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Four of the Toughest Laptops You Can Buy
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 03:28 AM PDT
| Four of the Toughest Laptops You Can Buy Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:24 AM PDT 
Tough laptops are really just built for one reason – to withstand rougher environments that are not meant for most consumer electronics. This means they are built to take extremes of heat, cold, wind, shock and even that great killer of most electronic devices, water. Now if you're looking for a laptop that will go anywhere you want to go and take the thrills and spills of travel into exotic locations, or withstand the environment of a working jobsite, here are four top laptops that are built to take whatever the world will dish out.
GETAC B300 The GETAC B300 is simply heads and shoulders the toughest laptop available for the consumer marketplace and the reason for this is that it's built to U.S. Military specifications and requirements. Each laptop is tested to meet or exceed the testing protocol benchmarks. The laptop is built like a Sherman tank. You can toss this in your luggage toss your luggage out of the plane and rest easy. Super bright screen that is visible in shade and sunlight, every single expansion port known to mankind, two battery bays for up to ten hours of use without an recharge and a full magnesium alloy case. It's tough and it does the job. The cons are that it's expensive and heavy. At the base price of $3300 before optional upgrades you might want to make sure the benchmarks are must have before committing to this machine. GammaTech S15C2 GammaTech machines are built tough. They aren't built to tote into battle like the GETAC laptops but are ideally suited for everyday life outdoor jobs. Since most of us aren't heading to a war zone with the latest teach gear under our arms, the GammaTech series will do the job for people like us. The laptops are heat, cold , wind and water resistant, have great outdoor resolution and do the job while being a bit lighter and lighter on the pocket that the GETAC series. The average GammaTech starts in the $2K range before upgrades. The Magnesium alloy case is 20 times stronger than usual laptop plastic in fact it can survive 26 consecutive 3 foot drops and still keep going. Although, if you drop your laptop 26 times in a row you might just have a bigger problem than laptop durability. Panasonic Toughbook The Panasonic Toughbook is so rigorously tested that they annually break in excess of one thousand Toughbooks while testing these digital survivors. According to the Panasonic website "the same unit was used for the 26 drops at 4 feet, then the same unit was dropped again 26 times from a height of 5 feet, and then the same exact unit was dropped 26 times from a height of 6 feet. So one unit survived 78 drops between heights of 4 to 6 feet.” That's one tough notebook. The units have pretty much the same other tech specs for a tough mobile system, as far as heat, cold and water are concerned, come in at about the same $2K price point and can keep chugging for 8 hours on a single charge. Dell E6420 XFR With a name like E6420 XFR you had better be tough. This Dell laptop looks the part and is the part. It sports a high impact resistant PR-72 ultra-polymer in the chassis which means you can repeatedly drop it from 6 feet, if you are so inclined. It also has rubber bumpers and nifty slots that close over your ports to keep them protected. Dell clearly takes tough seriously and has pulled out all the stops to create a machine that is military grade and rivals the GETAC series in toughness and price. The laptop will cost you a whopping $3300 before adding extras. Hanna Daniels is a professional blogger that provides advice on how to keep your computer running smooth. He writes for Dave’s Computer Inc., the best place to get laptop and desktop repair services in Hillsborough NJ. The post Four of the Toughest Laptops You Can Buy appeared first on The Blog Herald. | | 6 Effective Marketing Tips that Directly Impact Sales Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:14 AM PDT 
Agility While the concept of being agile in order to respond to a rapidly shifting market has been around for quite some time, it's never been more important to be agile than in today's market. With a rapidly shifting digital landscape as well as shifting trends in social media. Social media is an extremely fluid marketplace that requires constant maintenance as well constant customer engagement. What is different in this day and age is the speed at which consumers communicate with each other and share their opinions. With this shift in the dynamic consumers are much more likely to act as a flock or a herd than ever before. Please them and they will flock to your door but if you ignore them they will stampede to the competition.
Creative Alliances Being agile entails a streamlined use of resources and the ability to quickly respond to positive opportunities. When marketers leverage their in house relationships via cooperation with other teams duplicated efforts fall away and laser like streamlining occurs which brings about greater agility. On the external side the ability of a company to positively impact word of mouth advertising to increase sales has never been greater. And engaged conversation with your customer base will do more to increase good will and consumer positive associations than millions of dollars of print ads could ever accomplish. Winning over the influencers in your market and making those people allies has never been more important. Direct Relationships are Key Webinars, tweets, hosted chats, and FB direct engagement is the new multi-million dollar ad buy. Creating valuable content for your customers to read and comment on will also go a long way toward building direct customer contact and engagement. If it is great content, your customers will share it and that is priceless. The takeaway here is that your company should build a plan for customer engagement and execute it on a regular basis in order to court and sell to your base. Get Real About Your Numbers With the unprecedented flow of data into the company about it's customers it's going to take time to mine the data that is presented however, with a bit of work the marketing department should be able to develop an unprecedented sales driven relationship with the customer base. If your bottom line isn't being effected by this data flow then the way the date is being used is faulty and it's time to rethink the methodology. Content with Real-Time Data When assessing social listening efforts key in on key words that are relevant to your market. Understanding social media trends inside of the entire market will give your company an edge in determining how to move specifically. Your marketing people will have the latest trends available to them and they can develop content that is actually relevant for the market that is fresh, engaging and drives sales. Only Automate When There is No Other Choice While the burst of automation options cast a wide shadow, today's social media values direct engagement over large scale push advertising. This means that instead of a mass email, direct social media mentions are much more likely to build loyalty and sales. As a pioneer in marketing automation, LeadMD pairs its services with bleeding-edge marketing automation software. Karen Khan writes independently with an interest in marketing software development. The post 6 Effective Marketing Tips that Directly Impact Sales appeared first on The Blog Herald. | You are subscribed to email updates from The Blog Herald
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How to take your Pinterest account to the next level
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 03:22 AM PDT
| How to take your Pinterest account to the next level Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:56 AM PDT By Charles Mburugu Pinterest can be a great option for business owners who would like to promote their products and services. One of the most popular social media networks, it is not just for leisure time anymore. Pinterest allows users to collect photos and videos and share them with others. These images are pinned on boards, which are categorized according to hobbies, interests and events. Here are some tips that will help you take your pinning to the next level. 1. Include hashtags, @reply and keywords Pinterest users can use hashtags and keywords to look for specific items. In addition, they are informed whenever anyone replies to a pin. Therefore, make sure your pin descriptions have the relevant hashtags as well as keywords. This will increase the chances of your pin appearing in related searches. However, avoid having excess hashtags in your description since this could make it difficult to read. Replies enable your visitors to share their thoughts in the comments section of the pin. 2. Add a 'Pin it' bookmark to your browser If you don't have a 'pin it' bookmark, pinning anything from any site can be a long and frustrating process. The good news is that installing this bookmark on your browser is very simple. All you need to do is visit http://about.pinterest.com/goodies/ where you can download the 'pin it' button and then install it. Whenever you pin a web page, you will be able to see all the photos on it. You can then select the specific image you want to pin. 3. Be social The main purpose of social networks is to enable users to share, comment and connect with others. Therefore, when using Pinterest, you need to engage with others by liking, commenting on or repinning what they have posted. By being social and helpful, you will attract the attention of other users and they are likely to return the favor. 4. Request that followers pin photos of themselves with your product This can be a very effective strategy for connecting with your fans and finding out what they think about your products. Running a contest would be a great way of implementing this strategy. For instance, the person who pins the most creative photo could get a discount on their next purchase. Alternatively, you could choose the winner based on the number of likes or re-pins their photo gets. This will encourage participants to involve their friends in the contest, thus resulting in more exposure for your products. Always be sure to read the Pinterest business guidelines before starting a contest. 5. Pin directly on your blog If you have a blog, Pinterest allows you to pin photos directly on it. Whenever you find anything interesting, you can add it to one of your future blog posts. Alternatively, you could write a whole blog post based on that photo. Adding photos to blog posts is very easy. All you need to do is click the 'Embed' button on the photo and copy the code which appears. You can choose to adjust the size of the photo before pinning it on your blog. 6. Pin videos Besides photos, Pinterest also allows you to pin your favorite videos. This is a great feature for people who are selling all kinds of products. You can pin 'How to' lessons and 'DIY' tutorials that show how the product actually works. Ask some of your fans to pin videos of themselves using your product and taking about its benefits. You could also choose to pin videos which show how the product is actually created. Funny videos of all kinds can also be very effective in capturing the attention of your audience. 7. Test various captions One of the best things about Pinterest is the captions feature. You can use this feature to add hashtags as well as keywords. As you use these captions, it will be important to monitor them on a regular basis. Find out which captions attract the highest number of likes, repins and comments. This will give you an idea of what kind of captions to use for your future pins. 8. Include a dollar sign for products If you’re pinning an image of something you have for sale online, you can include the dollar sign in the description, and Pinterest will automatically put a price ribbon across the corner, and index your pin as an item for sale. Author’s Bio: Charles Mburugu writes about topics such as social media and SEO. He is currently writing for webdesign.org.  |
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#ff @MarketingProfs
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 03:14 AM PDT
| #ff @MarketingProfs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:43 AM PDT @peterkim Yes -- I sat on the runway at Logan for four hours last Wednesday, with nothing but Twinkle for entertainment! — Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs) January 11, 2009
The eighth person I followed on Twitter was Ann Handley. One time, I gave her a pony. Ann is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and co-author of Content Rules. She's on Twitter as @MarketingProfs. Earlier posts in this series: October 13, 2013 :: @maxkalehoff October 4, 2013 :: @cbasturea September 27, 2013 :: @jowyang September 20, 2013 :: @hyku September 13, 2013 :: @gregverdino September 6, 2013 :: @armano August 30, 2013 :: @charleneli Tweet | You are subscribed to email updates from Being: Peter Kim
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Digital Dice: Creative & Social
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 03:05 AM PDT
| Digital Dice: Creative & Social Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:03 PM PDT Konrad Palubicki A study shows Facebook ads increase impressions by a whopping 200 percent, a creative social campaign from Netflix and more of the most recent digital updates of the week STUDY: Facebook Ads Increase Impressions by 200 Percent A report from ShopIgniter, Facebook's Preferred Marketing Developer, revealed that paid media on Facebook increases viral and organic impressions by 200 percent. The study examined more than 2,000 Facebook News Feed posts from Q1 and Q2 2013, and their more than 2 billion impressions and post-click performance. The study also revealed a notable statistic that more than 51 percent of campaign engagement occurred on mobile devices. Netflix Hits a High with Derek Social Media Campaign Netflix recently took to an interesting social strategy to promote the release of a new show. The media-streaming company worked with the show's lead actor, Ricky Gervais, who portrays a character named Derek. Since Derek is exceptionally kind as a nursing home volunteer, Netflix launched a 'Be Like Derek' campaign, encouraging fans to celebrate kindness via social media. Using hashtag #BeLikeDerek, followers were encouraged to share their favorite quotes from the show, while the @BeLikeDerek handle posted acts of kindness from the news. Facebook Lowers Age Rule to Allow Teens to Post Publicly Facebook's latest update will allow teens between the ages of 13 and 17 to post publicly. Whereas teens could only share updates with friends, friends of friends and custom groups previously, the young users can now opt to share content with anyone on Facebook, as well as acquire followers. In order to partake in this update, teens will have to manually adjust their audience setting to 'public.' The update, which began rolling out Wednesday, will also allow teen users to enable non-friends to follow any publically published posts. How YouTube and Music Companies Reach Generation C For the music industry, the internet could easily be viewed as a source of strife. Instead, Warner Music is embracing it as both a promotional and revenue driving platform. Since young people are increasingly listening to music on YouTube rather than on the radio or streaming music apps, Warner Music seized the opportunity to use YouTube as a key source to reach Generation C. From advertising revenue to partnering with YouTube celebrities for promotional campaigns, meeting users where they are currently consuming music is setting Warner Music up for success. Pinterest Drives More Traffic to Publishers than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit Combined On Tuesday, the social plugin service Shareaholic released data from 200,000 publishers about social media traffic trends. According to their findings, Facebook drove more than 10% of overall traffic to publishers in September 2013, followed by Pinterest at 3%. Most of the tracked social platforms did see year-over-year increases, though Reddit and StumbleUpon saw decreases in referral traffic from September 2012 to September 2013. Written by Konrad Palubicki | | Friday Five: Lessons From the Creative Newsroom Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:30 AM PDT Christian Rooney This week, Edelman Chicago launched its Creative Newsroom, just in time for Chicago Ideas Week, an annual gathering of thought leaders designed to provoke new ideas and positive action. As the official communications partner of CIW, it was the perfect time to launch our first official Chicago Newsroom activation for the CIW team, and an opportunity to share integrated stories about the great ideas during the conference. Here are a few Newsroom lessons worth sharing: 1. It's not about the room The Creative Newsroom approach isn't about the room itself. It's a process and mindset for adapting brand storytelling to a new media environment. The team can sit right next to one another or live hundreds of miles away—as long as every member understands their place in the process and how best to operate within that team structure, content opportunities will "flow" as efficiently as possible. 2. The future is about sustained commitment to the audience In the past, a typical integrated campaign for a client was an episodic endeavor—clients and agencies would activate and engage with their audiences in a regimented, time-restricted manner. But in this world of continuous media and exponential growth in mobile usage, the newsroom approach is at its core a commitment to be "always on" for your audience—to engage on their terms and build a conversation that benefits all sides. 3. The team must have total client support The creative newsroom allows the team to sharpen the brand's presence across the media cloverleaf. But none of this can happen without full client support—from legal to brand management and all teams, including digital, traditional and making the account team an absolutely essential part of the process. 4. The newsroom team must be nimble The newsroom team should develop procedures and guidelines, but embrace flexibility in their individual roles. For example: the analyst might spot a trend or opportunity and immediately spark a creative idea. In rigid roles, they might simply pass it onto the strategist. But to operate effectively in a newsroom process, the entire team must be able to shift their roles based on the content or engagement need. It's an environment made for T-shaped skillsets. 5. Don't underestimate the change The newsroom approach is a fundamental reshaping of how marketers and brands adapt to the real-time media landscape. Like any change in how things are done, it's bound to be met with plenty of instinctual resistance, both within account teams and client organizations. But the payoff is a brand and an audience that's relevant, valuable and "tuned in." How have your teams adapted to an "always-on" marketing world? This Friday5 was written with assistance from April Umminger, Erin Shea, Gloria Hurtado and Rick Murray. Written by Christian Rooney | You are subscribed to email updates from Edelman Digital
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Live at #4AsData: 8 ad industry predictions from Goldman Sachs
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 03:04 AM PDT
| Live at #4AsData: 8 ad industry predictions from Goldman Sachs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 07:08 AM PDT  Debra Schwartz, vice president of equity research on the Internet team at Goldman Sachs, gave a presentation Wednesday at the 4A’s Data Summit in which she outlined eight predictions for the online-ad industry:
1. Ad dollars will continue to shift to online platforms
Schwartz said that online represented 20% of total ad spending in 2012, and she expects that to increase to 30% by 2017. 2. Programmatic buying will take up 70% of online inventory
Schwartz admitted this was an aggressive prediction that was predicated on a loose definition of “programmtic.” But with premium inventory moving into the programmatic realm, auction speed increasing, more brands buying in and an influx of video and mobile inventory into the space, Schwartz said Goldman is confident that programmatic buys will account for a majority of online inventory within a few years. 3. Buying ads across digital and traditional platforms will become frictionless
Ad technology firms such as Mediaocean are allow radio buyers to buy across terrestrial and streaming radio stations and television-ad buyers to purchase traditional TV and YouTube inventory. “The better the tech becomes, the more buyers will embrace it,” Schwartz said. 4. Consolidation will continue
Deals that resemble Facebook’s purchase of Instagram and AOL’s Adap.tv buy will be the norm as companies look to expand their ad capabilities with acquisitions of mobile, data and video companies. The goal will be to create 360-degree marketing solutions. 5. The “technology tax” will shrink
Schwartz predicts a drop in margins for those in the middle between advertisers and publishers, as barriers drop and technology becomes more widely available and easier to use. 6. The visualization of the Web will continue
Image- and video-based communication is becoming easier and more diverse — and also extremely popular. Advertisers will follow consumers onto visual platforms. 7. Companies will continue to leverage first-party data
As the era of the cookie fades, companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn will increase their focus on proprietary user-ID solutions that will allow marketers to target and retarget their users across the Web. 8. Ad targeting will become device agnostic
Schwartz said that this trend is still in it’s beginning stages, but that rapid advancements are likely in the next few years. Following a user across their many devices and delivering ads that are tailored to how they use each platform will prove extremely successful.
Related Posts: Live at #4AsData: 8 ad industry predictions from Goldman Sachs originally published by SmartBlogs | | 4 Facebook Timeline contests to run right now Posted: 18 Oct 2013 04:41 AM PDT Page managers are jumping for joy now that Facebook no longer requires contests to be run via third-party apps. Businesses can now easily run contests on their page timelines and manage the results themselves. Many are doing just that. Contests using likes, comments and shares as entry requirements, for example, are up and running on thousands of pages — and generating windfalls of engagement. If you're new to creating Facebook contests or need some quick ideas on how to run one, here are four simple contest ideas along with tips on how to get started: Caption contest Photos make for engaging posts on Facebook, so why not double the engagement and turn your photo into a contest? Just ask your fans to caption your photo to enter. You can either pick your favorite caption as the winner or, for even more engagement, make the caption comment with the most likes the winner. Even if the prize is simple, this contest can get waves of comments rolling in, often with funny and creative results. Check out this caption contest that got more than 1,200 comments:
Photo contest
Photos contests were a lot more complicated when you couldn't conduct them on your page's Timeline. Now they're a breeze — you just require entrants to post a photo on your wall. Then you can either let fans pick the winner (most likes, comments or shares) or you do it yourself. Either way, the result is a ton of user-generated content to share and a ton of engagement and interaction from your fans. Photo contests usually won't garner thousands of entries, but they're almost always visually pleasing and exciting for your dedicated fans. 
Fill-in-the-blank contest This is a great contest because it's so easy to enter and also has the potential to go so viral. The secret is posting an interesting fill-in-the-blank status that both quickly provokes an answer AND piques fans' curiosity enough to make them want to read what other fans wrote. If you can pull this off, you'll have fans commenting like crazy and also asking their friends to comment since it's quick, easy and potentially rewarding. If you need help coming up with the fill-in-the-blank, you can always tap into the "Contest" or "Fill-in-the-Blank" categories of our Post Planner's Status Ideas Engine — where you can access hundreds of fill-in-the-blank contests in a few clicks! Check out this contest for tickets to an event by Las Vegas nightclub Hakkasan. They modeled the question around the guest act and it garnered almost 200 comments in just one day. 
Most comments/likes contest: This is the simplest Timeline contest of all — and the one that typically earns the most responses since it's so easy to enter. While you may not be entertained by the responses, this is still a great way to conduct a weekly or monthly contest that boosts engagement and rewards fans Tea Forte scored almost 5,000 likes from this contest in just one day. 
Try mixing up these contest ideas and seeing which ones get the best response from your fans. Whichever one you choose, chances are it will keep your fans coming back for more. And if you're parched for ideas, be sure to check out Post Planner's content features. You'll be treated to hundreds of contest ideas that you can easily customize and publish to your pages in just a few clicks. A wordsmith turned tech junkie, Joshua Parkinson has a passion for conversation and content that led him around the world, and eventually to bootstrap Facebook content manager Post Planner.
Related Posts: 4 Facebook Timeline contests to run right now originally published by SmartBlogs | You are subscribed to email updates from SmartBlogs » Social Media
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Journalisms new scoop, learning from Harry Potter, and meeting designers more than half way.
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 01:50 AM PDT
| Journalisms new scoop, learning from Harry Potter, and meeting designers more than half way. Posted: 18 Oct 2013 12:50 PM PDT As an aspiring journalist, I worked in the Washington Post newsroom in an entry-level position that used to be known as a “copy boy”. (Later updated to the more inclusive “copy aide.”) I loved taking in the energy of the …  | | Four short links: 18 October 2013 Posted: 18 Oct 2013 12:31 PM PDT Science Not as Self-Correcting As It Thinks (Economist) — REALLY good discussion of the shortcomings in statistical practice by scientists, peer-review failures, and the complexities of experimental procedure and fuzziness of what reproducibility might actually mean. Reproducibility Initiative Receives Grant …  | | Knowing and Understanding Your Audience Posted: 18 Oct 2013 12:01 PM PDT I had the opportunity to sit down with Laura Klein (@lauraklein) and talk about the importance of creating effective user experiences. Laura is a UX expert and consultant. She stresses the need to figure out what works by talking to …  |
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How Can I Get My Local Business to Rank Higher in Search?
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 01:40 AM PDT
| How Can I Get My Local Business to Rank Higher in Search? Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:18 AM PDT How Can I Get My Local Business to Rank Higher in Search? written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing Friday is "Question of the Week" day here at Duct Tape Marketing. Each Friday I'll tackle a specific question I received via readers or in places where I'm speaking. Submit your question here and if we use it we'll highlight you and send you a signed copy of Duct Tape Marketing. For today’s answer I wish I could say there was some magic pixie dust, but the fact is getting your local business to show up high in the search results takes some work. For the local business the goal must be to move into what is referred to as the Google Local Pack – those 6-8 listing that show up for a local search. This is particularly important on mobile devices that are often pinpointing local only. 
There are many factors and of course a great deal has to do with the competitive nature of your particular industry. However, there are several tried and true steps that you should take in order to give your business the best chance possible Clean up your NAP NAP is the directory acronym for Name, Address and Phone. This data clearly tells that a business is local and guess what – if you’ve been around for a while there’s a good chance some data source has this wrong. Here’s how to assure you have an accurate NAP listing in as many places as possible. Go the USPS site and get the correct address format for your business Check with these major data providers to ensure your listing is complete and accurate. Get listed Now that your listing is accurate with the data folks, make sure that you listing in some of the more popular online business directories. Claim enhance these profiles. One of the best tools for doing this is getlisted.org – this free tool will find your listing or lack of in some of the major directories and lead you to the place where you can edit and add. Brightlocal is another very powerful paid tool for improving your local presence. Get reviewed Reviews carry a lot of weight, both with search engines and would be customers. You must get serious about this aspect of local search. Note the image above – the site that ranks #1 in Google has the best review profile. The three most important place to focus your review work are - Google+Local – Google want your business on Google+ so they’ve moved the local pages there. Start building your local page and focus on getting more reviews.
- Yelp – On top of being the biggest review site Yelp provides Bing Local results.
- Foursquare – this location based check in site is working hard on becoming a local directory and should not be ignored.
Localize your pages One of the most overlooking opportunities is the local nature of the content on your site. Make sure you: - Add your NAP in Schema.org format to every page
- Add local terms such as suburbs, neighborhoods, places and events in your titles and subtitles.
- Create localized happenings and news pages
- Create site sections or landing pages dedicated to local phrases.
For WordPress users one of the best things you can invest in is the Local SEO for WordPress plugin from Yoast. This plug in will handle a great deal of the techie stuff for you and let you do some nice things with maps and directions.  |
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Fun Friday: Big Changes This Year
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 01:38 AM PDT
| Fun Friday: Big Changes This Year Posted: 18 Oct 2013 06:24 AM PDT Arnold's post on Citibike inspired this fun friday. It got me thinking about what a profound change Citibike has been for me this year. I ride everywhere now. I used to Vespa around town but I haven't had my Vespa on the road for months. A Citibike can get me almost anywhere in lower manhattan in 15 minutes and it is my preferred form of transportation when I am traveling alone. Is there something that has come along this year and changed things up for you in a major way? If so, what is it?  | You are subscribed to email updates from A VC
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Four short links: 18 October 2013
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 01:38 AM PDT
| Four short links: 18 October 2013 Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:03 PM PDT - Science Not as Self-Correcting As It Thinks (Economist) — REALLY good discussion of the shortcomings in statistical practice by scientists, peer-review failures, and the complexities of experimental procedure and fuzziness of what reproducibility might actually mean.
- Reproducibility Initiative Receives Grant to Validate Landmark Cancer Studies — The key experimental findings from each cancer study will be replicated by experts from the Science Exchange network according to best practices for replication established by the Center for Open Science through the Center's Open Science Framework, and the impact of the replications will be tracked on Mendeley's research analytics platform. All of the ultimate publications and data will be freely available online, providing the first publicly available complete dataset of replicated biomedical research and representing a major advancement in the study of reproducibility of research.
- $20 SDR Police Scanner — using software-defined radio to listen to the police band.
- Reimagine the Chemistry Set — $50k prize in contest to design a “chemistry set” type kit that will engage kids as young as 8 and inspire people who are 88. We're looking for ideas that encourage kids to explore, create, build and question. We're looking for ideas that honor kids' curiosity about how things work. Backed by the Moore Foundation and Society for Science and the Public.
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Jack Marshall, The Smartphone Mouth French art director Victor...
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 01:27 AM PDT
| Jack Marshall, The Smartphone Mouth French art director Victor... Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:51 PM PDT Jack Marshall, The Smartphone Mouth French art director Victor Petit was looking for an internship when he created this mobile experience pitching his wares. The idea was simple: Prospective employers scanned a QR code, and their phones took on the mouth of the candidate, through which he introduced himself. "I realized during my previous job search that getting an interview at a communication agency is the hardest part of the process. I tried to create a CV (resume) that would enable me to express myself vocally as soon as they read the paper version," Petit told Mashable. | | Socialogy: Interview with Sandy Carter Posted: 18 Oct 2013 11:16 AM PDT I met Sandy Carter a few years ago at SxSW, when the IBM folks interviewed me about social business (see here), which was fun, but the conversation with Sandy beforehand was the thing they should have captured. About Sandy Carter 
Sandy is Vice President, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions Sales and Evangelism, where she is responsible for setting the direction for IBM's Social Business initiative, working with companies who are becoming Social Businesses, and being the evangelist for the concept and best practices around Social Business. She is the best-selling author of The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0, which won the Platinum MarCom Award in 2008, and The New Language of Marketing 2.0: Social Media which won the Silver MarketingSherpa award in 2009. Her newest book, Get Bold, has just been released. The Interview Stowe Boyd. Your new book, Get Bold, is out. What’s the central message?
Sandy Carter: Based on working with thousands of clients, I focused the book on the way companies can create their personalized Social Business Agenda.
A - Align your goals and culture to be ready to become more engaging and transparent. Do not underestimate the task ahead of you. Culture eats strategy for lunch. Take a look at IBM's Social Computing Guidelines as a way to get started!
G – Gain Social Trust focuses on finding your fans, friends and followers, and forming best friends from your tippers or most influential clients or outside parties. It dives into what social trust is all about and how you instill it.
E – Engage through experiences focuses on how a company can engage its clients and employees and dives into gaming, virtual gifting, location based, mobile, or other stellar experiences to drive that engagement.
N – "Social" Network your processes. Since this is about business, figuring out how to add social techniques to your processes is critical. Think about customer service — adding in Twitter to address your customer's concerns, crowdsourcing to drive product innovation or communities for incrementing your marketing processes around Loyalty!
D – Design for Reputation and Risk Management! This is the #1 area of focus for C level executives who must manage the risk of having your brand online, your employees being your brand advocates, and even your clients becoming your marketing department. The value of this approach far outweighs the risk but regardless you must develop a Disaster Recovery plan that prepares to address any incidents as they may arise.
A – Analyze your data! Social analytics are the new black! You need to see the patterns of sentiment, who your tippers are, and listen daily!
SB: I love ‘culture eats strategy for lunch’, although it’s often interpreted as meaning that a tradeoff needs to be made between them. My take is that all change in company direction (which is what strategy is about) requires changes in behavior, at the cultural level. Without that cultural change, strategy gets stymied. Is that how you intend it?
"Culture and change management is the foundation of true social business transformation. You can have a great social business, or social media strategy, but if you don't have the culture that supports that, the transparency, the willingness to learn and share, adoption and engagement will be fleeting and unsuccessful."SC: Absolutely! Culture and change management is the foundation of true social business transformation. You can have a great social business, or social media strategy, but if you don't have the culture that supports that, the transparency, the willingness to learn and share, adoption and engagement will be fleeting and unsuccessful.
SB: I saw that you wrote a series on your blog about Trend of Social, and ended on social leadership. What is the new job for leaders in a social business?
SC: Yes, in today’s increasingly social and digital business landscape, leaders need to “walk the talk” and shift to social conversations in order to better serve employees, partners and customers.
IBM recently released its 2013 Global C-suite study, which found that 70 percent of the C-suite recognize the importance of shifting to new models of social and digital interaction. The study also found that CEOs are driving the change with 27 percent more of them planning to open up their organizations to empower collaboration with customers.
The fact is social has quickly become critical for business and executives can play a critical role in the success of a social business. It's encouraging to see that business leaders are taking action, helping to drive adoption and engagement and establish trust and transparency among the workforce.
SB: In that study, 70% see the need, but only 30% thought social business was critical to connecting to customers. What’s the disconnect?
SC: The study suggests that, in the case of customer engagement, social business is still emerging, proving its worth with the C-Suite. But that same study also reveals that in fact 88% of the C-Suite plan to interact digitally with customers to a much greater extent over the next 3-5 years. So while social, digital interaction with customers may be relatively low today, it will significantly increase overtime.
SB: As you may know, the theory of socialogy is ‘How do you think a scientifically-grounded understanding of people as social beings will change business in the future and how?’ Can you give your take on that?
SC: I believe social business is at the root of this theory. Business is about people and Social Business is all about forming relationships with your people - employees, partners and customers. Whether you are B2C or B2B, today’s world is really about P2P; people to people. Just as you build trust among your network through face-to-face interactions, so to must you build trust via social networks. Trust is the social currency.
There’s also an analytics component here. Social networking enables businesses to gain greater insight into their ecosystem to find out what’s important to them. With this feedback you’re able to build a profile to really get to know your audience. This is groundbreaking because it allows businesses to build passionately engaged workforces, achieve customer activated innovation and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
SB: So you are arguing for a fusion of social network science and social data analytics as a way to better connect with customers and build a more engaged workforce?
SC: Yes, social is so much more than collaboration. The real winners in social will be those who harness the ability to capture and analyze the knowledge their social network creates and share it throughout the business to accelerate innovation, out-market competitors and remove boundaries internally and externally. SB: Thanks for your time. SC: Thanks for asking.
Sandy’s citing of IBM research on C-level executives belief in the central role that social business will be playing in the near future is clearly the biggest takeaway here, along with her observation that culture and change management form the foundation of social business transformation. This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions. | | Roland Barthes’ list of likes I like: salad, cinnamon,... Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:31 AM PDT  Roland Barthes' list of likes I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn't someone with a "nose" make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.'s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc. (via Barthes's Likes and Dislikes, Illustrated | Brain Pickings) | | "Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth..." Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:28 AM PDT "Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you've had, the things you've learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you're on your way to being a good writer. You can't write for other people. You can't write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are." - Ray Bradbury, interviewed by Sam Weller at the Paris Review | | "That which is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah, the rest is..." Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:23 AM PDT "That which is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah, the rest is just the explanation; go and learn."
- Hillel the Elder | | "It happened slowly, didn’t it? The change in the Republican Party? I don’t know. Maybe it’s..." Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:06 AM PDT " It happened slowly, didn't it? The change in the Republican Party? I don't know. Maybe it's nostalgia. There have always been the wild, vicious voices of the right. The devil on the shoulder of the conservative movement that whispers in its ear, "burn it down, burn it down." But those voices were to be ignored, humored, tolerated, placated, or just deceived. That was the way of things, and we were protected by the obvious: people who believe foolish things tend to be easy to fool. Then it all changed. The Republican elite caught a ride on the tiger. But the tiger got sick of waiting for the gazelles it was promised, the gazelles that were always one election away. The tiger was hungry and angry and tired of being used and the longer it waited the more appetizing the elite on its back became. So the tiger got a radio station and a news channel. The tiger got organized and mobilized. And finally the tiger realized it didn't need someone kicking its sides telling it which way to run and who to eat and when to eat and why it wasn't time to eat and the time to eat would come, don't worry, you'll eat soon enough. So the tiger ate its master and now here we are. " - Jon Lovett, How the GOP Slowly Went Insane | | Quartz has created a Medium-like paragraph-by-paragraph... Posted: 18 Oct 2013 07:48 AM PDT  Quartz has created a Medium-like paragraph-by-paragraph commenting system, and selling the sponsorship of the comments. Here you see Citi is sponsoring. But shouldn't they be dynamically auctioned off, based on the content in the articles and comments? | You are subscribed to email updates from Stowe Boyd
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Content Publishing Tips for Brands From the Experts
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 01:25 AM PDT
| Content Publishing Tips for Brands From the Experts Posted: 18 Oct 2013 06:30 AM PDT Brands publishing news content isn't a question anymore. Brands must master publishing to rise above the competition, get attention from search engines, feel the sharing love in social, and create brand advocates that ultimately convert into sales.  | | 3 Key Ways B2B SEO Impacts Demand Generation Efforts Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:30 AM PDT SEO plays a key role in demand generation initiatives by cultivating significant organic search traffic and leads. Here are critical points B2B SEO professionals need to consider, based on select research highlights and evolving trends.  | | Facebook Retail Advertisers Averaging 152% ROI [Report] Posted: 18 Oct 2013 04:30 AM PDT Performance on Facebook advertising for retailers is increasing significantly, meaning advertisers should feel confident about in their Facebook ad spends for the upcoming holiday season, according to a new report released by Nanigans.  | | AOL Races Past Google to Becomes Top U.S. Video Ad Property Posted: 18 Oct 2013 02:00 AM PDT In September 2013, 188.7 million Americans watched 46 billion online content videos, while the number of video ad views totaled 22.9 billion. AOL (fueled by its Adapt.tv acquisition) served the most video ads – 3.7 billion to Google's 3.2 billion.  | You are subscribed to email updates from Search Engine Watch
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Clash of Generations at the Workplace
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 01:14 AM PDT
| Clash of Generations at the Workplace Posted: 18 Oct 2013 10:30 AM PDT The generational gap is getting much bigger nowadays especially at the workplace. Younger generations want rapid change and more opportunities to show their personal brand while older generations generally prefer to keep the status quo or prefer a slower change after making sure that all of the risks are mitigated.  Technology is changing much faster these days compared to thirty-forty years ago. As a result, everything around us is changing and our needs and wants are changing. However, some corporations cannot keep up with the pace of this change and this reflects on their sales as well as on their profits. The number one reason why corporations fail to change rapidly is the mindset of people working in that organization. Some of you may blame the corporate bureaucracy but don't forget that it is up to the people in that organization to create or eliminate the bureaucracy.
Usually if the organization employs younger generations like Gen Y or younger members of Gen X, then that organization is much more courageous and more eager to change. However, if the organization mainly employs baby boomers and elder members of Gen X, then the change can come much slower. If the organization employs all of the three generations, then there is usually a big clash among the members of this organization. In order to avoid these conflicts and to be able to work in harmony, all of the three generations should respect each others' opinions and try to understand each others' perspectives. Older generations should understand that change is necessary and everything cannot always stay the same. For example; the computers that we had in 1980s are much different than the computers we have today. Similar to computers, corporations cannot stay the same as well and they need constant change in order to adapt to the rest of the world. Also, older generations should respect the fresh ideas of younger generations to old ways of doing things and should not put these ideas aside immediately. On the other hand, younger generations should keep in mind that older generations are more experienced and they can analyze some of the problems better. Moreover, they usually have the know-how due to their experience and this can reduce costs plus improve the process. Both generations have advantages and disadvantages they bring to the table. The key is to find the advantages of each generation over each other and use them effectively in the right place at the right time. Author: Ceren Cubukcu is a top 5 bestselling author of Make Your American Dream A Reality: How to Find a Job as an International Student in the United States. She recently founded her consulting business to help more international students find jobs in the US in addition to her self-service digital event ticketing platform, Etkinlik Fabrikam (My Event Factory), to be able to offer her webinars in her home country. You can follow her via Facebook or contact her via www.cerencubukcu.com/contact. | | Let’s Get Physical Posted: 18 Oct 2013 02:30 AM PDT Fall is in the air. The leaves are changing colors, the days are getting shorter, and people are settling in for the Winter. (At least in the Northern Hemisphere).  While we are settling in at work for the last quarter of the calendar year we have Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas all sneaking up on us. Which means all that exercise and all the outdoor activities you did over the summer are going to be put in jeopardy. At least in terms of your general fitness level.
“To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.” ~Buddha What does staying fit have to do with your career? your brand? your reputation? Well, besides the obvious things like energy level and stamina there are also elements to maintaining your fitness that relate to what you might be known for. In my case a lot of people know I am an avid mountain biker. Which has sparked a lot of conversations. I also have a standing offer to take anyone that is interested out for a ride. Which has led to people coming to ride with me from Australia, Singapore, South Africa, Canada, and many places across the USA. As Lance Armstrong said "It's not about the bike" – this is also true on these rides. They have led to great conversations, stronger relationships and even more business.
It doesn't matter whether you ride bikes. It matters that you have an interest outside of work and something you are passionate about. It can also be something you invite others to participate, but that's not always necessary. It doesn't really matter what you do. Just getting outdoors, or indoors if the weather is too frightful, and doing something is the critical factor. If you can invite others too, great. If not, that's OK. The fact that you are getting out and doing something is all that matters. It can be anything Whether it's kickball, wallyball or volleyball … just getting out and doing something for 30-60 minutes on a regular basis is all it takes. Harvard Medical School, participating in 30 to 60 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity on a regular basis can help you control your body weight and combat excess abdominal fat.
Even if it's something more serene like gardening or golf. Irony Alert: Gardening can take a lot of effort. If you live in the Pacific Northwest like I do you might have a serious effort coming up with all the leaves coming down. Raking leaves is hard work and can count for much more than your 30 minutes a day of exercise. If raking leaves makes you happy. Do it! Find your release When you find something that takes your mind off work and allows you to release all that pent up energy from using your brain all day you'll find that you can be much more engaged and perhaps even more effective when you do get back to work. A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world. ~Paul Dudley White
Figure out what makes you feel alive. Think about what you can't wait until you get a chance to do again and again. Plan for it and do it. What will you do first? Author: Jeff is a veteran in the Enterprise Content Management industry. Over the past 20 years he has worked with customers and partners to design, develop and deploy solutions around the world. Jeff is currently the Director of Strategic Alliances at Winshuttle. He has worked for Microsoft, FileNet (IBM), K2, Captaris, Open Text, Kofax and Kodak. He speaks and blogs about ECM and the Intersection between Social, Mobile and Cloud Computing. |
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All Hail Flipboard?
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 01:10 AM PDT
| All Hail Flipboard? Posted: 18 Oct 2013 04:10 PM PDT After the brouhaha that got kicked up over my comments about Flipboard last week, I had an initially somewhat awkward but eventually very pleasant conversation on Tuesday with Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, who wanted to discuss what he thought I missed in my post on Flipboard, Google Currents and other comparable products. Read More → | | Are You in The Running? Posted: 18 Oct 2013 02:11 PM PDT | | Look Out, Dan Savage Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:17 PM PDT | | Nothing Secedes Like Secessh Posted: 18 Oct 2013 10:32 AM PDT | | SmartyPants in Winter Posted: 18 Oct 2013 10:14 AM PDT This quote from Harry Reid (D-NV) bears repeating ... "Ted Cruz is smart. He has always been able to talk down to people. He is now in the Senate. People are as smart as he is. He can't talk down to anyone anymore. But he has still not accepted that in his own head. He still thinks he's smarter than everybody else. He might be able to work a calculus problem better than I can. But he can't legislate better than I can." Read More → | | Revenge Posted: 18 Oct 2013 10:11 AM PDT Things got heated at TPM Cafe this week when Cathy Reisenwitz made the libertarian argument against criminalizing "revenge porn." That prompted feminist writer Amanda Marcotte to weigh in against skeezy guys who respond to rejection in such a nightmarish way. And it got the attention of Mitchell J. Matorin, an attorney who's represented victims in these cases.  | | Painful Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:37 AM PDT When Obama asked Boehner what happened that had brought the government to a standstill. Boehner reportedly said "I got overrun, that's what happened."  | | This Could Be a Major Move Posted: 18 Oct 2013 06:58 AM PDT The Chamber of Commerce, for everything else it may or may not be about, doesn't want recurrent run-ups to world-rocking debt defaults, government shutdowns that damp GDP, major corporate vendors going unpaid on government contracts. But when does the rubber meet the road? With the source of these dramas coming from the Republican party and more particularly its Tea Party wing, when does it stop funding these candidates? Read More → | You are subscribed to email updates from Editor's Blog
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Where does your Wikipedia donation go? Outgoing chief warns of corruption (Tim Sampson/Daily Dot)
Posted: 19 Oct 2013 12:08 AM PDT
- Where does your Wikipedia donation go? Outgoing chief warns of corruption (Tim Sampson/Daily Dot)
- More trouble for HealthCare.gov, as insurers say they're receiving faulty data (Wall Street Journal)
- Huawei issues more detailed spying denial and calls for industrywide security standards (Adam Pasick/Quartz)
- Chill to Lay Off 40% of Staff, Move Away From Video Sales (Exclusive) (Lucas Shaw/The Wrap)
- Microsoft confirms it is working on a Remote Desktop app for Windows Phone (Emil Protalinski/The Next Web)
- Google Hangouts for iOS can call US & Canada for free, receive Google Voice calls (Richard Lawler/Engadget)
- iPhone 5C production cut by 35%, iPhone 5S production boosted 75% (John Koetsier/VentureBeat)
- Exclusive: NSA delayed anti-leak software at base where Snowden worked -officials (Reuters)
- U.S. Cellular to carry iPhone 5c and 5s on November 8th (Mike Beasley/9to5Mac)
- iOS 7 adoption 'much slower' than iOS 6, ad network says (John Koetsier/VentureBeat)
- Nokia Quietly Shuttering Pioneering Location Network Dopplr Nov 1st, 4 Years After Acquisition (Matthew Panzarino/TechCrunch)
- Google, Facebook Call an Ad Tech Truce: DoubleClick Is Coming to the Facebook Exchange (Peter Kafka/AllThingsD)
- Nvidia's big moves: New GeForce GTX 780 Ti, low-latency streaming tech, and an end to screen tearing (Jeffrey Grubb/VentureBeat)
- DoubleClick Bid Manager Joins FBX, Facebook's Real-Time Bidding Exchange (Payam Shodjai/DoubleClick Advertiser Blog)
- Google partners with Facebook to help its clients sell ads via the social network's FBX platform (Emil Protalinski/The Next Web)
| Where does your Wikipedia donation go? Outgoing chief warns of corruption (Tim Sampson/Daily Dot) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 10:55 PM PDT | | More trouble for HealthCare.gov, as insurers say they're receiving faulty data (Wall Street Journal) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:40 PM PDT | | Huawei issues more detailed spying denial and calls for industrywide security standards (Adam Pasick/Quartz) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:25 PM PDT | | Chill to Lay Off 40% of Staff, Move Away From Video Sales (Exclusive) (Lucas Shaw/The Wrap) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 06:40 PM PDT | | Microsoft confirms it is working on a Remote Desktop app for Windows Phone (Emil Protalinski/The Next Web) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:50 PM PDT | | Google Hangouts for iOS can call US & Canada for free, receive Google Voice calls (Richard Lawler/Engadget) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:00 PM PDT | | iPhone 5C production cut by 35%, iPhone 5S production boosted 75% (John Koetsier/VentureBeat) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 04:10 PM PDT | | Exclusive: NSA delayed anti-leak software at base where Snowden worked -officials (Reuters) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:20 PM PDT | | U.S. Cellular to carry iPhone 5c and 5s on November 8th (Mike Beasley/9to5Mac) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:00 PM PDT   Mike Beasley / 9to5Mac:
U.S. Cellular to carry iPhone 5c and 5s on November 8th — U.S. Celluar announced today that they will carry the latest iPhone models starting next month. Back in May the carrier announced plans to offer Apple devices this year, but until this point, U.S. Cellular was the largest carrier …
| | iOS 7 adoption 'much slower' than iOS 6, ad network says (John Koetsier/VentureBeat) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 02:25 PM PDT | | Nokia Quietly Shuttering Pioneering Location Network Dopplr Nov 1st, 4 Years After Acquisition (Matthew Panzarino/TechCrunch) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:55 PM PDT | | Google, Facebook Call an Ad Tech Truce: DoubleClick Is Coming to the Facebook Exchange (Peter Kafka/AllThingsD) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:20 PM PDT | | Nvidia's big moves: New GeForce GTX 780 Ti, low-latency streaming tech, and an end to screen tearing (Jeffrey Grubb/VentureBeat) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:10 PM PDT | | DoubleClick Bid Manager Joins FBX, Facebook's Real-Time Bidding Exchange (Payam Shodjai/DoubleClick Advertiser Blog) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 12:25 PM PDT | | Google partners with Facebook to help its clients sell ads via the social network's FBX platform (Emil Protalinski/The Next Web) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 12:20 PM PDT | You are subscribed to email updates from Techmeme
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No Income Taxes? Multi-Level Marketing? Hedging Against the Dollar? Beware.
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 11:51 PM PDT
| No Income Taxes? Multi-Level Marketing? Hedging Against the Dollar? Beware. Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:00 PM PDT I get a lot of email from readers. Most of them are from people either writing to comment on an article privately or to ask a question for the reader mailbag. Some, though, write in to encourage me to post an article on a certain topic. Sometimes, it’s because they want to promote a product. Other times, it’s because they truly believe in an idea and want me to share it. Quite often, I can file the “true believer” requests into several different groups. Today, I’m going to address three of the most frequent ones. You Don’t Have to Pay Income Taxes!
Quite often, tax protesters will write in, encouraging me to announce on The Simple Dollar that people don’t actually have to pay their income taxes. They make a lot of different arguments for this idea. Some argue that the law states that income taxes are voluntary. Others argue that there is no single law requiring you to pay. Still others have said that ignorance of income tax is a viable defense for not paying, so I should never mention income taxes at all. Yet others write about the definitions of the word “state” and “include.” Others write about it as a form of protest. I’ve also read that the Constitution forbids it in Article I, Sections 8 and 9. All of these arguments are on extremely faulty ground at best. There is a clearly stated law that makes the average American liable to pay income taxes. It is in Section 1 of the Internal Revenue Code, 26 U.S.C. § 1. It states, in short: “There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of [most citizens] a tax determined in accordance with the following table:” (and I’ll omit the table for brevity’s sake). The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution makes this law about as ironclad as can be. You occasionally might find a judge who will let you get away with these types of arguments. The thing is, once you fail to pay again, the IRS will just take you to court again and eventually the hammer will come down on you. It will not be pretty. Pay your taxes. It’s the law. This Multi-Level Marketing Company Will Make Us Both Rich!
I’ll just list a pile of the companies readers have asked me to join up with. AdvoCare. Amway. Avon. Herbalife. Discovery Toys. LifeVantage. MonaVie. The Pampered Chef. Scentsy. I’m sure there are others if I dug deep into the email archives. All of these companies – and many others – use multi-level marketing as a method for earning money. Here’s how it works: someone else signs you up for the program and trains you to sell a product. You often have to put up some money to buy some product at cost from the parent company, then you sell the product to whoever you can, often friends and family. The person who signed you up gets a portion of the income from your sale. If you sell everything you pick up, you’ll make some money, as will the person who signs you up. Sounds great, right? It fails in a bunch of ways. For starters, if you can’t sell enough of the product, you’re going to take it on the chin. You’re also making a relatively low cut yourself. The only low-risk way to make money with this system is to recruit others, not to sell yourself. So, the people who make a mint at this are the ones who simply sign up tons of people. It’s a people recruiting business, in other words, not a product-based business. In the end, salespeople at the end of the chain either just sell to family and friends or they work their tail off only to see some of the proceeds go to the person who signed them up. Sure, you can make money with a multi-level marketing company, but there are better ways to earn money for the effort you put in, plus you don’t have to tap your friends and family to buy products from you that they don’t really want. All of Your Readers Need to Switch to This “Safe” Investment!
Ever since mid-2008, I’ve seen a steady stream of people writing to me claiming that the dollar is on the verge of collapse and that I need to warn readers. Of course, most of them have a great solution for what you should do with that money. Usually, this comes coupled with a link to a website that’s pretty obviously selling an investment or brokering the sale of an investment. Quite often, they’re blogs in which every third article or so ends up discussing how investing in this particular item is the only way to save yourself. If you want fear and panic, go elsewhere. Regardless of my own feelings on the future of the U.S. dollar and the economy, I find it largely useless to talk about or focus on fear, and I find it particularly dangerous to make risky financial moves in advance of something that may or may not happen. As I’ve said many times on this site, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Beyond that, it’s always a good general principle to never fully believe a salesman. Don’t take the words of someone who is trying to sell you something as fact and don’t take any “sources” they give you as fact, either. Beyond that, most “alternative” investments are incredibly volatile. Gold, for example, has dropped almost 40% over the past year. I fully expect that someday it will spike like a freight train again, and I also expect that someday it’ll drop like a rock again. Why? It’s incredibly volatile and it always has been. The same is true with silver. It’s even more true for things like Bitcoin. Look, if you want to invest a little of your money in these types of “hedges,” feel free. They can provide a small portion of your portfolio. Putting all your money in gold or some other specific investment, though, is incredibly dangerous. You open your entire future up to these kinds of rapid swings in value. The best investment advice I can give anyone is to diversify. It is always a mistake to have all of your money in one or two things, no matter what those things are. The post No Income Taxes? Multi-Level Marketing? Hedging Against the Dollar? Beware. appeared first on The Simple Dollar.  | | Quickly Figuring Out the “Best” Option When Buying a Small Item Posted: 18 Oct 2013 07:00 AM PDT Many times in the past, I’ve talked about my process for figuring out a major purchase. I’ll consult Consumer Reports, I’ll talk to my social circle, and I’ll usually end up buying with reliability as a primary factor. This process really helps for anything that’s expensive, because the time you invest in figuring out the right purchase, but what about a spur of the moment purchase? For example, what do you do when you stroll into a grocery store with a grocery list that your wife assembled? One of the items is “tortilla chips,” but when you go down the chip aisle, you find that there are thirty types of chips. Ideally, you want to pick the one that offers the best “bang for the buck” for you, but how do you figure it out? This is a problem that I’ve thought about quite a lot because, frankly, it comes up fairly often. I’ll go to the store with an item in mind that I want to purchase, but when I finally reach that item, I’ll find two or six or twenty different versions of the item. Knowing how to make the best choice in that situation saves you a little money and probably a little time, too, but if you can make the best “bang for your buck” choice over and over again, you’ll end up saving a lot of time and a lot of money. You might think that buying things like laundry detergent and tortilla chips and body wash might have completely different processes for figuring this out, but I’ve found that they really do not. I end up using the same two steps in this situation each and every time I face it, regardless of the product. Here’s how I approach it. If I’m unfamiliar with the item in question, I just buy the generic version.
Why? If I don’t know anything about the product, I can – at best – name only a thing or two that would define a “good” version of this product. I simply don’t know. Take the tortilla chips. I’ve eaten tortilla chips before, but I can’t necessarily stand there and articulate what makes a good chip versus a bad one other than something like “stale is bad.” In that situation, I just grab the generic. The generic version is usually the one with the lowest cost. It usually succeeds at that bare minimum standard you have in your head for a product you’re unfamiliar with. If I can state a specific thing or two that I want from the product, I look for ones that mention that feature and has a customer service number.
The logic here is simple. If a product talks about having a specific feature, then the product is pretty likely to have that feature. If it does not, you want some form of recourse, so the customer service number provides that. This usually provides a small handful of products, so what I usually do is start from the lowest cost version of the item and work upwards. The first one I find that has these two things is the one I go home with. This “two-step” basically covers every product I run across when buying groceries or household products. I end up with a workable version of the item without paying too much and if I wind up with something terrible that didn’t meet my expectations, I have recourse – that customer service number, which often delivers coupons that I can use on some other product the company makes. Now, this is just the start of the buying process. I usually judge the product once I have it at home. Does it do the job well? Am I noticing elements of the product that actually matter to me? Often, I’ll figure out a thing or two I would want in a product if I were to buy it again, and I’ll usually jot these down in Evernote, not because I refer to it too often, but because writing it down gets it out of my head. Sometimes, I’ll check Evernote when I’m buying an unfamiliar product because I might simply not be remembering it. A final note: the brand name doesn’t matter beyond helping you find a product on a shelf. The contents of the container aren’t automatically better because of the name on the outside of it. I only use brand names if I know one that works really well and consistently has a good price. The post Quickly Figuring Out the “Best” Option When Buying a Small Item appeared first on The Simple Dollar.  | You are subscribed to email updates from The Simple Dollar
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Becoming a Media Company: How to Turn Your Business Into a Platform
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 10:08 AM PDT
| Becoming a Media Company: How to Turn Your Business Into a Platform Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:00 AM PDT Do you use content to capture the attention of consumers? Are you wondering how to reach out to a larger audience? To learn about how any business can become a media outlet, I interview Michael Brito for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is [...] This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | You are subscribed to email updates from Social Media Examiner
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Apple Recalls MacBook Air Flash Storage Sold Between June 2012 & June 2013 (Killian Bell/Cult of Mac)
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 10:06 AM PDT
- Apple Recalls MacBook Air Flash Storage Sold Between June 2012 & June 2013 (Killian Bell/Cult of Mac)
- As Suitors Swarm, Imgur Partners With Yahoo to Host Images (Liz Gannes/AllThingsD)
- NYSE to Test Trading System in Preparation for Twitter IPO (Matt Jarzemsky/Wall Street Journal)
- Aereo comes to Detroit on October 28. Can it really hit 22 cities by the end of 2013? (Laura Hazard Owen/GigaOM)
- Google Stock Hits $1,000 for First Time Ever (Seth Fiegerman/Mashable)
- New York Lawmaker Pushes Bill to Thwart Phone Theft (Brian X. Chen/NYT Bits)
- Apple: No, We Can't Read Your iMessages (And We Don't Want to, Either) (John Paczkowski/AllThingsD)
- Jeff Bezos's League of Shadows (Brad Stone/Businessweek)
- E-Loan Specialist Wonga Buys BillPay, The PayPal Of Germany, To Move Deeper Into Payments (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
- Programmers at Juniper - not Google or Facebook - rake in the most dough (Zach Miners/ITworld.com)
- Black Market Reloaded, Silk Road's main competitor, shuts down due to security breach (Adrianne Jeffries/The Verge)
- 40% Of YouTube Traffic Now Mobile, Up From 25% In 2012, 6% In 2011 (Josh Constine/TechCrunch)
- Facebook's New Teen Policy Draws Fire (Reed Albergotti/Wall Street Journal)
- Apple CFO Oppenheimer Says New Carbon-Balanced 'Campus 2′ Will Foster Collaboration (Matthew Panzarino/TechCrunch)
- Troubled Obamacare website wasn't tested until a week before launch (Richard Pollock/Washington Examiner)
| Apple Recalls MacBook Air Flash Storage Sold Between June 2012 & June 2013 (Killian Bell/Cult of Mac) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:35 AM PDT | | As Suitors Swarm, Imgur Partners With Yahoo to Host Images (Liz Gannes/AllThingsD) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:00 AM PDT | | NYSE to Test Trading System in Preparation for Twitter IPO (Matt Jarzemsky/Wall Street Journal) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:25 AM PDT | | Aereo comes to Detroit on October 28. Can it really hit 22 cities by the end of 2013? (Laura Hazard Owen/GigaOM) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 07:50 AM PDT | | Google Stock Hits $1,000 for First Time Ever (Seth Fiegerman/Mashable) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 07:25 AM PDT  Seth Fiegerman / Mashable:
Google Stock Hits $1,000 for First Time Ever — Google is officially part of the ultra-exclusive $1,000 club. — The search giant's stock topped $1,000 a share on Friday for the first time in its history, making it one of only a select few businesses including Priceline, Seaboard and Berkshire Hathaway to hit that milestone. | | New York Lawmaker Pushes Bill to Thwart Phone Theft (Brian X. Chen/NYT Bits) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 06:50 AM PDT  Brian X. Chen / NYT Bits:
New York Lawmaker Pushes Bill to Thwart Phone Theft — Smartphone theft has been a rising problem in many parts of the country, partly because of the devices' high resale value. A top New York lawmaker thinks the solution is to go after the sellers who help make stealing phones so profitable. | | Apple: No, We Can't Read Your iMessages (And We Don't Want to, Either) (John Paczkowski/AllThingsD) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:05 AM PDT | | Jeff Bezos's League of Shadows (Brad Stone/Businessweek) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 04:50 AM PDT  Brad Stone / Businessweek:
Jeff Bezos's League of Shadows — Amazon can be a uniquely challenging place to work, with its question-mark emergencies and the occasionally volcanic outburst from the visionary chief executive. It's a place where promotions are hard-fought and sometimes painfully public. | | E-Loan Specialist Wonga Buys BillPay, The PayPal Of Germany, To Move Deeper Into Payments (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 02:35 AM PDT | | Programmers at Juniper - not Google or Facebook - rake in the most dough (Zach Miners/ITworld.com) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:20 AM PDT | | Black Market Reloaded, Silk Road's main competitor, shuts down due to security breach (Adrianne Jeffries/The Verge) Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:55 PM PDT | | 40% Of YouTube Traffic Now Mobile, Up From 25% In 2012, 6% In 2011 (Josh Constine/TechCrunch) Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:20 PM PDT | | Facebook's New Teen Policy Draws Fire (Reed Albergotti/Wall Street Journal) Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:25 PM PDT  Reed Albergotti / Wall Street Journal:
Facebook's New Teen Policy Draws Fire — Privacy Advocates Criticize Allowing Young Users to Post ‘Publicly’ — Facebook Inc. 's move Wednesday to let teenagers share items more widely reflects growing competition among social networks for the attention of teens—and the advertisers that want to reach them. | | Apple CFO Oppenheimer Says New Carbon-Balanced 'Campus 2′ Will Foster Collaboration (Matthew Panzarino/TechCrunch) Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:50 PM PDT | | Troubled Obamacare website wasn't tested until a week before launch (Richard Pollock/Washington Examiner) Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:15 PM PDT | You are subscribed to email updates from Techmeme
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remash: tir na nog | courtyard ~ drew heath architects
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 10:05 AM PDT
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What's The Worst That Could Happen?
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:59 AM PDT
| What's The Worst That Could Happen? Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:30 PM PDT You don't have to use your imagination, you can see what has happened to other organizations. The extremes are not hard to find. Communities have been the cause of many tragic events. Online bullying has led to suicides. Members have killed other members over petty disputes. Crimes have been planned and committed. Members have slandered celebrities and the community has been sued. Communities have been conduits for everything from sharing of copyright/obscene material to organized crime. These are the extremes. Any one of these can spell the death of a community. Then there are the more common problems. An organized revolt or protest by community members against the organization. Employees might publicly explode (or implode) in the community. Disgruntled former employees may publicly releasing private information through the community. I'd suggest you spend a few hours putting together a list of both the worst things and most likely things that could happen. Plan now for how you would respond and handle each. Being preventative is good, but something will slip through, so have a plan. | You are subscribed to email updates from The Online Community Guide
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The Utter Disaster Of Healthcare.gov, Ctd
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:57 AM PDT
| The Utter Disaster Of Healthcare.gov, Ctd Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:14 AM PDT Yuval Levin talked with sources in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency in charge of the federal health insurance exchanges. A key section of his post, which is worth reading in full: If the problems now plaguing the system are not resolved by mid-November and the flow of enrollments at that point looks like it does now, the prospects for the first year of the exchanges will be in very grave jeopardy. Some large advertising and outreach campaigns are also geared to that crucial six-week period around Thanksgiving and Christmas, so if the sites are not functional, all of that might not happen—or else might be wasted. If that's what the late fall looks like, the administration might need to consider what one of the people I spoke with described as "unthinkable options" regarding the first year of the exchanges. All of the CMS people I spoke with thought the state-run exchanges are in far better shape than the federal system under their purview. But the insurers do not seem that much happier with many of those state exchanges.
Back-end data issues seem to be a problem everywhere, and some of the early enrollment figures being released by the states are not matching up with insurance company data about enrollments in those states, which suggests a breakdown in communication that is only beginning to be understood. The insurers believe that only Nevada, Colorado, Washington state, and Kentucky have what could reasonably be described as working systems at this point. Still, there is no question that on the whole the states with state-run exchanges are in better shape than those with federal ones.
Jonathan Cohn tries to look on the bright side: [I]f these past two weeks appear to reflect poorly on the federal bureaucracy and the Administration managing it, they shouldn't reflect poorly on health care reform itself—which, after all, has worked in Massachusetts and seems to be working in the states running their own operations. The success of states like Kentucky and New York and Connecticut and California are important for their own sake: By my count, they constitute about a fourth of the national population. But they are also important for what they show about how the law can work, once the technology piece is in place.
  | | The Backlash Against Modern-Day America Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:48 AM PDT 
Jelani Cobb outlines the GOP's "Dixiecrat problem": Today's Republican Party, like the Democrats six decades ago, has had to come to terms with a demographic shift—one in which Hispanic voters are a crucial new element. We would be naïve to believe that the opposition to comprehensive immigration reform that features so prominently in current Tea Party politics is incidental to its appeal. (A 2010 survey of Tea Party supporters conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifty-eight per cent believed the government "paid too much attention to the problems of blacks and minorities"; sixty-four percent said immigrants were "a burden" on the country.) The Tea Party–inspired eruptions that have recurred throughout Obama's Presidency represent something more complicated than a reactionary backlash to the sight of a black President; they are a product of the way he so tidily represents the disparate strands of social history that brought us to this impasse. The problem isn't that there's a black President; it's that the country has changed in ways that made Obama's election possible.
   | | What If Obama Needs To Delay Obamacare? Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:29 AM PDT Philip Klein wonders: Obama, no doubt, wants to avoid the political embarrassment of a delay — or even the mere suggestion of one. But what happens if it's the middle of December and enrollments are nowhere near where they need to be to make the system viable? What if, by necessity, he has to seek a delay? The operating assumption would be that Republicans would jump at the chance to delay it. But after the past few weeks, can we really be sure that this would be the case? It's perfectly conceivable that if such a scenario played out, the position of the Tea Party activists and their allies in Congress would be that delaying the law for a year would be tantamount to a bailout of Obamacare.
Should Healthcare.gov fail to improve, Chait concedes that delaying the individual mandate may be necessary: Here … is the kind of individual-mandate delay that would make sense. It would apply only to those states lacking a functioning website. (States that established their own exchanges are, in general, experiencing much better functionality than the states that boycotted their exchange and relied on the federal government to set up a site for them.) The delay would be tied to the workability of that state's website — no reason to delay California's individual mandate just because people in New Jersey can't log on. And the process for making this determination would have to rest with the Department of Health and Human Services, or some other body that is trying to make the law succeed, not one that's trying to destroy it. Note that the individual mandate in 2014 is only a token $95 annual tax. Its main purpose is as a signaling device that everybody should get covered.
Chait is wrong about that last point: The individual mandate's penalty is not $95 in year one. It's $95 or 1 percent of your taxable income, whichever is greater. So if you make $80,000 in taxable income, the penalty is $800.
  | | Stephen Colbert Kills Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:19 AM PDT Do yourself a favor and check out this clip of his remarks from last night’s Al Smith Dinner, a ghastly Catholic elite version of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. But some choice gags: I have great respect for Cardinal Dolan, though I do have to say, sir, it is not easy when you are wearing that outfit. In that cape and red sash, you look like a matador who's really let himself go. Did you not see the invite? It said white-tie, not 'Flamboyant Zorro.'
On Bloomberg: Tiny, tiny man. The real reason he doesn't want drink cups larger than 16 ounces is because he's afraid he might drown in one.
On Christine Quinn: New York City is the only place in the world where the lesbian candidate is too conservative.
Tip your waiter.   | | Sean Hannity Lies Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:04 AM PDT A pretty definitive exposure of the mendacious agit-prop being deployed to undermine the Affordable Healthcare Act. At this point, Fox News doesn’t just have to invent their own reality, they really have to invent the people affected by it. One thing you can be sure of: there will be no response from Hannity. Because the only response would be to admit error, and, as we know, that’s a cardinal sin on the far right.   | | The World’s Biggest Democracy Has The Most Slaves Posted: 18 Oct 2013 07:57 AM PDT 
New research indicates that 29 million people are enslaved worldwide: The [Global Slavery Index], published by the Walk Free Foundation on Thursday, ranks 162 countries and identifies risk factors for enslavement and the government responses. The research found that around 10 countries hold about 70 percent of the world's slaves. India has the highest number of people enslaved in absolute terms, approximately 14 million, almost half the total worldwide.
Amar Toor adds that “India's problems [are based] on an inefficient legal system and a tradition of ‘servile marriage’.” Getting an accurate picture of the problem can be very difficult: Dark figures are calculated on the basis of random sample surveys such as the British crime survey. By asking a sample of the population if they have experienced a list of crimes in the last year, the crimes the public reports can be compared to the official records of crimes known to the police. … The frightening fact is how many slavery crimes we are failing to detect: over 90 percent in most countries.
(Chart from The Economist)   | | The Abatement Of Cruelty, Ctd Posted: 18 Oct 2013 07:31 AM PDT Remaining thoughts on the popular thread: In response to your Aussie reader suggesting kangaroo meat, there’s another very good option in  the US, if a bit expensive and hard to find. I’ve almost completely cut pork out of my diet for all of the reasons discussed, but being from North Carolina, giving up pulled pork permanently would be tantamount to treason. It’s not common yet, but there is an alternative. Wild boar have been exploding in numbers, particularly in Texas, for reasons that aren’t fully determined (more on that caveat to eating boar in a minute). They’re aggressive, dangerous, very damaging to local flora and wildlife, and incredibly delicious. They’re also incredibly difficult to hunt, being fairly intelligent and swift of foot, which to me is a healthy challenge to our increasingly complacent collective backsides. Eating boar means you’re eating a gamier pork that needs to be reduced in numbers, and at the very least has lived its life in a natural environment. I’ve had wild boar sausage, and it was amazing. The caveat, of course, is that there most certainly are boar that are intentionally released for hunts and which contribute to the problem. We definitely need some way of distinguishing boar that’s killed in wildlife control and boar that’s killed after being intentionally released for sport, which turns the moral equation upside down.
Another zooms out: I’ve been following your thread about how we can be more humane in killing the animals we eat. It is fine for those of us who live in a place where we can actually get to a farmer's market and find grass-fed beef that is killed humanely; however, I think there is a huge disconnect about how we feed the people who live in the United States who barely have access to a grocery store in their neighborhood much less barnyard raised chickens … and even if there were such a thing, they would never be able to afford to buy it.
In 1940, there were approximately 128 million people in the US and lots of family farms; now there are 308 million (probably more since that number is from the 2010 census) that we need to figure out a way to feed. My dad had a grocery store in a small town and my aunt and uncle had a farm where they raised chickens, cattle and pigs. In the fall, my dad and two uncles would slaughter a steer and a calf for meat for my dad to sell at his store. And I am sorry, but when I saw my first calf with his neck cut, bleeding and stumbling around the barnyard until he fell over, I didn't feel like that calf was treated humanely. But I understood that that calf was going to feed a lot of people in my hometown (population 500) and at a not very expensive cost. The only expense my dad had was the slaughterhouse he took the animals to be cut up into smaller chunks so that he could store them more easily. I can still remember the smell – a mix of blood and meat – that permeated the place. So please tell me how, without factory farming, we are going to be able to feed 310 million people at an affordable price. And please, if we all became vegetarians/vegans, don't think that there wouldn't be factory vegetable gardens (there already are in California and other farm states) and we would probably run out of arable land to feed everyone. And if there weren't factory cattle farms, we would quickly run out of space for meat too. Now what we can do is regulate the hell out of them – which of course, our deregulating Congress wants nothing to do with. Make sure that the conditions that the animals are kept in and the meat harvested are as safe as we can make it … chickens and pigs, too. Of course that would mean adding inspectors and following up to make sure, etc. etc. And how is that going to be accomplished? I just think it's really naïve to say that we can all just check out how our meat is harvested and not buy from certain suppliers and the market will force a change. Until everyone makes enough money to put real pressure on the ranchers, meat producers, etc. it is not going to happen.
Another notes: I wanted to comment on the research you cited on dog fMRI from the Berns lab that argues that “dogs are people” based on the fact that dogs show emotional processing that activates the caudate nucleus. In my own work I also use fMRI, and the caudate nucleus (part of the basal ganglia) is my primary research speciality. I think that the methods for training and scanning dogs developed by Dr. Berns and his colleagues are very exciting and will lead to much greater understanding of the mind and brain of dogs. However, I think his emphasis on the caudate nucleus is very misleading. The basal ganglia in general, and the caudate in particular, are actually conserved across all vertebrate species, to a very remarkable degree; there is nothing special about dogs having a caudate nucleus, or using it to feel emotions. Stan Grillner at the Karolinska institute is a leader in the field and has found basal ganglia homologs in axolotl, lampreys, and pretty much every vertebrate ever tested. Even more impressive is recent research that found a basal ganglia like structure in the fly (drosophila)! A goal of many scientists has historically been to try to find the special thing about our minds and brains that makes us human. Most of these (enlarged prefrontal cortex, ability to use tools) have ultimately been shown to not be unique to our species. So the lesson here might not be that dogs, specifically, are like humans – but that we humans are more closely related to other vertebrates, and even invertebrates, to a much greater degree than we appreciate. That lesson is certainly consistent with the moral argument made by Matthew Scully.
(Photo of a wild boar from Getty)   | | Rent Is Too Damn High? Don’t Blame The Artists Posted: 18 Oct 2013 07:02 AM PDT 
Ben Davis argues that artists aren't responsible for gentrification, warning that "until there's some understanding that gentrification isn't just about people's individual lifestyle choices – of artists, or preppies – but a symptom of dysfunctional urban policy, everyone is going to continue to get herded in front of rising rents every few years": In the often-bitter narrative of neighborhood "revitalization," much more depends on huge forces like average area incomes, social stratification, real-estate speculation, and rent policy than on the magic of art. (Even in artist-led gentrification's relatively raw form in SoHo there were bigger city planning forces in play, including the Rockefellers' concurrent push to renew Lower Manhattan.) … The flip side is that in places like New York, with its turbo-charged real-estate market, artists aren't really in the driver's seat. Even in my neighborhood, Brooklyn's increasingly uncool and preppy Williamsburg, the spectacular transformation of the last decade has not been just some natural process of rising cachet thanks to the art scene. It's a function of very conscious and hotly contested zoning decisions.
(Photo by NOIR Visionary Studio)   | | Bright Young Thing Posted: 18 Oct 2013 06:35 AM PDT This week the 28-year-old New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Luminaries. A summary of the book: "The Luminaries" is set in a town called Hokitika, a Maori word that means "around and then back again", which offers a clue to the book's real framework. Twenty characters, every one fully formed, fill the story in 20 chapters, each half the length of the one before and offering what Ms Catton calls "a prismatic view" of events. The plot is based on the signs of the zodiac, a post-modern circular mystery that is astrologically precise and encompasses whores and drunkards, hidden gold, ships and séances, a murder and a lot of mud and bad weather.
Charlotte Higgins spoke to one of the Man Booker judges, Stuart Kelly: [H]e said that it was [Catton's] ability to “make the novel think in a way that the novel doesn’t do normally” that set her apart; the way that, for example, she sets astrology and capitalism into play as competing systems of dealing with the world, but at the same time has produced “a rip-roaring read”. “The prize went to the true avant-gardist,” he said. “No novel has been like this before.”
Martha Anne Toll emphasizes the author’s 19th-century influences: [Catton's] literary ancestry derives less from her homeland and more from the British and American giants of the nineteenth century. Catton deserves their company. Nodding to Melville, she's nailed the tormented sea captain and the revenge obsessed "Chinaman." With so many characters taking on false identities and trying to out-cheat each other in New Zealand's gold rush, Catton, too, has mined the seamy underside of greed and poverty so beloved by Dickens. Like George Eliot, Catton looks behind the stereotype of the whore and the opium dealer and forces us to question where the real morality lies. By the novel's end, every character's initial presentation has been destabilized.
Bill Roorbach appreciates that “Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new”: It's a lot of fun, like doing a Charlotte Brontë-themed crossword puzzle while playing chess and Dance Dance Revolution on a Bongo Board. Some readers will delight in the challenge, others may despair. I went both ways: always lost in admiration for this young New Zealander's vast knowledge and narrative skill, sometimes lost in her game, wishing at times for more warmth, delighted by her old-school chapter headings ("In which a stranger arrives . . . " "In which Quee Long brings a complaint before the law . . . "), puzzled by her astrology, Googling everything twice and three times, scratching my head, laughing out loud, sighing with pleasure at sudden connections, flipping back pages and chapters and whole sections for rereadings, forging ahead with excitement renewed.
In an interview with Nick Clark, Catton describes what she learned from The Luminaries: Writing the book, Catton says, became about the quest for self-knowledge. “It explored the degree to which the knowledge of your destiny corrupts a person. A lot of the characters in the book are engaged with their own pasts. What I’ve realised – partly from The Luminaries and partly just a life lesson – is the most revealing thing you can do is to surround yourself with people unlike you. And if you’re an artist the best thing is to read things that are most unlike what you are doing.”
  | | Portraits Of Jewish Life Posted: 18 Oct 2013 06:01 AM PDT Chavie Lieber profiles a Brooklyn gallery featuring the work of young Hasidic Jewish artists: The images displayed in this artistic genre  can often seem so synthetic: the modestly-clad woman, the Torah scrolls and their scholars—the messages of tradition almost hit you in the face. But every once in a while you'll come across something that evokes the exact emotion you want to feel when looking at Jewish art, and you're reminded why these same images and characters have been painted again and again by Jews for thousands of years. … The variety of the art is expansive, from a brightly colored, four-foot splatter painting by Moully simply titled "Life," to a cubism-depiction of the seven days of creation, to abstract ink splatters of Hasidic men dancing, to a moody charcoal sketching of children, presumably orphans, lighting Shabbat candles. Oh, and many, many drawings of the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the beloved Lubavitcher Rebbe, because an art exhibit blocks away from the Chabad headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway will, most certainly, feature paintings of the Rebbe.
(Image: Hisbonenus (Meditation), by Musya Herzog)   | | Going Nowhere Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:32 AM PDT Timothy Noah questions why so few unemployed Americans are moving for work: Nobody has a better reason to pick up and move than someone who can't find a job—or at least so it would seem. But while unemployed people remain likelier to migrate than employed people, they are much less likely to migrate than in previous decades. In 1956, for example, 7.6 percent of unemployed males moved from one state to another during the previous year. Subsequently that rate fell to 7 percent (1966), 5.9 percent (1976), 5.3 percent (1986), 4.4 percent (1996), 4.3 percent (2006), and, finally, 2.7 percent (2012).
He concludes that the jobless would move to the jobs … if only they could afford to live there: Since 2009, when the recession ended, the median price of a new house in the United States has risen 13 percent, even as median household income has fallen by about 4 percent. That doesn't pose much of a problem for a migrating architect whose income is already well above the median, and who is likelier to have existing home equity that he can transfer to another state. But for construction workers, for example, it's likely to be a big problem, and a reason why they can't easily move to where the best-paying jobs are. A construction worker can generally make more money in San Francisco than in suburban Fresno. But it won't likely be enough more to make up the difference in the relative cost of living. Indeed, few working-class people earn enough money to live anywhere near San Francisco anymore, to the point that there is now a severe shortage of construction workers in the Bay Area.
  | | The Everlasting Listicle Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:00 AM PDT As Emily Badger notes, magazines have been ranking places to live for more than 80 years: [C]onsider a three-part series by H.L. Mencken that ran in The American Mercury in 1931: It was succinctly headlined, "THE WORST AMERICAN STATE." In the impressive tome, which covered some 47 pages across three issues of the magazine, Mencken and Charles Angoff methodically ranked the states (at the time, there were only 48 plus the District of Columbia) on everything from farm electrification to literacy rates to the salaries of teachers to the number of natives in Who's Who in America. (*Blush*: They also included the local circulation per thousand people of The Atlantic Monthly).
Matt Carmichael, editor of the website Livability.com, dug up this gem ("on microfiche!") while working on a much more modern ranking of America's 100 best small and mid-sized cities to live in, which he's published today. … Mencken's list, Carmichael notes, included some metrics we would never measure today, like the prevalence of lynchings (surprise leader: Wyoming) or death rates from typhoid fever (sorry again, Mississippi). In preparing his own ranking, Carmichael became interested in how ideas about quality of life evolve, and not just with respect to rising living standards. "What would you have measured if you were doing a 'best places to live' list in 1965?" he asks. "Would it have been mall density? Or cul-de-sacs per capita?"
  | | Amazon’s Porn Dilemma Posted: 18 Oct 2013 04:27 AM PDT Meghan Neal outlines the latest controversy in the e-publishing world: Kernel magazine published an exposé last week detailing the dark corner of Amazon's Kindle store that features [self-published] adult novels about truly repulsive topics like incest rape, pedophilia, and sexual abuse. Understandably, an uproar ensued, and retailers scrambled to take down the offending titles. But some people are worried that retails are overreacting, or that the take-downs will set a dangerous precedent for squashing free speech. Yesterday, the British bookseller WH Smith went so far as to shut down its entire website in response to the article. The site is still down as of this writing – with a landing page and apology up in its place.
The exposé notes that Amazon already has "strict guidelines for amateur authors who wish to self-publish with the Kindle Direct Publishing service": "We don't accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts," say the guidelines. "What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect." But the authors of these works are setting up fake publishing houses for themselves, which can be as simple as paying $200 for a set of ISBN prefixes, bypassing such restrictions.
PJ Vogt wishes Amazon had kept the smut on the digital shelves: We outlaw snuff films, child porn and, increasingly, revenge porn, because actual people are harmed during their production.
Erotic fiction concerns fake characters who don't exist in real life. You could argue that entertainment that caters to people's darkest fantasies makes them more likely to enact them, but the science wouldn't support you. As for the idea that these books are just in bad taste, well, absolutely. They're the worst. But you won't find these books unless you're looking for them. They don't show up in Amazon search results, you have to go directly to their link. They're hidden away in the digital equivalent of the video store's curtain-covered backroom.
Meanwhile, Laura Hazard Owen wonders what a cleaner e-book marketplace would look like: If e-book retailers truly want no porn to be sold through their sites, they'll have to spend much more time and money than they do now implementing both automatic and human filters. They'll also have to clarify exactly what they mean by porn, and in doing so they'll risk alienating many authors and readers. The book industry reaped massive profits from the bestselling erotic trilogy. If that's okay, but other porn isn't – if, for instance, child rape porn is unacceptable – retailers will have to be much more explicit in publicly declaring what is and isn't acceptable.
  | | The Best Of The Dish Today Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:00 PM PDT 
If there is any reporter who met his moment these last few weeks, it’s been Robert Costa, who’s been timely, essential and correct. His exit interview with McConnell is interesting. Basically, it confirms there can be no bargain with the Democrats on the budget because of the GOP’s absolute insistence on no net revenue gains at all, unless they are “dynamically scored”: When the speaker has had conversations with the president over the last three years, they have always insisted on a $1 trillion tax increase — revenue scored by the Congressional Budget Office. That's their demand for any major entitlement reform. But we don't think we should have to pay a ransom to do what the country needs.
So giving the Democrats something in return for entitlement reform is “ransom.”It doesn’t get much clearer than that. But this is a relief, if it holds up in the next few months: One of my favorite sayings is an old Kentucky saying, "There's no education in the second kick of a mule." The first kick of the mule was in 1995; the second one was the last 16 days. A government shutdown is off the table. We're not going to do it … [W]e're not going to do this again in connection with the debt ceiling or with a government shutdown.
I may be misinterpreting the exchange but that sounds like future debt ceiling brinksmanship is not something McConnell supports. Sahil Kapur notes too that “a provision in the Wednesday legislation allows Congress to vote on a ‘motion to disapprove’ of a debt limit hike, without a real threat of default. That suggests the debt limit appears to be returning to its traditional place: an opportunity for the party out of power to grandstand and score political points against the president.” “Suggests” is not “proves”, but it could be something. We launched the great salsa-ketchup Drudge-Dish debate, maybe out of punchy loopiness after the last few weeks of reckless brinksmanship. But I took a moment to fisk a paragraph on Fox News’ website that revealed the stark surrealism of Tea Party absolutism. Even Grover Norquist sounded moderate as countless beards were shaven. We analyzed the votes of the Republicans in Congress, and counted the human casualties and broader economic damage they have already done to the economy since 2010. One reader told us all to cheer up, as I urged the president to return to Bowles-Simpson and backed a Democratic wave in 2014 as the best response to the excruciating legislative poop-throwing of October. Plus: dogs that play tetherball and toddlers who behave like Republicans! And the best review of The Walking Dead I’ve ever, er, watched. The most popular post of the day was “The Tea Party As A Religion“. The second most popular was “The Sabotage Of American Democracy.” In October, our traffic so far at the halfway point is almost as much as all of September. Blame – or credit – the Tea Party! See you later tonight on AC360 Later and in the morning. (Graph: current polling on the race for the House in 2014, less smoothing, via Pollster)   | | Quote For The Day II Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:30 PM PDT 
“For many men, work is the effective religion, a ritual occupation and inflexible orientation which permits them to imagine that the problem of their personal death has been solved. Unamuno: 'Work is the only practical consolation for having been born.' My own chosen career — its dispersal and multiplication of the self through publication, its daily excretion of yet more words, the eventual reifying of those words into books — certainly is a practical consolation, a kind of bicycle which, if I were ever to stop pedaling, would dump me flat on my side. Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life,” – John Updike. (Illustration: Pierre Michaux’s son on a velocipede in 1868.)   | | Loving Israel Before It Existed Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:08 PM PDT Robert W. Nicholson surveys the long history of evangelical support for Zionism, insisting it “bears no resemblance to the portrait of cardboard-cutout Jesus freaks itching for the annihilation of the Jews and using them as pawns in their apocalyptic game”: Part of God's covenant with the Jewish people involved bringing them back from exile and  setting them once again in their own land. Since the 16th century, and despite the sheer improbability of the idea, Protestant writers spoke of a Jewish ingathering and sometimes actively promoted it. When the Zionist movement proper began in the late 19th century, and especially after the Jewish state was founded in 1948, this unlikely prophecy seemed to many to be coming true before their very eyes. Although not all Christians embraced the new state, the vast majority of evangelicals became immediate supporters; one of them was President Harry Truman, a Baptist. In brief, evangelicals love Israel because God loves Israel.
But there is also another way of putting it. For evangelicals, Israel's mistakes are representative of their own mistakes as imperfect individuals in need of God's grace. They are comforted by the fact that God remains faithful to Israel; it means that God remains faithful to them.
He notes that this alliance may not last forever, as sympathy for the Palestinians rises among younger and more progressive evangelicals. While reviewing two recent books about the Bible’s place in American political rhetoric, Robert E. Brown also tracks the decline of Israel as a potent symbol of our national aspirations. Why it was attractive in the first place: [E]arly Americans — beginning with the Puritans — were accustomed to thinking of themselves as the new Israel, bound by covenant to honor God in their public life. This mindset helps to explain why the Exodus and other biblical events were so rhetorically compelling during the Revolution, why the patriots naturally identified with the Israelites struggling under the bondage and tyranny of the Egyptians.
That didn’t last: [T]he controversy over slavery radically undermined the moral authority — and so the mythic power — of the Old Testament. Pro-slavery apologists repeatedly trumpeted that the Old Testament sanctioned slavery, and abolitionists responded by fashioning interpretive methods that privileged the moral vision of the New Testament at the expense of the Old. The mythology of an ideal Hebrew polity that could be held out for modern emulation was substantially eroded. The Civil War dealt a final, crushing blow to American self-identity as a renewed Israel.
But the resonances remain. (Image via Temple Emanu-El)   | | The Tea Party’s International Counterparts Posted: 17 Oct 2013 04:44 PM PDT Steinglass points them out: It may be more useful to compare the tea-party movement to a different sort of party that tends to crop up in parliamentary systems: far-right populist parties based on backward-looking ideologies of national identity. In France, the Netherlands and Austria, such parties consistently win substantial portions of the vote. Like the tea-party movement, they tend to be fiercely protective of existing social-welfare programmes that benefit the elderly and the ethnic majority, and bitterly opposed to social-welfare programmes that benefit ethnic minorities or immigrants. And like the tea-party movement, they can win by losing: their partisans may treat legislative defeats as a badge of honour, and in any case, when government is stymied, the economy weakens, and people get angry, populist parties that avoid responsibility and stay out of government draw more support. But in parliamentary systems, fringe populist parties are rarely included in governing coalitions, in large part because their tendency to value expressive identity-based politics over concrete legislative goals makes them extremely difficult for other parties to work with. The weakness of two-party systems such as America's is that purists who treat politics as a type of self-affirming performance art have to be included in one party or the other, and indeed are likely to regard themselves as being that party's true soul.
I think of the xenophobic extremism of the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, in Britain. There are right-wing factions among the Tories, but they tend to be contained within the elitist structure of the Commons and the power of the central party in selecting candidates for parliament. The BBC – however contentiously liberal – has also created a single national conversation that can help integrate extremists. None of this exists to the same degree here – and with a divided government, the unaccountable can indeed inflict the unimaginable. And they nearly did.   | | An Inn For Outsiders Posted: 17 Oct 2013 04:16 PM PDT Nathaniel Rich reviews the history of the Chelsea Hotel, which, before closing to guests in 2011, was a famous hangout for artists: [I]n 1905 … the Chelsea was converted to a luxury hotel, which was visited regularly by guests such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and the painter John Sloan. After World War II, as the hotel declined and room prices fell, it attracted Jackson Pollock, James T. Farrell, Virgil Thomson, Larry Rivers, Kenneth Tynan, James Schuyler, and Dylan Thomas, whose death in 1953 further enhanced the hotel's legend. ("I've had 18 straight whiskies," said Thomas, after polishing off a bottle of Old Grandad on the last day of his life. "I think that's the record.") Arthur Miller moved into #614 after his divorce from Marilyn Monroe. Bob Dylan wrote "Sara" in #211 … Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death in #100. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Chelsea, William Burroughs wrote The Third Mind, and Jack Kerouac had a one-night stand with Gore Vidal. In 1966 Andy Warhol shot parts of Chelsea Girls at the hotel. In 1992, Madonna, a former resident, returned to shoot photographs for her Sex book.
Excerpts from an oral history of the hotel: MILOS FORMAN (Film director): Once I was going up in the elevator to my room on the eighth floor. On the fifth floor the door opened, and a totally naked girl, in a panic, ran into the elevator.
I was so taken aback that I just stared at her. Finally I asked what room she was in. But then the elevator stopped and she ran away. I never saw her again. And I remember in the floor above me there was a man who had in his room a small alligator, two monkeys, and a snake. … R. CRUMB (Artist): A bunch of really crazy people hung around the Chelsea. You could tell that people were going there just because of its reputation—poseurs with artistic pretentions or European eccentrics with money. There'd be poseurs sitting around the lobby. The lobby was really annoying. I only started staying there about 10 years ago. It was always when somebody else paid for it. I never could afford to stay there—even 10 years ago, it was too expensive. Except for the old residents who clung desperately to their rooms and by some law were not allowed to be kicked out, the guests there were all arty-farty pretentious people with money who wanted to stay there because Sid and Nancy lived there. That was my impression, anyway. The whole thing seemed extremely self-conscious to me.
For more, here’s Part One of a 1981 BBC documentary about the hotel:
The rest is here.   | | The Dismal State Of The Dismal Science Posted: 17 Oct 2013 03:45 PM PDT The Bloomberg editorial board this week gave a surprisingly critical appraisal of contemporary economics, arguing that researchers haven't answered the discipline's most pressing question: "Can policy makers know with any certainty when markets are dangerously out of line, and is there anything they can do about it?" Central bankers still debate whether it's possible to recognize asset bubbles when they occur, and whether they can or should be deflated. Regulators and bankers are still at odds over new financial products such as credit derivatives: Do they simply improve the market's ability to process and reflect information, or do they also present new dangers of their own? This is a failure that left the world unprepared for the most recent financial crisis, and the economics profession has been far too complacent about it. Economists can't be expected to predict the future. But they should be able to identify threatening trends, and to better understand the conditions that can turn a change in prices into a financial tsunami.
  | | Hathos Alert Posted: 17 Oct 2013 03:12 PM PDT Highlighting all the lame parts of The Walking Dead:   | | The Utter Disaster Of Healthcare.gov, Ctd Posted: 17 Oct 2013 02:45 PM PDT Certain state health exchanges, such as New York’s, appear to be functional. But Healthcare.gov, the federal exchange that covers 34 states, continues to have problems. Suderman has no idea when it will be fixed: It is clear now that, despite occasional suggestions of light at the end of the tunnel, the administration does not know how long the exchange problems will take to fix. At this point, then, it is necessary to at least consider the possibility that the federal exchanges, and perhaps a few of the state-run counterparts as well, are simply not going to work, at least not in the relatively short time the administration has to get the system on track. Given how little information is available to outsiders, it's hard to judge with great certainty. It is of course possible that the problems could be resolved in a few days or a few weeks. But the administration's obfuscations, as well the repeated assurances both before and after the opening of the exchanges that they had everything under control, don't inspire confidence that meaningful fixes are on the way. Already there are signals that the exchange problems could be deep and long-lasting.
Ezra explains the possible consequences of these glitches: Short-term problems can become long-term problems. Take the difficulties accessing the federal exchanges. If those persist much longer, it could change the mix of people who ultimately sign up.
The people who really need insurance — so, sicker folks — will keep coming back until they get through. But younger, healthier people will give up after a try and decide to simply pay the fine, at least in year one. That would tilt the risk pool in states with federal exchanges towards older, sicker people, which would mean those states will see much higher premiums in year two, which will further dissuade healthier applicants from signing up, and so on. So that's a case where a short-term problem could become a long-term one.
Additionally, this does not inspire confidence: The deadline to apply to enroll in health coverage and not pay a penalty next year is not the same deadline as the end of the open enrollment period, March 31. It's actually February 15. Which means that while you can still enroll after February 15, you'll have to pay the penalty for going uninsured if you finish your application after that date. What's terrifying isn't the earlier date itself, but the facepalm-worthy fact that the administration, including the Internal Revenue Service, seems not have known about the earlier date until very recently when it was pointed out to them.
  | | Be Of Good Cheer! Posted: 17 Oct 2013 02:07 PM PDT A reader writes: People should be more positive. Something good has happened. This is a gross oversimplification, but it will get the point across. We can think of three groups of people. The first group is the crazy people – the ones who want to default in order to kill off the government. The second group is the people who are appalled by the crazy people — you and me, and lots of other people. The third group are the people who aren’t crazy, but who have made alliances with the crazy people.  It’s that third group that’s changing. All sorts of people who have always backed the GOP are saying, “Wow, that sure was crazy!” Your readers who want the people who are in the first group, the actual crazy people, to change course, will certainly be disappointed. But from my perspective, having all sorts of conservative bloggers, the chamber of commerce, lots of CEOs, etc., and mainstream Republicans in general wake up and question their support of the nutters is good enough.
It’s a big leap forward. It’s an almost uniquely positive event in the post Gingrich history of the nutty right. We’ve seen lots of important wins – times when the crazies have been defeated politically. But this is the first time mainstream people are actually saying, “Those people were nuts!” It’s not a final victory, or even anything close to that. A huge chunk of the country is really whacked out politically. It’s going to take years to push back against that, a lot of work and struggle. But what’s happened has really brought that fight into a new place. It’s an extremely positive development. It’s interesting. Things were sort of malaise-y around the administration for awhile; there was a bleak vibe. But then out of the middle of that, we had a big win in Syria. Another one here. Iran could be enormous.
I know you want a two-state solution. I do too. But we have to chip away at the region incrementally – reduce the tension, consolidate smaller wins. Iran is extremely important in that regard. Kerry bloviates a lot on TV, but he seems to know his shit. There’s an angle of this that I haven’t seen discussed. It might be just a mean-spirited fantasy on my part. But when we talk about racism in politics, we tend to talk about it in terms of “other”. As in, white guys don’t like Obama because he’s not like them, he’s “the other”. But white supremacy goes further than that. White supremacy says that the other is weak and inferior. They’ve always treated the President that way, and they’ve always described him in those terms. So I am finding definite pleasure in the fact that the President, as an individual, beat them so decisively. That it was his personal strength that carried the battle.
I’ve come to know this reader by his emails and he’s often extremely perceptive. I agree about Iran and Syria. And about Obama’s new steel. Know hope!   | | Drudge And The Dish Posted: 17 Oct 2013 01:48 PM PDT A salsa update. Meanwhile, a reader notes that “ketchup is originally Chinese”: In the 1690s the Chinese mixed a concoction of pickled fish and spices and called it (in the Amoy dialect) kôe-chiap or kê-chiap (鮭汁, Mandarin Chinese guī zhī, Cantonese gwai) meaning the brine of pickled fish (鮭, salmon; 汁, juice) or shellfish. By the early 18th century, the table sauce had made it to the Malay states (present day Malaysia and Singapore), where it was discovered by English explorers. The Indonesian-Malay word for the sauce was kĕchap. That word evolved into the English word “ketchup”. English settlers took ketchup with them to the American colonies.
  | | How To Weaken The Tea Party Posted: 17 Oct 2013 01:47 PM PDT Lizza suggests ways to fix Washington: My list would start with the return of more money to politics. One of the reasons Boehner is such a weak Speaker is that he doesn't have the carrots and sticks that his predecessors previously used. The House banned the use of earmarks, which were a traditional tool to keep recalcitrant members in line. In a four-trillion-dollar annual budget, a few million dollars here and there to lubricate the gears of Congress seems like a very small price to pay if it would create a more productive legislative body. Indeed, last night Mitch McConnell, or someone working on his behalf, won a couple billion dollars for a dam project in Kentucky, which seems like a decent outcome if it helped prevent a default. The political system could also benefit if the national parties, which can act as moderating influences in elections, were allowed to spend more money on individual campaigns. The current system, under which party contributions are capped, has empowered special-interest groups and ideological factions like Heritage Action and Club for Growth, which constantly thwart the leadership of the G.O.P. If the parties were more powerful funding vehicles for members of Congress, a leader like Boehner could exercise more control over his conference, which would allow him far more room to negotiate with Obama: he'd be able to make concessions and know he could deliver the votes.
  | | Mental Health Break Posted: 17 Oct 2013 01:20 PM PDT This bear would make a great tetherball rival to this dog:   | | The Tea Party As A Religion, Ctd Posted: 17 Oct 2013 01:00 PM PDT Dreher makes the same analogy I did: Can the Tea Partiers' beliefs be falsified? I don't think they can be. I mean, is there any evidence that could convince them that the fault here lies with themselves, in the way they conceive politics, and in the way they behaved? It sure doesn't look like it. In that sense, they think of politics as a kind of religion. It's not for nothing that the hardcore House members stood together and sang "Amazing Grace" as the impossibility of their position became ever clearer. They really do bring a religious zealotry to politics. Let me hasten to say that I'm not endorsing the "Christianist" meme, which I find far too reductive, among other things. Besides, many of the Tea Partiers and fellow travelers are not motivated by religious faith, but by a religious-like zeal for their political ideology. It was like this on the Right before the advent of the Tea Party. There has long been a sense on the Right that the movement must be vigilant against the backsliders and compromisers, who will Betray True Conservatism if you give them the chance. Again, the religious mindset: politics as a purity test. In this worldview, a politician who compromises sells out the True Faith — and faith, by definition, does not depend on empirical observation to justify itself.
Millman points out that treating politics as religion makes getting a majority near impossible: In order to persuade someone, you have to be willing to entertain the possibility that there are multiple ways of looking at something, that there are arguments on both sides (albeit presumably better ones on your own), and that it is right and proper for someone to expect to be persuaded of the rightness of your position rather than merely be told what it is. That the truth is not self-evident, but contested, continuously. If entertaining that possibility is threatening to your faith, you won't do it. If you don't do it, you won't be very persuasive to people who don't already believe. Of course, you make make some converts of people who are looking for a new faith. But those who don't convert will remain unpersuaded. A political party that tried to build itself like a church could only succeed if it had monopoly control of the state – if, in other words, it was the ruling party of a totalitarian system. Under a situation of free competition, those principles of organization will inevitably lead to perpetual minority status.
The confusion of politics with religion also explains why the GOP is obsessed with punishing political heresy. For example, Molly Ball gets an incredible quote from a Tea Partier who seems to no longer care about getting a majority: "There are two views on the right. One says more Republicans is better; the other says better Republicans is better," said Dean Clancy, vice president of public policy for the Tea Party group FreedomWorks. "One view focuses on the number of Republicans in the Senate, the other on the amount of fight in the senators."
Finally, it’s telling that Eric Erickson uses religious language when attempting to enforce Tea Party dogma: Men like Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and others have preached a great sermon against Obamacare, but now conservatives who supported them see that these men have refused to actually practice what they've been preaching. They've refused to stand and fight with the rest of us.
  | | Go Big, Mr President Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:12 PM PDT 
Tomasky is highly skeptical that new negotations over the budget can result in any different outcome next time: The position of the chaos caucus is going to be: Okay Obama, you give us entitlement cuts, and we'll give you…uh, what? No revenues. They're inflexible on that point. No programs (outside maybe of defense, and even that's a maybe) funded at levels above sequestration. So actually, they'll give nothing.
Beutler’s view: [T]here's a high likelihood that these negotiations will end the same way as all the others that preceded them did: no agreement. An agreement is only compatible with the GOP's anti-tax absolutism if Democrats drop their demand for tax parity and agree to pay down sequestration with other spending cuts. Possible, but unlikely.
One way out of this would be for Obama to go big, to propose in these new talks a Bowles-Simpson-style deal in which major tax reform and entitlement cuts are exchanged for much higher revenues. If the GOP were a genuinely conservative party, actually interested in long-term government solvency and reform within our current system of government, they would jump at this. They could claim to have reduced tax rates, even if the net result were higher taxes. And the brutal fact is that, given simply our demographics, higher taxes are going to be necessary if we are to avoid gutting our commitments to the seniors of tomorrow. They could concede that and climb down from this impossibly long limb they have constructed for themselves. I’ve long favored a Grand Bargain, but recognize its huge political liabilities without the leadership of both parties genuinely wanting to get there. But for Obama, it seems to me, re-stating such a possibility and embracing it more than he has ever done, is a win-win. He may alienate Democrats – but after his cold-steel resistance to Tea Party blackmail, he has surely won some chips to his left. With independents and moderate Republicans, now reeling from the last month’s brinksmanship, it would signal centrist leadership that could bolster his political standing, even if the GOP turns him down. If his political standing improves, then the chances for a Democratic wave in 2014 increase. But it means taking a real risk now. And this president has shown in his second term a much greater propensity to risk than in his first. Think of the boldness of his response to Assad’s chemical weapons attack and agility in roping in Putin to deal with it (so far successfully). Think of his steadfast refusal to budge right up against the threat of default. He has earned new cred and could bolster it some more with a new, bold reach for the political center he can still represent. I believe it would be the most politically effective domestic policy agenda the president can plausibly move forward, if the GOP maintains its rigidity against immigration reform past the next Congressional elections. It would also help bring back the core coalition that gave him such a huge victory in 2008. It would mean the president has not given up on the long-term fiscal health of the country. And it is vital that no president gives up on that, especially one elected on the principle of hope as well as change. Resignation to gridlock is perfectly rational. But changing that dynamic is never impossible. It’s what we elect presidents to do. And this one still could, if he swiftly exploits the opening this near-catastrophe has presented to him. (Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama makes a statement at the State Dining Room of the White House October 17, 2013 in Washington, DC. Obama said the American people are completely fed up with Washington and called on cooperation to work things out. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.)   | | Headline Of The Day Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:07 PM PDT 
Update from a reader: It’s good to know Drudge has caught up to 1992: “New Mainstream: Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Salsa”
March 11, 1992 KETCHUP, long the king of American condiments, has been dethroned. Last year, salsa — a retailing category that includes picante, enchilada, taco and similar chili-based sauces — took the condiment crown, outselling ketchup by $40 million in retail stores.”
Another goes Seinfeldian:
And an update from Drudge lui-meme: 
Amazing who reads the Dish, innit?   | | Whom The Shutdown Hurt Most Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:55 AM PDT Americans like John Anderson: He is a line cook at the American Indian Smithsonian Museum on the National Mall. Anderson is not a government employee. He’s a contract worker – the government hires his company to make the food for visitors to the museum. When the shutdown closed the museum, Anderson lost his job. He’ll now presumably be able to go back to work, but unlike federal workers, he won’t get back pay. And he could use that back pay: Anderson is a divorced father of two who usually brings home about $350 a week after taxes and child support. His 16-year-old son lives with him in Washington but commutes by bus and train to high school in Maryland every day. Anderson has no savings – his wages don’t leave much cushion for savings – and struggled through the shutdown to pay his rent, put food on the table and pay for his son to travel back and forth to school.
When you think of the actual Americans that the Tea Party is playing with, like so many pawns on a chessboard, the repulsiveness of the ego of Ted Cruz and the fanaticism of Erick Erickson becomes even clearer. For them, for all their protestations to the contrary, this was a game. And nameless, struggling Americans were the losers.   | | Where’s Boehner’s Backbone? Ctd Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:38 AM PDT 
Speaker Pelosi Part 2: Opening Jan 5. 2015 — MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) October 16, 2013
A reader writes: The fact is, John Boehner has made a deliberate choice all along in his speakership. You can moan all day about leadership and and herding cats, etc. But he has made the choice that his slavish devotion to the Hastert Rule is more important than anything else … more important than the financial health of the country, even the globe. His choice of requiring a majority of the majority on every single vote continues to give unprecedented power to a relatively small minority in his party. He’s made a choice letting roughly 12% of the House drive the entire government. That’s all it is – a choice. There’s no law, rule or even recognized precedent for that. He’s taken the (occasional) practice of one of his predecessors and turned it into something more important than the law of the land. All he needs to do is stop, and everything immediately goes back to normal but for the screaming.
Another is far too generous to the Speaker: I’ve never to be politically sophisticated but I did have a manipulative mother whose upbringing required me to develop survival skills in interpreting the underlying motivations of others.
Regarding John Boehner’s recent handling of the debt crisis, it seems to me by having the balls to let the extremist Republican element in the House play out their power play, while appearing to support them, has resulted in their demise. This greatly enhances his ability to control them in the future, which he managed without appearing to undermine their effort and, thus, gives him a much stronger hand in dealing with Democrats and puts the balance of power within their party back in the hands of their establishment. The biggest winners in this show are Boehner and Mitch McConnell, who for his part and all at once, just neutralized his primary Tea Party opposition and his his eventual Democrat opponent, Allison Grimes, who has based her campaign on his perpetuation of gridlock. These guys didn’t get to where they are by lacking in Machiavellian skills!
Another fumes: I just can’t believe that this Speaker and his party will move on from this with no resignations, no apologies and no responsibility. This is an utterly disastrous event for the Republican party and the stories we read state that the Speaker’s position is not in question? WTF?
Previous Dish discussion here.   | | A Breakthrough With Iran? Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:20 AM PDT This week's talks in Geneva have been unusually productive: In a rare joint statement, the nations called the discussions "substantive and forward-looking" and formalized the next round of negotiations in Geneva on November 7 and 8. The United States and the European Union depicted the talks as "substantive,""very important," and "positive." One senior Obama administration official beamed with excitement. "I've been doing this now for about two years, and I have never had such intense, detailed, straightforward, candid conversations with the Iranian delegation before," said the official. "I would say we really are beginning that type of negotiation where one could imagine that you could possible have an agreement."
Kaplan is similarly hopeful: First, the chances for a truly historic breakthrough are pretty good – which, at this stage in talks of such magnitude, is astonishing. Second, the Iranians' main demands—at least what we know of them – are pretty reasonable. … Not only that, but after the first day of meetings, the U.S. and Iranian delegations broke away for an hourlong bilateral session, which American officials described as "useful" in clearing up ambiguities.
After the second day, another meeting was set for November 7 – 8. Some said it would be at the "ministerial" level, which, if true, would mean Secretary of State John Kerry would head the American delegation. A U.S. secretary of state doesn't usually become so visibly involved until much closer to the end of a negotiation, suggesting that maybe we're closer to the end than anyone could have imagined. This is remarkably fast work for any set of nations negotiating any issue—much less for nations that haven't had diplomatic relations in 34 years, and on an issue that ranks among the globe's most perilous and contentious.
Cole is cautiously optimistic: Can a breakthrough be had? I believe so. The sticking points will be the extremists on both sides. In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards and Leader Ali Khamenei think the negotiations are another imperialist US trick, and getting them to sign on the dotted line of an agreement won't be easy. On the US side, the Israel lobbies and Israel itself will accept nothing less than the mothballing of the whole Iranian enrichment program, which is highly unlikely to happen. A settlement would therefore have to be one that could be accomplished by Presidents Rouhani and Obama despite the carping of the right wings of their countries.
Colin H. Kahl and Alireza Nader wants the US to be realistic: Instead of pushing for an impossible goal, the United States and other world powers should push for a possible one: an agreement that caps Iranian enrichment at the 5 percent level (sufficient for civilian power plants but far away from bomb-grade) under stringent conditions designed to preclude Tehran's ability to rapidly produce nuclear weapons, including restrictions on Iran's stockpile of low enriched uranium, limitations on centrifuges, intrusive inspections, and halting the construction of a plutonium reactor that could open an alternative pathway to nuclear weapons. Such an accord would allow Khamenei and Rouhani to claim Iran's "rights" had been respected, giving them a face-saving way out of the current nuclear crisis. Even this might be difficult for the Iranian regime to stomach. But if paired with meaningful sanctions relief, it has a much better chance of success than insisting on the complete dismantling of Iran's program.
Walt agrees: Iran had zero centrifuges in operation in 2000 and only a handful in 2005, the last time the Iranians offered to freeze their program. The United States rejected all these previous offers, and now Iran has some 19,000 centrifuges, a plutonium program, and a larger stockpile of uranium that could in theory be enriched to make a bomb if Iran ever decides it wants one. In short, the hard-line position of issuing threats, imposing sanctions, and insisting that Iran give in to all our demands has backfired and put us in a worse position today.
Which is why I support engagement of exactly the kind we’re now doing and believe it is the sanest way to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East – and, ultimately, democracy for the people of Iran. Getting Iran more fully into the international economy, rewarding the reformists, increasing bilateral contact and communication all reinforce each other. We have a chance for a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious one. As Reagan ended the first cold war by engaging moderates, so Obama can end the Iranian version by rewarding Rouhani. Because, like Gorbachev, he’s the best hope we’ve got now that sanctions have almost achieved their goal.   | | The Sabotage Of The American Economy Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:59 AM PDT 
Derek Thompson puts the GOP’s economic damage in more perspective: Counter-factual accounting is guess-work by definition, but a few research firms have tried to attach a number to the shutdown. Macroeconomic Advisers put the figure at $12 billion. S&P estimate the cost was twice as high, at $24 billion. Split the difference, and you’re talking about $18 billion in lost work. What’s a good way to think about that kind of money—a sliver of the entire $15 trillion U.S. economy, but still, you know, $18 billion? In July this year, NASA funding was approved at around $17 billion for the fiscal year. So, there: The shutdown took a NASA-sized bite out of the U.S. economy. But that’s just a nibble compared to the total cost of the budget showdowns stretching back to 2010. According to Macroeconomic Advisers, the total cost of Congress’s assault on the economy going back to 2010—including the budget cuts, including sequestration, and fights around the budget cuts—was about 3 percent of our entire economy. That’s $700 billion. That’s not just NASA. It’s one year’s entire defense budget.
Krugman thinks the number-crunchers at Macroeconomic Advisors are underestimating the fiscal drag: The combination of the payroll [tax] hike and the [unemployment] benefit cuts amounts to about $200 billion of fiscal contraction at an annual rate, or 1.25 percent of GDP, probably with a significant multiplier effect. Add this to the effects of sharp cuts in discretionary spending and the effects of economic uncertainty, however measured, and I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that extortion tactics may have shaved as much as 4 percent off GDP and added 2 points to the unemployment rate. In other words, we'd be looking at a vastly healthier economy if it weren't for the GOP takeover of the House in 2010.
  | | What The Shutdown Accomplished Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:38 AM PDT @chrislhayes something a bit like this, chris. http://t.co/WvGDG0UcVF — darthredpandacare™ (@darth) October 16, 2013
The one concession Republicans got is meaningless: There’s nothing about the income verification measures that passed Wednesday night that will change Obamacare, aside from a few staff members at Health and Human Services devoting some hours to gathering the data and writing up these reports. And that probably explains why Democrats were okay with passing this language in the first place.
Gleckman sighs: Congress has just shuttered much of the federal government for more than two weeks and risked a market-shattering federal default in order to convene a meeting of budget negotiators.
And at the cost $24 billion in lost economic output. Sheer vandalism.   | | The Benefits Of Quiet Diplomacy Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:18 AM PDT 
Joshua Keating is, like me, grateful the shutdown has been drowning out coverage of our negotiations with Iran: Thanks to the government shutdown and the looming default, the news cycle this week has skewed heavily domestic, and understandably so. Somewhat lost in all this has been what is actually a pretty big foreign-policy story, the restarted Iran nuclear talks in Geneva. It's still early to say, but while nobody's been paying attention, the talks have been going surprisingly well. Those two things may be connected. [Neither lifting sanctions or allowing some uranium enrichment on Iranian soil is] popular on Capitol Hill. And as Yochi Dreazen and John Hudson of Foreign Policy report, some members of Congress – some Democrats, in particular – are already signaling opposition to a deal involving lifting sanctions. But Congress has also had its attention elsewhere this week. As Rep. David Price told FP, "We're in such a weird situation on the Hill with the shutdown and all the oxygen is pretty much going to that fight." It's easy to imagine an alternative-universe scenario in which the government is not shut down, the Iran talks are front-page news, and this is a major focus of attention from Capitol Hill. It still may be tough to the White House to sell Congress on lifting sanctions, but it has to have helped lead negotiator Wendy Sherman that Congress hasn't been setting the terms of this debate before she even sat down with the Iranians.
And as I noted last night, the talks have been remarkably cordial so far. A distracted Congress and relative quiet about the Israel-Palestine peace process is also helpful, as the invaluable Roger Cohen notes today: For almost three months now Israelis and Palestinians have been negotiating peace in U.S.-brokered talks. They have been doing so in such quiet that the previous sentence may seem startling. Nobody is leaking. Because expectations are low, spoilers are quiescent. There is a feeling nobody opposed to a resolution need lift a finger because the talks will fail all on their own. This is good. Absent discretion, diplomacy dies.
I think we’re going to get a deal that precludes a war against Iran and begins a period of constructive engagement and detente with the theocracy in Tehran. There’s still a lot to get nailed down and verified, and there are powerful forces in both countries determined to prevent a deal (the Revolutionary Guards, AIPAC and religious fanatics in Iran’s and America’s reddest states among them) but both recently elected governments in Washington and Tehran have a huge amount riding on success. Avoiding another war in the Middle East – and the wave of murderous Jihadism and polarization that would provoke – is, to my mind, the most important foreign policy goal of the next three years. The second most important? A two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. Domestic drama – and a new constellation of forces in the Middle East, as Cohen explains – may help Obama secure both. Am I delusional? Maybe. But the coalition of countries behind the negotiations with Iran, combined with the unexpectedly successful chemical weapons suppression and destruction in Syria, has isolated Netanyahu even more acutely in the world, as his political position at home remains tenuous. You know who he reminds me of – threatening to upend global peace and break the US-Israel alliance by a unilateral attack? Ted Cruz. (Photo: US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman (right) smiles at the start of two days of closed-door nuclear talks in Geneva October 15. By Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)   | | The Wave On The Horizon? Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:59 AM PDT 
Republican Congressman Charles Boustany worried recently that actions by House Republicans “could trigger a wave of discontent that could wash out our Republican majority in the House if we’re not careful.” Nate Cohn continues to insist that the Republican majority is safe: [E]ven if public outrage with the GOP persists at today's levels, there good reasons to question whether the wave will endure through November 2014. Unlike real waves, electoral waves shrink as they approach the shore. Political scientists have found that the generic ballot overestimates the president's party this far from an election. That's part of why Alan Abramowitz estimates that Democrats need a 13 point Democratic edge on September 1 to win the 17 seats necessary to retake the chamber in November.
Enten disagrees and argues that ”Abramowitz’s forecast is a good starting-point for understanding how uphill is the Democrats’ task in taking back the House, but it is far from perfect.” Furthermore: The thing is that expert ratings (like most polling) are not all that predictive a year out from an election. At this point in the 2006 cycle, there were 17 Republican seats in the lean or tossup categories (pdf). That’s well short of the 30 seats that Democrats would ultimately take from Republicans. At this point in the 2010 cycle, there were 28 Democratic seats in the lean or tossup category. Republicans, of course, went onto gain 63 seats in 2010. It’s not until later in the cycle when individual seat rankings become quite useful. That’s when potential challengers and incumbents read the national environment and decide to run or not. Chances are that if the 4-5pt Democratic lead holds, the individual seat rankings will reflect that edge. For now, individual seat ratings probably aren’t all that helpful to understanding which way and how hard the wind is blowing.
My view, for what it’s worth, is that this event has the potential to deeply shape public attitudes about the GOP’s fitness for public office and change the shape of the next Congress decisively. I mean, here’s Ross today: However you slice and dice the history, the strategery, and the underlying issues, the decision to live with a government shutdown for an extended period of time — inflicting modest-but-real harm on the economy, needlessly disrupting the lives and paychecks of many thousands of hardworking people, and further tarnishing the Republican Party's already not-exactly-shiny image — in pursuit of obviously, obviously unattainable goals was not a normal political blunder by a normally-functioning political party. It was an irresponsible, dysfunctional and deeply pointless act, carried out by a party that on the evidence of the last few weeks shouldn't be trusted with the management of a banana stand, let alone the House of Representatives.
And the key thing for responsible actors in the next year is to remind voters again and again about what this crew voted for: a second great depression to appease their ideological purity. They nearly got away with it. The lesson should not be relief and moving on; it should be continued outrage at this vandalism and brinksmanship and a demand for accountability. That means voting Democrat next year even if you disagree about many aspects of their policy proposals. Because this is not about mere policy. It’s about a party threatening to break apart the country if they do not get the rest of us to bend to their minority will and their apocalyptic vision. If that message can sink in with independents and moderate Republicans, then of course the Democrats can regain the House – and finish the job of the Obama presidency. I don’t like partisanship. But if it is an indispensable means to ending this level of blackmail of the entire system, then it is a necessary, short-term price to pay. (Photo by Miguel Teixeira)   | | Quote For The Day Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:46 AM PDT “Even at the bitter end, on the last possible day to defuse the crisis before the debt ceiling was breached, over 60% of House Republicans voted to push the US government into default, with incalculable but almost certainly catastrophic consequences. This is a very important point, with very ominous implications, that shouldn’t be forgotten or obscured. Is it unfair, one-sided, or exaggerated to suggest that the national Republican Party has become a dangerous menace to the republic, with no clearly visible redeeming features? I don’t think so,” – Jeff Weintraub. Me neither.   | You are subscribed to email updates from The Dish
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Automatic Link Review Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Realtime Driving Feedback
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:51 AM PDT
| Automatic Link Review Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Realtime Driving Feedback Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:00 AM PDT  I have something to get off my chest: I live in New Jersey, so by definition that makes me a “Jersey driver”. I've never thought of myself as the sort of manically aggressive road warrior that befits the stereotype (and I'd argue that Pennsylvania drivers are way worse), but Y Combinator-backed Automatic’s Link dongle begs to differ. It’s been plugged into my car for the better part of two weeks now, dutifully tracking all my hard stops, all my hasty starts at green lights, and all the times I’ve perhaps pushed the car a bit too hard. And the verdict is in: I’m exactly what I thought I wasn’t. I’m a stereotypical New Jersey driver. As the old adage goes, the first step to recovering is admitting you have a problem, and Automatic’s neat little dongle + app combo has helped me to realize just that.
The Rundown But let’s back up a moment — how does this all work? Let’s back up a moment first. Since 1996, every car that’s been sold in the United States has what’s called an OBD-II port nestled in it somewhere. Odds are good you don’t even know what it looks like (it’s a little trapezoidal thing with 16 pins) or where it is. It’s there so mechanics and car dealers can troubleshoot automotive issues by connecting a computer to the thing, and the Automatic team has whipped up a consumer device that pops in there to monitor your car’s speed, fuel injection rate, and more. There are a few extra bits in there that make the Link dongle more than your average diagnostics tool. The accelerometer means that it can detect sudden stops and starts, and there’s a tiny speaker built into the that audibly alerts you in those moments. It sounds like sort of a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Consistently slamming your brakes isn’t doing your car any favors, but the dongle is much more sensitive than that — seemingly normal stops can trigger the alert which sort of forces you to reconsider how normal your driving really is. The dongle also beeps at you when you’re too quick off the line (something I’m apparently guilty of way too often), and when you push your car over 70 miles per hour. In the end, you’re left with a gadget that’s capable of giving you realtime driving feedback while you tool around town (and it’s much more pleasant than having a backseat driver bark at you). Of course, the (currently iOS-only) app plays a big role in all this too as the Link connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy. You can’t glance down at your phone in-the-moment for immediate status updates — the only feedback you’re getting while driving is those audio notifications — but it dutifully chews on all of that data post-drive to show you your route and how many of those driving faux pas you made on the road. It also displays a rough estimate of your fuel economy, and I do mean rough — some quick, back of the napkin calculations gave me figures that weren’t always as peachy as the ones the app displayed. Automatic says this is a known issue though, and they’re apparently working on improving accuracy. All of those metrics get boiled down into a single weekly score so users can easily track their progress over time. And thankfully, there are some features that I haven’t had to use yet. In the event that your car throws up a Check Engine light, the Automatic app is capable of showing some detailed information about what may be causing it and how to potentially fix it. And if you’ve got Crash Alert enabled, the Link will be on the lookout for the sort of incredibly hard stops that usually signify, well, a crash. In the event it detects one, it collects your location information using your phone’s GPS and attempts to send it along to the local authorities by way of Automatic’s backend servers. It’s exclusive to the U.S. and still very much in beta though — Automatic admits that at this point there’s no guarantee that any nearby police stations or fire departments will respond. There are, as always, some caveats to be aware of. While years and years worth of cars physically have an OBD-II port somewhere, the Automatic Link can’t decipher the data from every single one of them (you can check your car’s compatibility here). That crucial Bluetooth connection presents some problems of its own too — if you're the type of person who relies on Bluetooth to stream your music through your car stereo or access your contact list on the go, you may to have to decide which of these experiences means more to you. Then again, there's a fair to middling chance that if your car came with Bluetooth functionality out of the gate, it's already going to replicate some of the Automatic Link’s more basic features. And you know what? That’s just fine. My car rolled off an assembly line in 2006, which was apparently the model year just before the one when neato options like AUX inputs and in-dash fuel economy gauges became standard fare. A drill and a $15 gewgaw from Amazon fixed that first problem, and now a $99 gadget + app combination have taken care of the latter for me (and then some). On some level though, I just wish the Automatic system did more — I’d love a web view that lets me dig into all this information in aggregate, and some maintenance reminders every few thousand miles since I’m probably running a little behind on that too. The Verdict Now this is all well and good, but there’s a bigger question to tackle: am I actually a better driver? Well, I’m getting there. The thing to remember about Automatic is that it isn’t going to magically make you a more conscientious driver — you have to work at it. The name of the game is behavior modification through better data. In that sense the Automatic dongle is a sort of Fitbit for your car, a reasonably inexpensive doodad that shines a little more light on what you put your car (and your wallet) through on a weekly basis. Exactly what you do with that data is entirely up to you. In my case, I’ve slowly grown to be a bit more thoughtful on road in the two or so weeks since I first jammed the dongle in my ODB port. That's not to say that I've given up my leadfoot tendencies completely — sometimes you just need to crank things up a bit — but I'm noticeably more cognizant of how fast I'm going at any given moment. It's even gotten to the point where I finding myself driving as close to 70 MPH as possible without actually going over, even when the Automatic isn't plugged in. It’s also not meant to be a replacement for more robust, capable ODB scanners. Needless to say, dyed-in-the-wool car buffs may not find enough value here to warrant a purchase. The same goes for people who are more than happy putting pedals to the metal on a regular basis — chances are they’re not planning to change their behavior very soon. But for cost-conscious consumers? Or people like me who actively want to change their driving style? The Automatic experience is worth the asking price, and with any luck it’ll only get better with time. Video production by Steve Long | | Datawind's Sub-$50 Android Tablet Hitting The UK Soon, Next-Gen Device Matches iPad Specs On Paper Posted: 18 Oct 2013 07:23 AM PDT  The Datawind Aakash tablet made headlines when it promised to deliver a full-featured Android device for just under $50 a couple of years back, and now the company and the device have shared some new info regarding their progress at Wired’s 2013 London event. Datawind CEO Suneet Tuli revealed that so far, the company has shipped around 1 million low-cost tablets, with plans in the pipeline that could see them increase that number exponentially both in India and in other developing markets around the world. Part of those plans include introducing its low-cost hardware in the west for the first time, via retail sales to kick off in the UK by the end of the year. Four different models of the Aakash (called the UbiSlate now per official trade dress) will be available to UK buyers, starting at £29.99 for the UbiSlate 7Ci (Aakash2), and ranging up to £99.99 for the UbiSlate 3G7. Tuli told me via email that the company’s upcoming Aakash4, which has a processor and RAM that actually exceeds the current iPad’s on paper (with a 1.5GHz dual-core A9 processor, and 1GB of RAM), will be available as well, and will be branded as the UbiSlate 7CZ. The Aakash4 represents a major technological leap forward for the Aakash, made possible by continued downward pressure on the pricing of components used in smartphone and tablets, and by Datawind’s ownership of its own LCD panel and touch screen production, when its original supplier unfortunately had to close up shop. Tuli said that, in fact, they found that the margins on manufacturing touchscreens were much better than those on their device business, but rather than switch which business they were in, they used that price advantage to drive down the overall cost of their products. That’s been to their lasting advantage, and after some initial hiccups (including shipping delays and potential government disinterest in the product, which Tuli previously addressed), the company seems to be on track to starting to make good on its vision of a world where even some of the poorest people in the world can get online with a smart, connected device. Datawind has also been criticized by some for focusing too much on Aakash hardware, but Tuli says the company is more focused on delivering Internet to those that lack it. Accordingly, they’re working on deals that should allow them to ship Aakash tablets with free basic browsing connections by year’s end, which solves the other half of the equation between devices and service for getting those typically unplugged online. | | Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 06:23 AM PDT  Hello, puny human! How are your watery, floaty insides today? Good? Good. In this installment of TIDWRTWHUFOO we present the 3D-printed robot named Poppy. Poppy looks like a little mensch, all moxie and mettle, but imagine when the robots learn to 3D print themselves. You won’t be giggling when Poppy comes striding through the train station asking you to pick up a can, will you? Poppy is completely open source and will cost about $9,000 to build in human money but it should be free once the robots take over the economy. You can learn more here. Poppy Overview from Matthieu Lapeyre on Vimeo. Ever wonder why they had to block out the sun in The Matrix? It’s because monsters like the Robo Raven were taking wing and using the sweet juices of the old Sol to swoop down and grab children playing in the streets. That’s right: this robot is a solar powered pterodactyl that is just waiting to be weaponized and/or fitted with a dropping disposal system. Quoth the raven-maker, Dr. S.K. Gupta: Real ravens are omnivorous and are happy to eat whatever is available. Unfortunately, mimicking this feat in Robo Raven is not practical at this point in time because the equipment necessary to convert biomass into 30 W of electrical power would make Robo Raven too heavy to fly. Since it is not practical to build a flying platform that can directly convert the biomass into energy needed to flap wings at the moment, we had to come up with a different option to "feed" Robo Raven. You feed Robo Raven human organs, Dr. Gupta, making us alive nevermore. Also iRobot sold 1 million Roombas or, to put it more precisely, 1 million underfoot soldiers in the coming robot war against the humans. Keep your head on a swivel, people! Until next week… | | Le Laboratoire's Ophone Is A Smartphone For The Nose That Knows Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:47 AM PDT  Can you smell a symphony? If Le Laboratoire has its way, you soon will. The contemporary art and design sensor founded by academic and scientists David Edwards in 2007 was at Wired’s 2013 event in London this week, showing their latest creation: an olfactory experience unlike any other, delivered digitally like an email or instant message. Edwards and his former student Rachel Field revealed the second, and much more polished prototype of the Ophone at the show, which is a cylindrical device that rests atop a base supplied with a number of chemicals. It’s a “phone” in some respects, as its name implies, but it doesn’t transmit sound or receive sounds like your iPhone: It can receive encoded transmissions that tell it what kind of smells to play. No, that’s not a typo. Here’s how the prototype works: First, you go to a website and enter in a number of ‘movements’ for a ‘symphony,’ choosing a type of coffee, then a chocolate, then a caramel and a nut variety. Then, you can send this off to the Ophone’s servers, and it’s received by a smartphone that controls the device, which transmits the recipes via bluetooth. The Ophone combines its materials in the required complication to render those smells. The experience is the latest from the collective around scent and taste, as Edwards continues to try to explore the nature of olfactory processes as another type of communication on par with music, writing or anything else we might hope to offer up. Already, the company offers up capsules that spritz small serving doses of things like coffee, reduced to a fine dust, which can be brought on planes and are completely travel and customs safe. The more interesting possibility for the future, according to Edwards, is a vision where delivery mechanisms for the olfactory units are built-into every device, making it possible for your cell phone, TV remote control or anything else to offer up a scent shot. That’s what the company hopes to accomplish, given more time to refine the product and work out a final production Ophone-type device. “In the next few years we’re absolutely moving towards a world where you have these little chips, they’re universal, and you have any number of objects they work with,” he said. “It could be the holder of your phone, your desk or something in your clothing, so that any communication, whether it’s on the phone, or an email, or an Internet site or a James Bond movie, that has an inherent olfactory dimension, if you turn this on, you’re going to be smelling it.” The Ophone is currently the most advanced iteration of that vision. It’s much, much better than the typical smell-o-vision type inventions you’ll see trotted out at trade shows, as I learned via a nose-on. That’s because it’s remarkably subtle, and remarkably personal. There’s no haze of smell you have to walk through, for instance; and when you want the experience to end, you just draw you head back and the smell quickly fades. Currently, the Ophone prototype can produce up to 320 different smells, and working out the UI for that experience is its own challenge. Field says that they came up with the idea of symphonies, and the basic set scent selection as a way of making it more digestible, but in fact its extremely flexible, and they’re interested to see what people are able to come up with to interact with it once its more generally available. You can easily imagine a situation where people come up with various “scent recipes” and “scent apps” like they do now for lighting with the Philips Hue. The concept of a smell-based media device isn’t new, and it’s been applied to everything from TV to gaming, but the Ophone and the larger vision behind Le Laboratoire envision a much more expansive application of olfactory sense tech. It’s still pretty sci-fi, but it’s a lot more palatable (and eligible for consumerization) in this form than having a fog machine shoot a foul-smelling cloud in your direction, which is how others’ efforts have come off in the past. | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch » Gadgets
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McConnell challenger nabs big endorsement (Alexandra Jaffe/Ballot Box)
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:30 AM PDT
| McConnell challenger nabs big endorsement (Alexandra Jaffe/Ballot Box) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:25 AM PDT  Alexandra Jaffe / Ballot Box:
McConnell challenger nabs big endorsement — Sen. Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) primary challenger got a boost Friday with the endorsement of a prominent national conservative group, the Senate Conservatives Fund. — The endorsement of Matt Bevin comes just days after the fund blasted McConnell …
| | Saudi Arabia Rejects Security Council Seat (Alan Cowell/New York Times) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:25 AM PDT Alan Cowell / New York Times:
Saudi Arabia Rejects Security Council Seat — LONDON — Assailing what it called double standards at the United Nations, Saudi Arabia took the surprising step Friday of declining an invitation to take a rotating seat on the Security Council just one day after it was chosen to join the body for a two-year term. | | The GOP's Uncertainty Strategy Is Killing the Recovery (Kirsten Powers/The Daily Beast) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:20 AM PDT | | Game-Changing Investments for the U.S. (Economix) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:20 AM PDT  Economix:
Game-Changing Investments for the U.S. — Laura D'Andrea Tyson is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton. Susan Lund is a partner at McKinsey & Company … | | Obamacare Website Failure Threatens Health Coverage For Millions Of Americans (Jeffrey Young/The Huffington Post) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:15 AM PDT | | Do not read this post, by order of King Barry the First (Jim Treacher/The Daily Caller) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:15 AM PDT  Jim Treacher / The Daily Caller:
Do not read this post, by order of King Barry the First — This morning, His Majesty magnanimously took some time out of his busy day to perform his most important task as King of America: Condemning the common rabble who resist his will. — I'll skip past the first few minutes of his lies, blamethrowing, and other nonsense. | | Republican Civil War Erupts: Business Groups v. Tea Party (Bloomberg) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:15 AM PDT | | N.J. health department says no marriage licenses for same-sex couples until court rules (Susan K. Livio/New Jersey Online) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:10 AM PDT | | Sarah Palin suggests she will get involved in Kentucky Senate race (Sam Youngman/Lexington Herald-Leader) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:10 AM PDT | | Handicappers: Shutdown Puts More Than 17 GOP Seats in Play (Alex Seitz-Wald/NationalJournal.com) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:05 AM PDT | | Assessing the Exchanges (Yuval Levin/National Review) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:00 AM PDT Yuval Levin / National Review:
Assessing the Exchanges — Over the last few days, I have spoken in some detail about the state of the federal Obamacare exchanges with several officials of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (the HHS agency that is running the exchanges), and with a number of reasonably well placed insurance company officials in Washington. | | Obamacare woes widen as insurers get wrong data (MarketWatch) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:55 AM PDT  MarketWatch:
Obamacare woes widen as insurers get wrong data … Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far, in a sign that technological problems extend further … | | Ted Cruz Failed To Disclose Ties To Caribbean Holding Company (Massimo Calabresi/TIME) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:50 AM PDT | | Brian Schweitzer eyes 2016, makes anti-Hillary Clinton case (Katie Glueck/Politico) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:50 AM PDT | | Anatomy of a shutdown - House Speaker John Boehner just wanted ... (Politico) Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:50 AM PDT  Politico:
Anatomy of a shutdown — House Speaker John Boehner just wanted to sneak out of the White House for a smoke. — But President Barack Obama pulled him aside for a grilling. Obama wanted to know why they were in the second day of a government shutdown that the speaker had repeatedly and publicly pledged to avoid. | You are subscribed to email updates from memeorandum
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Top 5 Videos In Viral Friday: Banksy – Art Sale
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:26 AM PDT
| Top 5 Videos In Viral Friday: Banksy – Art Sale Posted: 18 Oct 2013 08:45 AM PDT Millions of videos get uploaded, so we curate them for you in our flagship format Viral Friday. See the 5 top viral videos of this week here on ViralBlog.
Trailer created by Michiel Zwart of EditieM
This week, we selected the following top 5 viral videos for you:
1. Banksy – Art Sale Click here to view the embedded video. Well-known streetart-ist Banksy is in the Big Apple for a while busy painting, he pulled the following prank, trying to sell his stencils. His pieces are sold for hundred of thousands, guess how many did he sell this time? Great video with over 4,7 million views in a week. Have a look at one more project of Banksy – Sirens of the lambs.
2. Red Bull Stratos FULL POV + Mission Data Click here to view the embedded video. A year after the Red Bull Stratos project, we can see all the details and different points of view from this amazing free-fall, the video got over 3,7 million views in 5 days. Also recommended to check out the full Red Bull Stratos documentary.
3. PlayStation 4 – Perfect Day Click here to view the embedded video. PlayStation 4 will be here in a couple of weeks, and here comes a new video with over 2,5 million views in 4 days, featuring an epic song by Lou Reed – Perfect Day.
4. Carpark Click here to view the embedded video. Birdbox Studio creates cute and interesting video that are pleasure to watch, just like this with 2,3 million views in a week. Look where you park. And don’t annoy dogs!
5. Superman 75th Anniversary Click here to view the embedded video. Even though he’s already 75 years young, still looking good, helping the mankind and fighting crime. Thanks Superman! A cool tribute to this superhero by DC Comics with 1,5 million views in 3 days. What About You?
What was the video that made you wet your panty? We would love to hear your opinion in the comments below. Follow & Share
More viral videos? Browse all Viral Fridays, join us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, RSS and get our weekly E-mail Newsletter for updates and free bonus content. viral The post Top 5 Videos In Viral Friday: Banksy – Art Sale appeared first on VIRALBLOG.COM.     | | 10 Tips For Finding A Job Using Social Media Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:00 AM PDT There are many ways how the internet can help you finding a new job. I this article we show you tips for finding a job using social media. 
Image Source: Shutterstock.com Recent studies have shown that social media is now helping one in six job-hunters find a new position From all recruiters, 89 percent check the social media profiles of prospective candidates when looking to make a new hire. What they are a looking for? For talents who fit the profile. But definitely for the real person behind your curriculum vitae and LinkedIn Profile. The infographic below provides 10 social media tips for helping you to really stand out when job hunting. 
My opinion I believe that recommendations are always better that trying to sell yourself. It’s pretty much similar to recommendations or reviews from your network regarding brands, products or services. When a hotel or washing machine is rated with an A+, we tend to buy it faster. When colleagues, clients and partners are giving you recommendations on your LinkedIn profile, I’m positive recruiters and employers will be interested. And the facts a clear: just 1 out of 100 people who are not referred get hired. What about you?
So what would your tips be for finding a job using social media? Follow & Share
Want more stories on breaking with the status quo? Browse our category Viral & Social Video, join us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, RSS and get our weekly E-mail Newsletter for updates and free bonus content. About the Author
Laurens Bianchi is an independent online (sport) marketing professional from the Netherlands and has been blogging on ViralBlog since 2008. Currently Laurens is also the Social Media Consultant for the Royal Dutch Football Association. The post 10 Tips For Finding A Job Using Social Media appeared first on VIRALBLOG.COM.     |
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How's that move from the funnel to the customer life cycle going?
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:25 AM PDT
| How's that move from the funnel to the customer life cycle going? Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:46 PM PDT Earlier this year, I penned a break up letter on behalf of CMOs to the marketing funnel. Though some chief marketers initally were a little reluctant to follow through, in new research published today, we see that the vast majority of marketers recognize that the customer life cycle (CLC) is their partner of the future. In "The State Of Customer Life Cycle Marketing," (subscription required), we share the results from our July 2013 North American Customer Life Cycle Marketing Online Survey of 80 senior marketers, a highlight of which is that marketers are overwhelmingly picking the CLC for all their customer-obsessed marketing activities (see figure). In addition to getting a pulse for where companies are in their transition to a customer-first approach to marketing, we also used our assessment (subs req) to benchmark performance on the five key dimensions of customer life cycle marketing: strategy, organization, data & analytics, measurement, and technology. We find that: Read more | | There Is No Internet Of Things Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:40 AM PDT More than a decade ago -- in May 2001 -- Forrester authored a report heralding the coming of the X Internet, or extended Internet, defined as "Internet devices and applications that sense, analyze, and control the real world." We proclaimed that "the Web is fading fast . . . smart devices will push the scale of the Internet far beyond today's PC-based Net." Turns out that the vision we laid out in 2001 still hasn't come to fruition. While enterprises in healthcare, manufacturing, and utilities are well down the path of the X Internet -- better known today as the Internet of Things, the industrial Internet, or in Cisco Systems' parlance, the Internet of Everything -- consumer adoption and general business adoption of sensor devices and services are just getting started. The sensor-laden consumer products that are starting to hit the market are "smart" in sensing and relaying information about the physical bodies wearing them or the physical environments they inhabit -- a phenomenon we call "smart body, smart world." But these smart products could get a lot smarter: Today they are largely fragmented and not as useful as they could be. Read more | You are subscribed to email updates from Forrester Blogs
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How Broad or Narrow Should Your Blog’s Niche Be?
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:13 AM PDT
| How Broad or Narrow Should Your Blog’s Niche Be? Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:34 AM PDT One of the questions that's come up a few times in the DailyBlogTips survey is how to select a niche, or how to fix problems with one. Usually, problems crop up because a niche is too broad or too narrow. When I started out in blogging six years ago, the conventional advice was to choose a very specific niche. Over the past few years, though, I've seen thinking on this shift. Most bloggers now suggest a slightly broader niche, as this makes it much easier to build a real business around your blog. Going too broad, however, is also a mistake. Is Your Niche Too Broad? Here's an example of too broad a niche … in fact, this blog doesn't really have a niche at all: My blog covers travel, health, personal development, Twitter, and watercolour painting. While you might personally have a very wide range of interests, it's not a good idea to combine these into one blog. Even if you have no intention of making money, you presumably want readers – and they'll want a blog with a focus. Fix it: - Choose a core topic (or two or three closely related topics) to focus on. For instance, it might make sense to combine health and personal development.
- Write down what your blog is really about. You might find it’s useful to use bullet points here. Imagine you’re explaining your blog to a friend or a potential new reader.
- Use different outlets for your other interests. If you have a blog on personal development, with a slant towards health, there's nothing stopping you writing guest posts about watercolour painting.
Is Your Niche Too Narrow? A very narrow niche might sound like a good idea, but in practice, it can be very tough to get traffic and readers. A too-narrow niche is also a common cause of burnout: you simply run out of things to say, or lose interest. It might look like this: Best brushes for watercolour painting. While that could make a great blog post or even a great series, it's not going to be an easy topic for a whole blog. In my experience, bloggers often choose a too-narrow niche not because they're passionately interested in it but because they hope it'll make money. The truth is that a slightly broader niche will usually serve you better. Fix it: - Move one step up from your current topic. From best brushes for watercolour painting, you might choose to blog about painting tools (brushes, canvases, etc) or you might blog about watercolour painting.
- Consider buying a new domain. Perhaps your current domain name restricts your topics too much, and it's time to find a new one.
- Rethink how your blog makes money. Very niche sites are often monetised with affiliate marketing or ads. There's nothing wrong with that, but you might find a broader niche is easier to monetise in other ways (e.g. by selling products or services).
What's your blog's niche? Do you think it's too narrow or too broad? Let us know in the comments! Don't forget the DailyBlogTips survey, which you can find here on SurveyMonkey. We'll be closing this early next week, so please get your answers in now! Remember, everyone who completes the survey has a chance to win a free place on our upcoming course. Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!
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