privacy as well as trying to hide. It sort of reminds me of what some people did to resist the draft in the ’70′s, trying to paralyze and overwhelm the system by sending tons of data, or even bricks, for inclusion in their Selective Service files. Elahi conceived of it as an art project, and more:

 

“What I’m doing is no longer just an art project; creating our own archives has become so commonplace that we’re all — or at least hundreds of millions of us — doing it all the time. Whether we know it or not.” 

(via NYTimes)

Related:

Helping the FBI Track You (yro.slashdot.org)
Color Me Unprivileged – Color Me Patriot Acted (thevigilantlens.com)
Flipping the Script on the FBI With 45,000+ Pieces of Digital Art (mashable.com)

Now this is interesting. Apparently a lot of the reporting on the Wenzhou financial meltdown is coming from a local BBS which permits anonymous postings:

Wild tales of the ruin of China’s microcosm of private lending and credit crunch — from “runaway bosses” to abandoned luxury cars, and rumored suicides to local mob hit lists — have leaked out since this spring on the site “703804.” The name, when spoken in the Wenzhou dialect, sounds something like “chitchat.”

...Much of the credible information appears to come from inside sources who have posted anonymously. Many of the stories are repeated nearly word-for-word in newspapers and other media across China, eventually making their way into international news reports.

For example, there is a throwaway line in every story on Wenzhou referring to the 80 factory bosses who’ve fled the region or gone bankrupt. That morsel of information comes directly from a 33-page ongoing “runaway bosses” thread on the forum, where readers add names and financial details daily.

The forum is run by a chap called Ye Zhe, who in passing is described as a ‘local official’, which also means a party member. Mr Ye says the site was shut down a lot in its early years but is now tolerated because the local apparat ‘have figured out that it is better to guide information than block it’.

I suppose it’s possible that Mr Ye has managed to keep his site open simply through his skill at persuading the local apparat on the general benefits of openness; though his phrase about ‘guiding information’ indicates that something slightly different is going on.

On the other hand, tempting though it is to think of this as an information operation staged by the local government, I think that’s unlikely given some of the hair raising stuff that’s coming out. Wenzhou’s brand is ‘city of millionaires’, not ‘city of executive suicides’. It may be that the local government is in such disarray – perhaps due to personal losses in the local informal banking sector, or maybe because of CDIC sniffing around – that there’s no-one in a position to crack down. To know more, we’d need to know more about Mr Ye, his role, and his connections.

Still, here’s the takeout. What we know about the state of China’s economy depends to a certain extent on what we know about its grey financial markets. What we know about China’s grey financial markets depends to a possibly larger extent on what we know about how the situation in Wenzhou is unwinding. And what we know about that depends quite substantially on a bulletin board run by a local official and depending entirely on anonymous contributors, none of whom are likely to be entirely disinterested. 

UPDATED: The end is reportedly nigh for webOS. According to a report by the Guardian, HP is set to kill off its webOS mobile operating system after receiving apparently no interest in the OS it bought from Palm for $1.2 billion.

Quoting inside sources, the Guardian said the webOS group expects to be closed down imminently, affecting 500 jobs. “There’s a 95 percent chance we all get laid off between now and November, and I for one am thinking it’s for the best,” one webOS employee was quoted as saying.

HP had been trying to find a buyer or someone to license the operating system after announcing it was not going to put out anymore webOS hardware. But it has yet to announce any deals though there was speculation that HTC or Amazon might want to buy the operating system. On the most recent earnings call, HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman reversed the company’s move to spin off its PC business but said the decision on webOS was still a couple months away. Whitman talked up the potential of using Windows 8 for tablets instead of webOS, which appeared on HP’s TouchPad earlier this year.

We will have to wait until the final announcement is made on webOS. But if HP can’t find a buyer, it might be hard to justify keeping the webOS group going. The company said recently that it was still looking at using webOS for printers but it may just give up on the whole venture and write it off.

It’s a shame because webOS was a solid operating system. But perhaps that was its weakness. It was good but didn’t stand out enough in the market. And HP didn’t seem to support it enough. I still remember when I first saw webOS at CES and really thought Palm had a chance with it. It didn’t work out. It’s a sign of how fast things move in this industry.

UPDATE: Tony Prophet, SVP of operations for HP’s PC division told GigaOM today the WebOS discussion is on-going. “It’s a similar process to the one we did with the PC business and the WebOS is being thoroughly evaluated including the software and product facets, the whole thing.” So we have to see what Meg and the HP decide finally.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Disruptapalooza 2011: how Amazon’s Kindle is changing the portable media gameA Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Incomes of the top 1% grew by a whopping 275% in the past three decades, according to a new CBO report. 77% of unemployed Americans said they thought the distribution of wealth in the U.S. is unfair. What do you think?8 in 10 unemployed Americans say they'd take any job they can getwww.iwatchnews.orgAs hard times linger, unemployed workers are grappling with shame, anxiety and depression. They are cutting costs, losing health care coverage and worried about retirement.

We're always on the lookout for new therapeutic interventions, particularly behavioral interventions for our guys.
Since we're physicians, we're used to finding those interventions in handbooks, manuals and the like. Knowledge that comes with a creation history, but that is public.
Of course even in medicine that's not quite true. I've always been struck by how little ophthalmology, for example, is actually written down. Yes, there are lot of ophthalmology textbooks, but they seem to leave out a lot of the actual practice of eye care. Orthopedics was the same way. General medicine had the best public coverage.
In the 1980s medical-process patents began to appear in clinical practice [1], though, surprisingly, Congress actually moved to limit their impact in 1996. In Nursing care several "instruments" are owned by publishing companies and cannot be used without license.
There are similar issues in science, particularly in genomic research. The "iceman" (Otzi) genome is still a carefully held sequence, worth fame and grants to its owners. Archeologists are infamous for restricting access to ancient documents (ex: Dead Sea Scrolls).
So in the worlds of science, engineering and medicine there's a spectrum of open knowledge.
We're discovering that much of behavioral therapy for autism tends towards the closed end of this spectrum; many programs are patented and unpublished.
I'm unsure how important this is. It may be that patented programs are not only "secret" but also unstudied. Idiosyncratic therapeutic interventions may be harmful or wasteful (in this world, since time is limited, wasteful is harmful). Perhaps we're better off not knowing what's in them.
On the other hand, secret knowledge is yet one more obstacle to information sharing in the cognitive disability community. It's a part of a bigger problem that's getting more of my attention...
[1] Link intentionally made to a NEJM restricted access article.

From The Daily Show, via Why Evolution is True, here’s a hard-hitting expose on the slick con called “science” that is scamming America.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

Weathering Fights – Science – What’s It Up To?

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor & Satire Blog
The Daily Show on Facebook

I am generally a fan of the two-party system. Sadly, at the moment in this country, one of the parties is completely crazy.

Update: Sorry that the video isn’t available outside the U.S. Note that Lisa Randall was a guest earlier on the show.

IF YOU think the art of mind-reading is a conjuring trick, think again. Over the past few years, the ability to connect first monkeys and then men to machines in ways that allow brain signals to tell those machines what to do has improved by leaps and bounds. In the latest demonstration of this, just published in the Public Library of Science, Bin He and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota report that their volunteers can successfully fly a helicopter (admittedly a virtual one, on a computer screen) through a three-dimensional digital sky, merely by thinking about it. Signals from electrodes taped to the scalp of such pilots provide enough information for a computer to work out exactly what the pilot wants to do.That is interesting and useful. Mind-reading of this sort will allow the disabled to lead more normal lives, and the able-bodied to extend their range of possibilities still further. But there is another kind of mind-reading, too: determining, by scanning the brain, what someone is actually thinking about. This sort of mind-reading is less advanced than the machine-...

Smithsonian magazine has a very nice article by Charles C. Mann, "How the Potato Changed the World", focusing on the effects of the Columbian exchange on Europe.

“For the first time in the history of western Europe, a definitive solution had been found to the food problem,” the Belgian historian Christian Vandenbroeke concluded in the 1970s. By the end of the 18th century, potatoes had become in much of Europe what they were in the Andes—a staple. Roughly 40 percent of the Irish ate no solid food other than potatoes; the figure was between 10 percent and 30 percent in the Netherlands, Belgium, Prussia and perhaps Poland. Routine famine almost disappeared in potato country, a 2,000-mile band that stretched from Ireland in the west to Russia’s Ural Mountains in the east. At long last, the continent could produce its own dinner.

When I toured through the Altai this summer, I was impressed at the healthy potato patch outside nearly every house. How unlikely it seems that this American crop should have become a central part of people's lives in some of the most remote parts of Central Asia.

Tags: agriculturedomesticationdiethistoryAmericaEurope

Cancer experts say a snowballing body of evidence shows that the number of cases that can be helped by early detection through widespread screening are small in number.

The 4% of GDP trade deficit that we have on average run over the past decade is best viewed as yet another shift of the US economy into the insurance industry: in this case, a shift inro the "industry" of providing political risk insurance.

Poor-country governments desperately need economic growth for two reasons: first, to enhance the welfare of their people; second, to keep the heads of the rulers from winding up being carried through the streets on pikes. But the only reliable way we know him for a poor country to become richer is for it to grab some markets by exporting low and relatively simple manufactured goods to the rich industrial core. That requires a low value look for the domestic currency. And that requires that the government manipulate the currency by buying large amounts of dollars at prices that it knows damned well it will not be able to match when it comes time to sell its accumulation of dollar-denominated assets.

Developing country governments, especially in Asia, think that this political risk insurance policy is well worth buying.

That is about half of the past decade's trade deficit

The other half is the sale of political risk insurance not to poor-country governments but to rich people in poor countries. If the balloon goes up, if the revolution commences, and if the upper class of a poor country has to make a run for it in the Learjet or the rubber boat, it is then much better for them to arrive on the other side with a large securities account of dollar-denominated money at Citigroup or J.P. Morgan Chase than to arrive as penniless refugees. That in large part explains the extraordinary demand by the emerging rich of much of the rest of the world for dollar denominated assets.

That is the other half of our past decade's trade deficit.

Now from one perspective the sale of political risk insurance is a very lucrative business to be in indeed. The People's Bank of China pays eight renminbi for each dollar that it buys, and yet when it will come time to sell those dollars it will get only four renminbi in return. $30 billion at four renminbi per dollar profit means 120 billion renminbi a month in value to the United States from its trade deficit with China alone. That is $180 billion a year of value from the sale of political risk insurance to Greater China alone.

The question, however, is whether this American specialization in finance and in the sale of political risk insurance is truly intelligent. Are these the "industries" of the future? Or is this rather a path that leads to a dimmer future for middle-class America?

Often, anonymous sources have been exposed by a journalist’s use of insecure communications.

Some specialists are taking a stand against overreliance on the scans, saying they are easily misinterpreted.

Such an exhaustive list of clichés and film terms in films I have never seen. Here are a few of my favorites:

Balloon Rule

Good movies rarely contain a hot-air balloon. Most egregious recent use of a hot-air balloon: MEN DON’T LEAVE, where the heroine is cured of clinical depression by a ride in one. (Readers keep writing in with exceptions to this rule, including WITNESS, but the general principle still applies.)

Cole Rule, The

No movie made since 1977 containing a character with the first name “Cole” has been any good. (Exception: DAYS OF THUNDER, which was good but not all that good.)

“Hay Wagon!”

Rural version of “Fruit cart!” (q.v.). At the beginning of chase scenes through colorful ethnic locales, knowledgeable film buffs anticipate the inevitable scene in which the speeding sports car will get stuck on a narrow country lane behind a wagon overloaded with hay.

Law of Take-out Chinese Food

Take-out Chinese food is eaten in one of only two situations: Communally by a large, multi-ethnic group enthusiastically working on a common project (REVERSAL OF FORTUNE), or in bed by two post-coital lovers (ANNIE HALL). In the former case, the meal predicts success; in the latter, that the couple will break up.

Myopia Rule

Little girls who wear glasses in the movies always tell the truth. Little boys who wear glasses in the movies always lie.

(via The Lone Gunman)

Here’s central Paris:

Unfortunate ring road, but the actual city is a city. At the same scale, here’s central DC:

There’s this swathe of the city south of the Mall that’s been ruined by freeways, but thanks to the NIMBY activists of yore we, like Paris, have preserved the bulk of the city for use by people who live in the city.

Compare to Minneapolis:

Central Minneapolis is a nice place. But the main conceit of this layout seems to be that it’s a place people who live very far away from need to be able to get to. Meanwhile, the people who live in the residential neighborhoods just outside the very tight inner freeway ring seem to be regarded as inconveniences. The result is that the city perversely disincentivizes living in the downtown-proximate neighborhoods. The freeways make them less pleasant and less-connected to downtown, even while they reduce the cost in travel time to live further away.

Apple’s Cash and Marketable Securities has been the focus of attention for many year now. It has now reached $81.6 billion equivalent to a value of $86.8 per diluted share. Currently each share is worth about $393 making the enterprise value $306/share or 11 times last twelve month’s earnings.

The division of liquid cash and cash equivalent asset types is shown in the following chart.

The company added $5.4 billion to its cash reserves during the quarter and now keeps two thirds of that outside the US. Long-term securities (bonds mainly) are now also about two thirds of total. Both of these ratios have increased this year. Some of this shift may be explained by changes in the strategy employed by the CFO/treasurer, but there is another set of assets that has changed dramatically and may explain the change in cash allocation.

I’ve written about the PP&E assets and their dramatic increase, but the “Acquired intangible assets” have also had a huge increase in the last quarter ($2.3 billion). Much of that is attributed to the acquisition of Nortel’s patents.

Unlike cash, these assets can be considered an “investment” by the company. They are expected to (but may not) return value to shareholders in excess of the average cost of capital. Therefore, they demonstrate that some of Apple’s capital is being “put to work” rather than resting idle as many suggest. Apple is buying patents and companies and intellectual property. $12 billion worth so far.

Whether they will be a good investment, we cannot tell, but the allocation of capital to non-cash assets is already significant and has grown more quickly than cash. They have, in fact, more than doubled in a year and quadrupled in two.

This WaPo editorial has a good, generally supportive discussion of the “Volcker rule,” a component of the financial reform law that disallows commercial banks, insured by the FDIC, from betting their own book on the market.

“The rule’s purpose…is to keep banks, whose deposits are federally insured, from taking excessive risks based on the funding advantage that they get from implied government support.”

In passing, the piece makes a point that I assure you will soon to become a talking point among the amnesiacs who want to gut financial reform.  In applying the rule, “10,000 U.S. banks may eventually spend a combined 1.8 million hours a year [on compliance]…”

The thing is, the costs of implementing financial regulation need to be weighed against the costs of not doing so, i.e., the impact of the financial instability and recession caused (in part) by the absence of adequate controls on this type of speculation.

So when I read the part about 1.8 million hours, I wondered how many hours of work had been lost in the Great Recession.  And the answer is:

16 billion hours.

So yes, the new rules of financial regulation will take some time to implement.  But if they help to prevent the next meltdown, they’ll be well worth it.

(Source: BEA, NIPA table 6.9, difference in annual hours, 2007-09)

 

The Hatch Act can prevent would-be candidates in state and local races from running because they are in some way tied to a source of federal funds in their professional lives.

The weaponized Keynesians are out in full force.

To get some sense of where we are with the police in New York, it's worth reading every single word of this stunning story from the Times:A three-year investigation into the police's habit of fixing traffic and parking tickets in the Bronx ended in the unsealing of indictments on Friday and a stunning display of vitriol by hundreds of off-duty officers, who converged on the courthouse to applaud their accused colleagues and denounce their prosecution.As 16 police officers were arraigned at State Supreme Court in the Bronx, incensed colleagues organized by their union cursed and taunted prosecutors and investigators, chanting, "Down with the D.A." and "Ray Kelly, hypocrite."

As the defendants emerged from their morning court appearance, a swarm of officers formed a cordon in the hallway and clapped as they picked their way to the elevators. Members of the news media were prevented by court officers from walking down the hallway where more than 100 off-duty police officers had gathered outside the courtroom. The assembled police officers blocked cameras from filming their colleagues, in one instance grabbing lenses and shoving television camera operators backward.

The unsealed indictments contained more than 1,600 criminal counts, the bulk of them misdemeanors having to do with making tickets disappear as favors for friends, relatives and others with clout. But they also outlined more serious crimes, related both to ticket-fixing and drugs, grand larceny and unrelated corruption. Four of the officers were charged with helping a man get away with assault.

Jose R. Ramos, an officer in the 40th Precinct whose suspicious behavior spawned the protracted investigation, was accused of two dozen crimes, including attempted robbery, attempted grand larceny, transporting what he thought was heroin for drug dealers and revealing the identity of a confidential informant. The case, troubling to many New Yorkers because of its implication that the police officers believed they deserved special treatment, is expected to have long tentacles. Scores of other officers accused of fixing tickets could face departmental charges. Some officers have already retired. Moreover, the indictments may jeopardize thousands of cases in which implicated officers are important witnesses and may be seen as untrustworthy by Bronx juries.Read the whole story down to the rather stunning end...On Friday morning, on the street outside the courthouse, some 350 officers massed behind barricades and brandished signs expressing sentiments like "It's a Courtesy Not a Crime." When the defendants emerged, many in the crowd burst into raucous cheers. Once they had gone and the tide of officers had dispersed, the street was littered with refuse....it's a shocking look at a privileged class. Privileged we have awarded them. MORE: This a department with one officer presently accused of rape, (again) and another caught on the radio saying falsified reports after falsely arresting and imprisoning a black man, bragging that he "fried another nigger."

I may have mentioned before that I used to work for the vice chair of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. As such, I got a fairly useful (though now outdated) snapshot of China’s evolving opinions of the EU.

At the outset Beijing were very favourable to the project, partly because it thought the EU would be a political counterweight to the US and partly because of a more general affinity with, ahem, unification projects, rooted in both communist ideology and in the wider discourse of Chinese nationalism.

Actually dealing with the EU caused more than a little disillusion to set in. In particular, there were complaints that the EU never seemed to operate as a coherent institution. When European politicians arrived in Beijing with their EU hats on, for instance, they would constantly talk up their own country’s businesses and national level agendas. There were constant complaints about this.

So you had a dawning perception in China that the EU was just a convenient vehicle for its member states to scheme for advantage against each other and that its political and economic institutions were both cover for this and means of facilitating something which bore rather a resemblance to Communist Party factional struggle.

As I say, this is old news. But it does provide potentially useful context for the debate over whether China is going to join the big Euro bailout and on what terms:

Any Chinese support would depend on contributions from other countries and Beijing must be given strong guarantees on the safety of its investment, according to Li Daokui, an academic member of China’s central bank monetary policy committee, and Yu Yongding, a former member of that committee.

“It is in China’s long-term and intrinsic interest to help Europe because they are our biggest trading partner but the chief concern of the Chinese government is how to explain this decision to our own people,” said Professor Li. “The last thing China wants is to throw away the country’s wealth and be seen as just a source of dumb money.”

He added that Beijing might also ask European leaders to refrain from criticising China’s currency policy, a frequent source of tension with trade partners. The US argues that an intentionally undervalued renminbi unfairly supports Chinese exports.

This has been tweeted about as ‘China blackmails Europe’, but apart from not being supported by the content of the article else, that perception is just the wrong way of looking at things. As Prof Li points out, Europe is China’s biggest trading partner. On the other hand, it has to deal with an EU structure that it believes to be institutionally untrustworthy. From Beijing’s perspective, China has become far too economically dependent on a politically ramshackle entity.

It follows from this that the price of Chinese support won’t be marginal stuff like lifting the EU arms embargo; though I wouldn’t be surprised to see that offered from the EU side as an item of good faith. What Beijing may be interested in are changes in the way that Europe functions as an entity which guarantees its loans and which ensure that more loans won’t have to be made – and maybe more widely as an entity that makes sense from Beijing’s point of view. If you’re going to stunt up $100 billion odd to bail out a company, you’re going to want a seat on the Board, if only through one or more nominees. You're going to want to have ongoing influence over how it functions.  Perhaps this is what Professor Li is hinting at.

Great review of how Minneapolis became a bicycle town following the Dutch model of bike/car separation, with very encouraging news from St Paul ...
Behind the Bicycle Boom - JAY WALLJASPER
People across the country were surprised last year when Bicycling magazine named Minneapolis America’s “#1 Bike City” over Portland, Oregon, which had claimed the honor for many years....
... This year the city is adding 57 new miles of bikeways to the 127 miles already built. An additional 183 miles are planned over the next twenty years.  By 2020, almost every city resident will live within a mile of an off-street bikeway and within a half-mile of a bike lane, vows city transportation planner Donald Pfaum...
... it boasts arguably the nation’s finest network of off-street bicycle trails. It was chosen as one of four pilot projects (along with Marin County, California; Columbia, Missouri; and Sheboygan County, Wisconsin) for the federal Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program, which aims to shift a share of commuters out of cars and onto bikes or foot...
... Minneapolis features two “ bike freeways,” that are the envy of bicyclists around the country. The Cedar Lake Trail, and the Midtown Greenway both connect to numerous other trails, creating an off-road network that reaches deep into St. Paul and surrounding suburbs. Intersections are infrequent along these routes, which boosts riders’ speed along with their sense of safety and comfort. In a good sign for the future of biking in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis engineers recently reversed a stop sign to give bikes priority over cars where the Midtown Greenway meets 5th Avenue South...
... While only a quarter of riders are women nationally, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey reports 37 percent in Minneapolis...
... Since the 1970s Dutch planners have separated bicyclists from motor vehicles on most arterial streets, with impressive results.  The rate of biking has doubled throughout the country, now accounting for 27 percent of all trips. Women make up 55 percent of two-wheel traffic and citizens over 55 ride in numbers slightly higher than the national average. Nearly every Dutch schoolyard is filled with kids’ bikes parked at racks and lampposts.The Dutch also that as the number of riders rises, their safety increases.  Statistics in Minneapolis show the same results. Shaun Murphy, Non-Motorized Transportation Program Coordinator in the Public Works Department, notes that your chances of being in a car/bike crash in the city are 75 percent less than in 1993...
... Steve Elkins, Transportation Chair of the Metropolitan Council, highlighted his efforts as city council member in suburban Bloomington  to push the idea of Complete Streets--meaning that roadways should serve walkers and bikers as well as cars...
..City workers clear snow from the off-road bikeways just the same as streets, sometimes doing them first. Studded snow tires and breakthroughs in cold-weather clothing makes year-round biking easier than it looks, Clark said...
.. Local bicyclists would have howled at the idea of Minneapolis being named America’s best city 30 years ago. It was a frustrating and dangerous place to bike, crisscrossed by freeways and arterial streets that felt like freeways. Drivers were openly hostile to bike riders, some of them going the extra step to scare the daylights out of us as they roared past. Bike lanes were practically non-existent at that time....
I wager Portland cyclists are happy we took the crown. I suspect their officials were getting complacent. Maybe they'll win it back, but that will only motivate Minneapolis. It's the kind of battle nobody loses.
Really, Portland's not a natural bike town either. It's bloody icy and hilly in January. So the success of Minneapolis and Portland shows the power of the Dutch model of bicycling, amply championed by David Hembrow and Mark Wagenbuur.
Alas, though the distinction seems academic beyond Minnesota, I can't claim to live in the promised land of Minneapolis. I'm a St Paul resident, the older of the Twin Cities. We're not quite as advanced. So it was good to recognize how much Minneapolis has changed in 20 years. With the help of the Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition, and the example of the younger Twin, we might get there yet.

The Guardian has printed an excerpt of economics Nobelist Daniel Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The story addresses the question of why investment bankers believe they are doing anything useful when statistics show they average worse than the market. Kahneman draws upon his own experience as a psychologist in the Israeli Army, predicting leadership:

We were willing to make that admission because, despite our definite impressions about individual candidates, we knew with certainty that our forecasts were largely useless. The evidence was overwhelming. Every few months we had a feedback session in which we learned how the cadets were doing at the officer training school and could compare our assessments against the opinions of commanders who had been monitoring them for some time. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. Our forecasts were not much better than blind guesses.

I think the army story is much more interesting than what he describes about his later interactions with investment houses. Using methods developed by the British army, Kahneman's outfit attempted to evaluate leadership potential in candidate officers based on their interactions on a physical task that required teamwork. They believed their assessments to be reliable and based on real data, and yet they did very poorly compared to the officers who ultimately trained the men.

Predicting leadership seems much more relevant to our evolutionary history than predicting investment returns. In many ways, leadership is a much less predictable game than investment. Kahneman describes the interactions among men who may not have previously worked together. But in the absence of reputation and repeated interactions, some effective strategies for attaining and defending status as a leader simply won't work. More aggressive leadership strategies may work in the short term, while judgment and fairness become important among people who know each other well.

The usual argument for why we don't predict marginal probabilities well is that we haven't encountered them in nature. But here's a task it seems we ought to be pretty good at. And maybe we aren't. Worth further exploration.

Tags: evolutionary psychologyeconomicsrisk

Unintended Consequences: Iranian Opposition Concerned About Google Reader Changes

Google Reader is one of Google's many free services; it's primarily a reader for RSS feeds. While I have used it for that, I was — I suspect like many other users — unaware that it had social sharing features as well. Google recently announced that it will be removing those sharing features from Google Reader and merging it more closely with the social networking features of Google+, Google's challenger to  Facebook.

What I, and presumably Google, did not know is just why Google Reader is the number one RSS reader in Iran: because it doubles as a social networking medium that is difficult for the regime to filter. Blogger Amir explains in imperfect English but clearly enough:
Google Reader, which thanks to its social features (which are going to be removed), is much more than a simple RSS reader for Iranian users. Google Reader is not in a separated domain (like any other Google product) and thanks to https protocol, it is hard to filter by government (To filter google reader the whole google.com domain should be filtered). In a country which all social website like twitter, facebook, friendfeed, and video or image sharing websites like youtube, tumblr, flickr, picassa and many more are banned, Google reader acts like a social websites and in lack of any independent news website (it should be mentioned that all international news channels like BBC, CNN, VOA, and all other non-governmental news website are banned,) Google Reader acts like a news spreading website. Easy access to Google reader made it suitable for Iranian community and through all these years, specially after June 2009 election, developed an strong community for spreading the news. Users like VahidOnline, with more than 7500 followers acts as a hub for spreading and sharing the news from different sources like many other popular users. Commenting space of popular users are also like a forum for discussion about the news and events! Websites like Balatarin (digg like Iranian website) with 60000 subscriber, kaleme.com which represents green movement news with more than 12000 subscriber, BBCpersian with 10000 feed subscriber are some of the examples why such a simple RSS news reader website changed to be one-of-the popular website in Iran. Where all blog provider services like Blogger.com and Wordpress.com are also banned, many weblogs owe their readers to Google reader and some also use notes as a weblog post or tweet.Here's a post on the subject at TechCrunch, with multiple links to discussion boards etc. There's apparently quite a movement online to roll back the decision. (And, no doubt, the controversy has now called the regime censors' attention to a back door they left open.)

Unintended consequences; Google might be well-advised to rethink the decision.

According to CardWeb.com, the average American household with at least one credit card has nearly $10,700 in credit-card debt with an average interest rate that runs in the mid- to high teens at any given time.

How do we get ourselves in so deep?  This infographic from Visualizing Economics reminds us of the power of a little thing called compound interest and how it can have you spending in upwards of 50% more than the original purchase price of the item you put on your credit card. While in the short run, it may seem like a good idea to just make your minimum monthly payment, it’s pretty evident that such a decision can haunt you for long after you swipe your card (in this case, over seven years!).

(via Visualizing Economics)

spending to promote employment in a depressed economy should not be viewed as something that has to generate a good financial return; in effect, most of the resources being used are in reality free.

I sometimes like to say that modern conservatism isn’t an attempt to turn the clock back to the Gilded Age, it’s an attempt to roll things back to before the Enlightenment, with all that godless talk about numbers and evidence and all that. Doesn’t sound that silly now, does it?

If only we could convince Republicans that solar power or mass transit were complete wastes, but that they would upset some foreign power — the French, that’s it! — a big stimulus program might sail through.

I'm still working through my use of iCloud -- my corner case involved making my Apple ID password more secure and getting River to upgrade to OS X Lion to get around a bug in the way iCloud and OS X Snow Leopard interacted -- but the much more common scenario of Outlook for Windows and iCloud has produced its first major report of woe at Office Watch.I've always thought Apple makes its iStuff for Windows just barely usable to help drive sales of Mac computers. Perhaps in the case of iCloud, it's even less barely usable, especially for the MS Office crowd.

Apple can produce decent software. There are, for example, some nice improvements in Lion. Lots of bad stuff too of course, but eventually we'll see 10.7.4 as a good OS. iWork is buggy and into heavy duty data bondage, but it shows some thought. iOS is elegant.Calendars though - they are really bad at Calendars. There was a brief time when Apple did Calendars well. Ok, not Apple, but Claris - which has been in and and out of Apple over the years. Claris Organizer was pretty good. It was, I believe, during the Apple 2.0 era, when Jobs was gone.During Apple 1.0 and Apple 3.0 though, when Jobs was around, every calendar app Apple did was unspeakably bad. iCloud sounds no better than MobileMe calendar -- and they were just bad. iCal for OS X is beyond miserable. iOS Calendar? Try setting a two week alarm so you get a birthday gift in the mail. Right. You can't.I haven't read Jobs bio yet, but I've read the excerpts. My guess is the man hated, from the very depth of his soul, boundaries. Being told what he had to do when. I suspect the only way he ever made an appointment was because he was rich and powerful enough to have people whose entire mission in life was to manage his time.I think that's why Apple sucks at Calendars.Apple 3.0 was a reflection of Jobs. His virtues, and his defects.Apple 4.0 is a different show.Maybe they'll do better at Calendars.

I’m going to use the longer posting capabilities (on here and Google+ which DOES NOT have RSS haha) to express my irritation about people removing RSS as a way to subscribe to websites.

Basically I’ve noticed a huge trend not only in websites moving away from RSS to Twitter and FB, but REMOVING IT COMPLETELY! Personally, I feel like this is NOT a good move for people who provide content to stay in touch with consumers. Why?

-Twitter has no good way to filter information sources and brands from friends. Lists are really not useable, I don’t think a lot of people use them, and the UI has them buried so it’s a pain in the ass to get to them. People are HIGHLY selective about who they follow, and they’re not gonna throw a dozen small blogs in with their best friends’ updates or the experience of using the service become greatly diminished.

-Facebook is a mess for trying to sort “likes” and pages, I don’t see how having a MASSIVE unwieldy feed of constant centralized updates helps ANYONE disseminate information. I would say you could check 5-6 Facebook pages a day MAX for blogs you like who have pages there. That’s a far cry from the 200+ blogs I check every day in about an hour.

RSS is a way to consume a LOT of information very quickly, and STORE it in nice categories if you miss it. So I can catch up with a small blog’s output at the end of the week and, if I so choose, read EVERY article easily in one sitting. You think on Friday I’m gonna go browse that same site’s Twitter feed on their page (digging through all the messy @ replies) and see what they did that week?! Or go to their Facebook page that is littered with contests? No way dude, I’m too busy for that!

I feel like small blogs cut their own throat by taking away the RSS capability. I give this analogy a lot, but social media outlets are INFO COLANDERS! 5% of your followers will see anything you post, and that’s probably only within 20 minutes of posting. That’s the way it is and it’s gonna only get worse. Apart from email lists, RSS is the best way you can collect stuff across the internet to read quickly, and I am so irritated when that choice is taken from me.
/rant

Ok. Ok!I'll talk.It's true. I killed her. Oh god, I swear ... it was an accident.I didn't mean to do it. None of us did.Of course I wasn't alone! You think I could have killed her all by myself? She was huge. Powerful! Millions of users. We all loved her. We loved her to death.How? How did we do it?It's obvious buddy. Staring you in the face. Just look. Look!Ok, do I need to spell it out? I mean, how did you read this?Yeah, I thought so.  Google Reader user eh? Yeah, the hard stuff. Jacking the info stream right to the cortex. RSS junkie you are.You killed her too.I mean, did you pay for this? No, you didn't. There's no way to pay. Free beer.Did you read the ads? Yeah, trick question. There are no ads. At most you added a cookie. Worth a nano-dollar to someone.You got the full feed ad free. You spent your time here instead of making someone money. You used Google Reader to steal money from Google.Google doesn't like that. That's why G+ doesn't have an RSS feed.Facebook doesn't like that. They turned personal page RSS feeds off a year or so ago.Twitter ... Yeah, you get it. I see it in your face.RSS was too good for this world.That's why she had to die.We loved her to death.

Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason.

It's disappointing to feel sad for no reason. Sadness can be almost pleasantly indulgent when you have a way to justify it - you can listen to sad music and imagine yourself as the protagonist in a dramatic movie. You can gaze out the window while you're crying and think "This is so sad. I can't even believe how sad this whole situation is. I bet even a reenactment of my sadness could bring an entire theater audience to tears."

But my sadness didn't have a purpose.  Listening to sad music and imagining that my life was a movie just made me feel kind of weird because I couldn't really get behind the idea of a movie where the character is sad for no reason.

Essentially, I was being robbed of my right to feel self pity, which is the only redeeming part of sadness.

And for a little bit, that was a good enough reason to pity myself.

Standing around feeling sorry for myself was momentarily exhilarating, but I grew tired of it quickly. "That will do," I thought. "I've had my fun, let's move on to something else now." But the sadness didn't go away.

I tried to force myself to not be sad.

But trying to use willpower to overcome the apathetic sort of sadness that accompanies depression is like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back.  A fundamental component of the plan is missing and it isn't going to work. 

When I couldn't will myself to not be sad, I became frustrated and angry. In a final, desperate attempt to regain power over myself, I turned to shame as a sort of motivational tool.

 

But, since I was depressed, this tactic was less inspirational and more just a way to oppress myself with hatred.

Which made me more sad. 

Which then made me more frustrated and abusive.

And that made me even more sad, and so on and so forth until the only way to adequately express my sadness was to crawl very slowly across the floor.

The self-loathing and shame had ceased to be even slightly productive, but it was too late to go back at that point, so I just kept going. I followed myself around like a bully, narrating my thoughts and actions with a constant stream of abuse.

I spent months shut in my house, surfing the internet on top of a pile of my own dirty laundry which I set on the couch for "just a second" because I experienced a sudden moment of apathy on my way to the washer and couldn't continue. And then, two weeks later, I still hadn't completed that journey. But who cares - it wasn't like I had been showering regularly and sitting on a pile of clothes isn't necessarily uncomfortable. But even if it was, I couldn't feel anything through the self hatred anyway, so it didn't matter. JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE.

Slowly, my feelings started to shrivel up. The few that managed to survive the constant beatings staggered around like wounded baby deer, just biding their time until they could die and join all the other carcasses strewn across the wasteland of my soul.

I couldn't even muster up the enthusiasm to hate myself anymore.

I just drifted around, completely unsure of what I was feeling or whether I could actually feel anything at all.

If my life was a movie, the turning point of my depression would have been inspirational and meaningful. It would have involved wisdom-filled epiphanies about discovering my true self and I would conquer my demons and go on to live out the rest of my life in happiness.

Instead, my turning point mostly hinged upon the fact that I had rented some movies and then I didn't return them for too long.

The late fees had reached the point where the injustice of paying any more than I already owed outweighed my apathy. I considered just keeping the movies and never going to the video store again, but then I remembered that I still wanted to re-watch Jumanji.

I put on some clothes, put the movies in my backpack and biked to the video store. It was the slowest, most resentful bike ride ever.

And when I arrived, I found out that they didn't even have Jumanji in.

Just as I was debating whether I should settle on a movie that wasn't Jumanji or go home and stare in abject silence, I noticed a woman looking at me weirdly from a couple rows over.

She was probably looking at me that way because I looked really, really depressed and I was dressed like an eskimo vagrant.

Normally, I would have felt an instant, crushing sense of self-consciousness, but instead, I felt nothing.

I've always wanted to not give a fuck. While crying helplessly into my pillow for no good reason, I would often fantasize that maybe someday I could be one of those stoic badasses whose emotions are mostly comprised of rock music and not being afraid of things. And finally - finally - after a lifetime of feelings and anxiety and more feelings, I didn't have any feelings left. I had spent my last feeling being disappointed that I couldn't rent Jumanji.

I felt invincible.

And thus began a tiny rebellion.

Then I swooped out of there like the Batman and biked home in a blaze of defiant glory.

And that's how my depression got so horrible that it actually broke through to the other side and became a sort of fear-proof exoskeleton.

Writer Steve Silberman, who studied with the same Buddhist teacher as Jobs, reflects on the surprising sincerity and depth of Jobs’ Buddhist practice. In so doing, we have a microcosm of the history of the last several decades of Buddhism in the West. (via NeuroTribes).

What could be wrong with a top foreclosure firm throwing a foreclosed families/homeless-themed halloween party?

When it comes to undocumented system tweaks, we at TidBITS tend to take a fairly conservative stance. After all, your system is a system. It’s responsible for running your whole computer. You wouldn’t want to break it accidentally, and we wouldn’t want to give you any advice that might cause you to do so. Also, undocumented tweaks are undocumented; this means that Apple could withdraw their effectiveness at any time (and has indeed sometimes done so; see, for example, “Leopard Screen Sharing Loses Hidden Features,” 29 September 2008).


Sometimes, however, Apple backs us into a corner, producing a system that does something so blatantly annoying or even downright moronic that we can’t resist advising you to fix it by giving some mystical and unsupported incantation at the command line. For example, when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard introduced the transparent menu bar, I couldn’t get any work done, and rejoiced the moment a trick was discovered for making it opaque again (“Transparent Menu Bar, Die Die Die!,” 16 November 2007). Apple later saw the error of its own ways (for once!) and provided an official interface for doing the same thing, which remains to this day. And when 10.7 Lion deviously hid your user Library from
you, Adam immediately told you how to show it again (“Dealing with Lion’s Hidden Library,” 20 July 2011).


When it comes to undocumented system tweaks, what most users want, I think, is two things:



Give me a graphical interface. Don’t make me type directly into Terminal; I’m afraid I might mess something up accidentally. And if I don’t like a change I’ve made, I want a simple way to undo it immediately.

Give me a conservative list. I don’t want to go wild and hack my system; I just want to know what’s well-tested and safe that I can tweak, even though Apple doesn’t provide an interface in System Preferences to let me do so.



If that’s how you feel, you can’t do better than to download Marcel Bresink’s freeware TinkerTool. TinkerTool is a brilliant one-window application that presents itself as a series of panes, rather like System Preferences, each pane providing checkboxes or other interface for toggling undocumented under-the-hood switches in your system and in some Apple-provided software, such as the Finder and Safari. It customizes itself automatically to the particular system and version you’re using, so the options you’ll see are always the right options. And, like TidBITS, it takes a conservative stance; its only options are those that have been determined to be safe and useful.


You can get a sense of what TinkerTool might be able to do for you by looking at the online list of TinkerTool’s options in 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.7 Lion. For example, I always check the option listed here as “Disable the three-dimensional glass effect of the Dock”; this allows me to keep the Dock at the bottom of the screen while using the more compact, pleasing appearance that it automatically takes on when it’s at one side of the screen. In Snow Leopard and before, I always checked “Place both scroll arrow buttons of any scroll bar at both ends of the bar,” giving me both an up arrow and a down arrow at each end of the scroll bar. (In Lion, there are no scroll
arrow buttons in a scroll bar, so that option no longer applies.) And the option listed as “Control the style and degree of font smoothing (optimized for CRT or LCD)” has saved my eyes through many system generations; because of a bug in the system, my LCD monitor is not seen as an LCD, so that Apple’s own system preference panes (Appearance or General) don’t allow me to increase the font smoothing far enough to make text legible — whereas TinkerTool does.


For Lion in particular, I’d call your attention to several settings you might consider:



Lion has a feature, copied from iOS, where holding down a letter on your keyboard can summon a popover listing alternate versions of that letter, from which you can then choose. For example, the popover that appears when you hold down “e” includes “e” with an acute accent, “e” with a grave accent, and so forth. The price of this feature, however, is that you can no longer hold “e” to achieve multiple repeated “eeeeee”, as you could with previous systems. Users writing horror stories might object to that. TinkerTool lets you access the setting that restores the old behavior (“Re-enable the key repeat feature”); you will then lose the popover, but of course you can still type alternate letter forms just as
before, using the Character Viewer, the Keyboard Viewer, or a modifier-key combination or sequence.

When you close a window containing unsaved changes and the dialog appears asking whether you want to save, you might have a muscle memory telling you that you can dismiss the dialog without saving by pressing Command-D, for “Don’t Save.” In Lion, that keyboard shortcut no longer works; you can restore it with the TinkerTool option listed as “Re-enable the keyboard shortcut for Don’t Save in save sheets”. (Of course, that little dialog about unsaved changes itself appears less than it used to, because of Lion’s Auto Save feature. But that’s a horror story of a different kind.)

Most Lion users are aware by now that when an application is launched, whatever windows were open when that application was previously quit will automatically re-open, thanks to Resume. If you don’t like this, you can turn off Resume at a global level; it is also possible, even if Resume is globally turned on, to turn off Resume for a particular application on a one-time basis, by holding Option as you quit it (or vice versa). But what if you’d like, say, to turn off Resume globally but turn it on by default for certain particular applications? It turns out that there is a way to do this, but Apple doesn’t provide access to it; TinkerTool does (“Control the Resume setting individually per application”).



TinkerTool is not the only system-tweaking game in town. There are other applications that do the same sort of thing TinkerTool does. For certain settings, they might provide a better interface; for example, in the case of the per-application Resume setting, I rather prefer Erica Sadun’s Resuminator. For other settings, they might provide graphical access to something that TinkerTool doesn’t; for example, Lion Tweaks lets you enable AirDrop on unsupported hardware (providing a graphical interface to the trick discussed by Glenn Fleishman in Macworld) and get rid of the iCal and Address Book leather appearance (though I’m not sure I can recommend that one, as it involves meddling with the internals of these applications).


Nevertheless, I always find myself returning to TinkerTool as my under-the-hood control panel of choice. It’s a utility that I’ve used since the early days of Mac OS X, and I recommend that you try it out if you haven’t already. You might be surprised at some of the simple ways in which it can make your Mac more usable, more comfortable, or more powerful.


TinkerTool is a 1.5 MB download; the current version requires Snow Leopard or Lion, but earlier versions have been spun off into separate applications (TinkerTool Classic and TinkerTool Classic Generation 2), still available to those using older systems.

 
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Poor Netflix has had a rocky six months.  It’s like having a friend go into complete, total meltdown and trying to decide when you should start planning the intervention.

After Netflix announced it was splitting its streaming and DVD delivery services into two separate companies, they made a complete 180-degree turn and combined the services again.

Just this week, Netflix announced their Q3 earnings, and while they met expectations, they lost 800,000 subscribers. Now the market is punishing them. In after-hours trading just after the announcement, they lost nearly 30 percent of their stock value. In opening trading the next morning, they were down another 10 percent. While all that loss may not have been avoidable, the industry is wondering why Netflix decided to make this move so quickly.

Colin Dixon of The Diffusion Group (TDG) succinctly referred to this whole event as “premature bifurcation.” And he’s right – many of us within the industry may have seen this split as inevitable, but the timing and the way Netflix has handled this announcement hints at a larger, more complex situation.

Why break up with yourself?
Why would Netflix choose to split itself apart?  And why completely change the name and make two different services to interact with their company?

It all started with the Starz negotiations: Netflix landed a great deal with Starz in 2008. For only $30 million, Starz gave Netflix access to some pretty good movies to stream because the perceived value of streaming was very low at the time.

Fast-forward to 2011. Netflix is now available on so many devices and touting the largest subscriber numbers for a MSO, so the perceived value of that license goes up quite a bit. This makes it a lot harder for Netflix to negotiate cheap prices; hence the very public break up this summer.

So, how does Netflix improve its bargaining position? Oddly enough, by weakening themselves (or at least appearing to be weaker), they position themselves to negotiate for a better price. Let me explain: by splitting the two entities apart, they show much lower subscriber numbers to potential licensees as reasoning for lower pricing. By still having the two companies under one roof, Netflix gets to play the beggar during negotiations for streaming in regards to subscriber numbers, while still offering combined DVD & streaming licenses as an incentive. Therefore, a “weaker” Netflix might have been stronger from a negotiation standpoint.

The problem is, they couldn’t come out and just say that, so instead we get the standard Netflix hubris, disingenuous apologies, and some new branding.  And ironically, now Netflix is much weaker than it planned.

Experience teaches at the cost of mistakes
Despite all the missteps, I still would like to see them succeed. Netflix may be down, but they definitely aren’t out of the game.  Let’s face it, they still have the largest online subscriber base for video content, they have announced rollout plans in new markets, and have recently announced some great new content deals.

Unfortunately, the industry is still learning what customers do and don’t want. Netflix is our canary in the coal mine as they find new and exciting ways to create a burgeoning business model while pissing off content makers and alienating their own customers in the process.

If Netflix doesn’t rebuild itself soon, then maybe it is time for that intervention. And if this WSJ article is correct, that intervention could come in the form of takeover interest. Either way, to regain subscribers and prove the streaming business case, Netflix needs to get back to signing content deals.

Andy Beach is Vice President of Marketing and Product Development at SeaWell Networks, a Canada-based company that specializes in online streaming video delivery. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user jcoterhals.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shinesWhat Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online mediaConnected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes

Jacques Chirac, too feeble to appear at his trial, has made a miraculous recovery and will participate in a Sciences Po colloquium on his foreign policy in December. FP wishes to congratulate the former president on the return of his memory, which I hope remains robust when he is questioned about the suitcases full of cash Robert Bourgi claims to have delivered to him in person.

Walter Isaacson, in his new biography of Steve Jobs, reveals that Apple is planning to introduce its own televisions, attempting to revolutionize that space in the same way it did mobile phones with the iPhone. He quotes Jobs as having said that he had finally cracked the technical issues of controlling such a TV, though giving no details. This has led to a lot of speculation, but it seems obvious to me that Jobs was referring to IOS 5’s new Siri personal assistance capability. We’ll control our Apple TVs by telling them what to do.

Apple has tried to do TVs before. A few years ago, inspired by the TV success of Gateway and then Dell, Apple had an OEM line of TV’s queued-up and ready to go only to be cancelled when Steve Jobs decided they weren’t good enough. The issue was always controlling the TVs, especially if they were part of a multi-vendor home theater system. We all know the nightmare of multiple remotes, which Apple back then tried and failed to cure.

But Siri is different since it requires no remote.  That means in a house like ours filled with little boys no more losing remotes controls, too.

There are two key issues here that make Siri ideal for this control function. First is what I’m calling do what I mean, not what I say. As an intelligent process backed-up by a ton of knowledge on the net, Siri can learn all the devices attached to your system then easily tell them not just what to do, but what you mean. So instead of a big sequence of button pushes, Siri will respond to your command “Get me Dr. Phil” by finding you the latest (or any other) episode of the TV shrink.

The other advantage of Siri (at least for Apple) is what I’d call bait and switch, which is to say that Siri can offer you Dr. Phil from a variety of sources, but the first one will probably be from Apple.

Bait and switch will be Apple’s way of disintermediating TV networks, cable systems, and ISPs, grabbing their TV, movie, and advertising revenue for itself.

Not to mention Google. Apple is hardly going to give up search revenue, either, and Google TV will look pathetic compared to this.

Now that big data center in North Carolina is starting to make more sense.

A reader from Israel first suggested this idea to me. Neither of us know diddly whether it is true, of course, but it makes sense to me.

So Apple’s television would be an iPhone 4S minus the display and telephone parts velcro’d to a big 1080p screen. Figure an extra $100 or so for the Apple bits on a TV that will be marketed initially toward the top of the market but will eventually be aimed, like the iPod, at everyone. Between hardware, content, and advertising there’s another $100 billion market to be conquered there, just for the U.S.  Then add extensive language support to Siri and conquer the TV world.

He cracked it alright.

Note — A reader asked why Apple would make expensieve HDTVs rather than cheaper set top boxes like the Apple TV? That’s a good question. And answering it further illuminates Apple’s probable strategy.

Apple may do both, but they’ll want to make high margins for the bits they actually make so it is better to be selling $2000 TVs than $100 set-top-boxes. 

Look at a likely Apple HDTV. It includes $100 in circuitry that wouldn’t normally be there, though $30 can probably be saved removing stuff that isn’t needed. They’ll push for a better screen for the size, so add $75 for that, and a better case costing an extra $50. So compared to the base TV in that size Apple is spending $195 more. But the TV sells for $1995 in an Apple store rather than $995 (net $800) at Best Buy. There is $200 in manufacturer margin in that $995 set but $1000 in total margin for the Apple set sold in an Apple Store.
Compare that to $50 in possible margin for a set top box. Apple has to sell only five percent as many TVs as set top boxes to make the same money. TVs have a bigger perceived impact on the market and of course Apple has greater end-to-end control. They’ll enter the market small but high-profit as they like to do, then spread down as production costs drop and development costs are amortized. They side-step a price war and eventually end up the dominant player because they’ll have more dry powder when they need it.

The 16 countries that recognize the British monarch as head of state have abolished male precedence in the order of succession.

Ten years after anthrax attacks, biodefense is busted.

Posted today by Consumer Reports:Recall: Trek 2012 bicycles—seat can disconnect from post - Consumer Reports Newsnews.consumerreports.orgTrek Bicycle is recalling about 27,000 FX and District bicycles because the bolt securing the seat saddle clamp to the seat post can break, creating the risk of a crash.

I don't reflexively think ill of all cops, and in my 27 years in New York City I've had some interactions with local cops who seemed impressively decent, grounded, and on-the-ball.

But I would really like someone to convince me that this demonstrates anything other than widespread and deeply-felt contempt, by the NYPD, for the law and for the everyday citizens of this city.

It's not the fact that 16 police officers were indicted in the Bronx for ticket-fixing and other chicanery, it's the fact that their arraignment was greeted by over 100 off-duty officers swarming the courthouse and physically blocking reporters from covering the event:

The assembled police officers blocked cameras from filming their colleagues, in one instance grabbing lenses and shoving television camera operators backward.

This is far worse than anything any of the Occupy groups have done. Where are the helicopters, the tear gas, the tasers, the rubber bullets being deployed to pacify this threat to public safety? Oh yeah. They're in the hands of these guys.

It's almost like they're incapable of self-governance and unable to maintain the place in a safe condition.

Nice find by Gary Ng. Details, details, details.

 ★