Latest Tech News

Using Software To Easily Identify Living Organisms

2011-11-29T01:17:00.001-08:00

http://determix.com/

Before the rise of the Digital age, research and forensic scientists, biologists, and botanists, painstakingly identified each and every living organism by searching their various ranks in the Nomenclature Code rule book. Using advanced technology however, has made it possible to simplify these steps in just a couple of clicks on the computer. Determix has created Lysandra Online, an internet-based, biological database that classifies all organisms using interactive catalogues and identification guides. Everything is basically there; and unlike a trip to the library, it wouldn't take a day to find a strange organism's Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species classification—all in one sitting.

This is good news to scientists all over the world. Lysandra Online is co-authored by leading specialists in the fields of zoology and biological sciences; and it uses complex algorithms to search for an organism's specific hierarchies. It makes things even easier by adding illustrated catalogues, handy navigation, and print output in its features. And here's the best part: it can organize random search lists from the general catalogue and even create mini-presentations. Some of its published works include beetles and butterfly classification, butterfly identifcation database, and all that can be easily accessed via website.

The best part, however, is that it’s free. All its database and facilities are available after installation, and some of its demo databases don't even need registration. Today, it is used as an accurate guide to biological classification, and Determix has now released a commercial version of its database that contains completely illustrated tools, maps, and pictures for better identification.

[Via - MadConomist.com]

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ShiftMyGift.Com Review

2011-11-26T00:57:00.000-08:00

Need business name ideas? PickyDomains.com, world's first risk free naming agency

http://www.shiftmygift.com/

What it is
Shift My Gift is a web-based service that allows registered users to transfer money to worthy causes--money that would otherwise have been spent on gifts. Donations are processed online through Network for Good, a Bethesda, Md., nonprofit organization. Through a partnership with GuideStar, a nonprofit reporting agency, users can access a database of more than 1.8 million IRS-recognized nonprofits and choose where they want the cash to go.

How it started
After hiking through some of Nepal's poorest regions, Blair Souder returned to his Lincoln University, Pa., home just in time for Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving retail frenzy. Although the people in Nepal had very little, they "were very connected and seemed to be living in happiness and peace, as far as I could see," Souder says. It was a stark contrast to the shopping craze that kicks off the December holiday season in the States.

"I began thinking it would be cool to have a place online where people could easily [transfer their gifts to benefit others] and also create a bit of a movement around it," Souder says. "It would help people reflect on themselves: How am I going to celebrate the next event in my life? Do I really need more gifts?" He told his brother Kirk about the idea and the two went to work building the site.

Why it took off
The site, which has only been live since mid-August, attracted more than 2,000 discrete visitors within the first month, simply through word-of-mouth. The Souders plan a grassroots promotion campaign that will include up to 25 partner nonprofits to help spread the word through their own networks. One of the most recently featured nonprofits is the venerable Heifer International, which was established in 1944 and works with poor communities throughout the world to end hunger and poverty while caring for the earth.

The business case
Shift My Gift charges users a $1.49 processing fee per transaction--less than what it would cost to wrap and send most gifts through the U.S. Postal Service or courier. The fee is not tax-deductible, but the donation is. In addition, a 4.75 percent "grant" is withheld from each donation and given to Network for Good to offset the cost of processing (the grant is tax-deductible).

What's next
The Souders will work with their nonprofit partners to run donation campaigns and encourage gifting through the site. They're also working on a publicity campaign and increasing their social media profile to get the word out about their site, which Blair says is easy to use.

"For people who realize that they just don't want any more stuff and would like to use gift-giving occasions, like birthdays or weddings, to make a difference in the world, this allows them to celebrate in a more meaningful way," he says. "People are really responding to that message."

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[Via - Madconomist.com]

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Jerkey Station

2011-11-21T01:51:00.000-08:00

Idea of the day - PickyDomains.com, world's first risk free naming agency

http://www.caribreoso.com/JerkStation.html

Residents and workers in Redmond can get a taste of the Caribbean without leaving city limits.

The Jerk Sation, a mobile food truck serving up Caribbean cuisine, made its debut in Redmond on Monday and is helping owner and chef Michael Cunningham get his food out to hungry people.

The Renton resident and former Boeing employee opened for business about two weeks ago in Woodinville, where he is stationed in the parking lot of the Woodin Professional Building at 13901 NE 175th St. on Tuesdays and Fridays. Right now, Cunningham is in Redmond on Mondays and his truck is parked at 6855 176th Ave. N.E. The Jerk Station also parks in Renton on Wednesdays and Thursdays in the Center Cycle parking lot at 3950 Lind Ave. S.W.

"My preference is to stay on the Eastside," Cunningham said.

The Jerk Station offers food in two categories: Caribbean classics and Caribbean creations. The former features classic Caribbean dishes such as Jamaican patties, jerk meats, rice and peas and mofongo. With his creations, Cunningham said he has created original dishes that use Caribbean preparation techniques. Some of Cunningham's dishes include a Haitian lobster roll, Puerto Rican crab cake and Cubano cheesesteak.

Cunningham received his culinary training at the Kitchen Academy (now called Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts) in Tukwila and graduated in 2008. Although he grew up in the South, Cunningham went to school in south Florida, which introduced him to Caribbean food. This was one of the reasons he chose to focus on Caribbean cuisine.

"I always enjoyed the food," he said.

To promote his new business, Cunningham, who has a masters of business administration in marketing, said he did a lot of footwork by passing out flyers before he opened, but he has also utilized social media, promoting the Jerk Station on Twitter (his handle is @CaribreosoCater) and Facebook. Through Twitter, Cunningham said he is able to communicate directly with customers, giving them real-time information about what he's selling and even taking suggestions on what people want.

Cunningham added that since he began Jerk Station, his Twitter account — which he also uses to promote Caribreoso, his catering company — has tripled in the number of followers.

"It's been growing pretty quickly," he said, adding that posting pictures brings in more followers as well.

The idea to start a food truck came to Cunningham when he was laid off from Boeing in 2010. At that point, he had already put the wheels in motion to start a catering company, but he also wanted to offer a lunch service. Cunningham said he initially started with a delivery service, but that didn't work because orders weren't coming in with enough time for him to cook the food and get it to his customers.

Right around this time documentaries and shows about food trucks were airing and Cunningham saw that they were run by experienced, professional chefs.

"These are people who have extensive, well-established food backgrounds," he said.

A food truck seemed like the perfect idea for Cunningham. He said he didn't want to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant because the hours were too long and grueling. He said he wants to be able to spend time with his wife and a restaurant would have him working opposite hours as her.

Eventually, way down the line, Cunningham can see himself opening a bed and breakfast with a full-service restaurant, somewhere on the beach. But that's far into the future.

For now, Cunningham said he enjoys seeing people eat his food and interacting with his customers.

"I feed off of that," he said.

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[Via - Business Ideas Blog]

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The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

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Make Your Ideas Mean Business

Idea of the day - PickyDomains.com, world's first risk free naming agency

7 Great Free Websites And Services That Almost Nobody Knows About

2011-11-10T07:36:00.001-08:00

Have you ever wondered what Gmail, Hotmail, YouTube, ImageShack, and Flickr have in common? Aside from being popular, one-word sites (duh!), they have one thing in common: they're all FREE.

And we all love freebies, right?

But did you know that there are other smaller niche sites that offer interesting stuff as well? And what's more, most of them are 100% free. Okay, so not all of them are totally free; and some of those juicier features require a small fee, but who cares? There’s still something free in there; and by golly, we are going to search for them until we turn blue (hopefully it wouldn’t take that long) and find what we’re looking for.

Want to know what sites are worth looking at? Here are the top seven on our list:

1. Bloove.com
Have you ever wanted to synchronize your phone, restore and back up your data, and edit your contacts all without those nasty cables, bluetooth hardware, and infrared ports driving you insane? Then you should get Bloove. This is a web-based, free phone management system and mobile backup in one. What's more, the name's got a nice ring to it, which makes us love it even more.

2. IconWanted.com
Do you look icons? No--we're not talking about those so-called Hollywood schmucks who get paid a bazillion dollars just to look cute on the big screen. What we’re talking about here are free icons for your website; and if you like these kinds of things, then go to IconWanted.com. This is the world's first search engine that looks for great icons you can put on your site, and currently, they have around 14,000 icons for FREE. Yes, folks, they're free—and way, way, much better than watching Mariah Carey act in Glitter, doesn't it?

3. SideJobTrack.com
Give your inner accountant a break and use SideJobTrack.com to handle your financial transactions. This free service is specifically id eal for part-time contractors who need to create invoices for all their part-time gigs.

4. RememberTheMilk.com
Have you forgotten the milk--again?!? Never fear; Remember the Milk is here. This site is a free online scheduler, to-do list maker, and calendar in one. What's more, it can easily be integrated with your phone, PDA, iPad, and iPhone, so the list will always be with you like Master Yoda in that great movie…uhh…huh…argh…what’s that name again?

5. TwitBacks.com
Twitter fans will love this site. TwitBacks is a free background creator that lets you customize anything and everything in your Twitter account. Not only that, but you can merge your links to your other social network accounts and place it into your Twitter background as well.

6. HootSuite
Are you tired of being soooo popular online? Then you should try HootSuite. This is a new service that helps you to simultaneously work with all social networks (s uch as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc) in just one interface. Its basic services are free, but you need to pay $5.99 a month to use their advanced options.

7. MyClasses.org
Like Facebook, which first started as a social network in college, MyClasses.Org is learning social network, centered on on non-academic learning (things like yoga, for instance or dancing, horseriding, etc.). MyClasses.org offers free CMS and webhosting for schools, retreats, studios, teachers, allowing you to post photos of your school, schedule, payment details, etc. In addition to that, you can search for all kinds of courses available in all major metropolitan areas worldwide.

Dmitry Davydov works for PickyDomains.com, world's first risk-free naming agency. We can find a perfect domain for you or your business and you pay us only if you decide to use it.

How To Turn $60 Into $1000 In Three Months With Domain Names

2011-11-05T03:21:00.001-07:00

.How To Turn $60 Into $1000 In Three Months With Domain Names

Here is an interesting story about 'renegade webopreneur' who turned sixty dollars into a thousand bucks as a 'domain profiteer' I just received via e-mail. Most likely, we'll see more and more stories like that.

2. Dallas Cowboys Return Cowboys.com Domain Name

The highlight of the conference was the live internet domain name auction on Friday, October 12th, at 2pm, hosted by Moniker. One of the domain names that was up for sale was Cowboys.com, a great domain name. The Dallas Cowboys apparently was amongst the many bidders for this name and ultimately won the auction for $275,000. Now, about a week later, they want to give it back.

3. Insider Domain Name Snatching Probed

The Internet's key oversight agency is investigating suspicions that insider information is being used to snatch desired domain names before an individual or business can register them.

4. Domain Squatter Wants To Give His Domains To Google In Exchange For A Job

"Creative minds write not a normal application, they will ensure that you will be attentive to them!" That's the first line of an open letter posted on adwordsgoogle.de, docsgoogle.de, labsgoogle.de, and five other domain names. The sites' owner and letter's author, German IT guy Sebastian Klein, wants to give his domains to Google... in exchange for a job!

5. Google Buys The Shortest Domain Name In Cyberspace - G.CN

SEARCH outfit Google has splashed out and bought the world's shortest domain name, G.cn. Most single letter domain names are supposed to reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, however there are a few cases of this not being so. Z.com is owned by Nissan, Q.com by Qwest, and X.com is owned by PayPal.

Shop Name Ideas
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Product Naming

Seven Cool Time-Saving Tools and Services for Techies & Bloggers

2011-10-17T03:36:00.001-07:00

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

If you have felt like you cannot fathom a way to get some free time from the stress of your work, then you are certainly not the only one to feel that way. In the hustle and bustle of modern society, many people find it difficult to get a some spare time for themselves. So, how would you feel if there were time-saving services and tools out there just waiting to be discovered? Well, in fact, there are thousands of such services and tools available right now and this list will provide you with seven of the best.

Search Engine Optimization – Use KeywordSpy.com

Keyword Spy in a nutshell is an Internet marketing tool used to find the best and most effective keywords for your website, including those used by the best sites out there and your competitors. With feedback that includes describing it as ‘invaluable’ and the ‘best tool for anyone’, plus a client list that includes American Express, IBM and Toyota, you know already that Keyword Spy is an effective tool to have in your armory for your Internet marketing quest.

Outsourcing – Use Freelancer.com

With a wide variety of skilled contractors available in professional fields such as design, writing and programming, Freelancer.com is a great service provider if you are looking to outsource work. Not only can it help in saving time, Freelancer.com can also help in saving you money. For example, a company could quote you a four-figure sum to carry out a web design job, whereas a contractor on Freelancer.com can offer a comparable service at a fraction of that figure.

Legal – Use BatesExpress.com

Seen as a menial task by professionals that have to do it, manual Bate numbering is a process that includes stamping Bates to all relevant documents every day. Thankfully, a solution in the form of Bates Express has dispelled any need to have to apply Bates manually. A simple tool that will apply a digital Bate to any type of document you require, Bates Express is great time-saver.

Accounting – Use QuickBooksOnline.Intuit.com

Used by over 200,000 businesses, QuickBooks Online is a simple-to-use service for accounting. QuickBooks Online saves you time, money and data, plus it gives you the freedom of accessing your account virtually anywhere.

Translation – Use Babylon.com

If your work or business has an international scope, then chances are that you will have to translate all relevant text into a language applicable to the country you are targeting. Babylon 9 is the latest product from the experienced Babylon.com team and offers you document and webpage translation, access to over 2,000 dictionaries/glossaries and seamless integration into Microsoft Office.

Intranets – Use Bitrix.com

Although not commonly known outside of Russia, Birtix is an essential tool when it comes to building an intranet within a business. With Bitrix Intranet 10 in place and a proficient programmer at hand, an Intranet could be effectively set up and running within the space of two days.

Branding – Use PickyDomains.com

Devised back in 2007, PickyDomains.com is an intuitive service provided to budding website owners that are struggling to devise a domain name to use. Risk-free and with over 1,500 domains selected to their name so far, PickyDomains.com has proven to be an invaluable service for many.

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

Manage Your Phone With Bloove

2011-10-05T23:53:00.000-07:00

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

http://bloove.com

Bloove is a cool new free mobile backup and phone management system. What makes it especially handy is the fact that it requires no hardware whatsoever – no cables, no Bluetooth, no IR ports, etc. The system is entirely is web based. Here is how it works.

First, you create online account. Then you download Bloove agent. Now you are able to manage contents of your mobile phones (contacts, SMS, settings, bookmarks) and save them online. This is also where you can edit things, because this is obviously more convenient than performing the same task with the phone itself.

Should anything happen to your phone (suppose, you lost it, when traveling abroad or want to upgrade to some shiny new model), you can get a new phone, go online via GPRS, 3G, Wi-Fi, etc, log into your account and have access to all that data. If needed, you simply synchronize or restore data to your mobile. This is MUCH more flexible than the usual ‘back it up onto your PC’ approach.

The only downside is that Bloove is free for backup one account/one phone only. If you want to restore or have multiple phones linked to one account – that’s gonna cost you $10 a month or $60 a year. For this cost you also will get some bonuses like scheduled automatic sync and integration with Google Contacts.

[Via - Uncommon Business Blog]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

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Make Your Ideas Mean Business

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

Bates Manufacturing Company

2011-09-25T02:01:00.000-07:00

http://batesexpress.com
The Bates stamp system was invented in 1892 by the Bates Manufacturing Company and hundreds of thousands of attorneys, paralegals and government clerks have been using it ever since. Bates Express is new electronic bates numbering software that frees legal professionals from having manually apply Bates numbers to paper documents.

The Bates Express softwarecomes with a number of the stamps that are most commonly used, but there is the option to have texts and images easily customized. The spamps are appllied automatically to emails, images, Word documents, PDFs, HTML pages when they are being printed out. The stamps can be applied both to a single document or be batched processed. The software is free to try and can be downloaded from www.batesexpress.com

Off Topic

2011-07-11T07:13:00.000-07:00

As you may (or may not) know, I own PickyDomains. After recent upgrade, we had a huge surge in orders, getting as many as 8 new orders in a single day. So basically we need your help and right away. What's in it for you? We charge $50 our clients for coming up with a cool domain. The person who suggests picked domain (that could be you, yes YOU) gets half of the fee. So if you are good with domains, names or slogans (you get more for slogans), go we need your suggestions right now. Here is registration link.

Here is a simple trick that will GREATLY increases your chance to get your suggestion picked. Most names are picked within two weeks, with day 2,3,4 most popular. Most new users work on the first three orders only. Because of difference in traffic depending on day of the week and time of the day, a new order may receive 200 suggestion during first few hours or 20. Then, as new orders are listed, old orders are pushed down and volume of suggestions for old orders goes down. So to increase your chances (after working on orders that we just added) go and work on ALL orders that were listed withing last 72-96 hours. These are going to be the first 15 orders on the Available orders list, generally speaking. And when you work on older orders, work BACKWARDS, submitting to order 15 first, then 14, then 13, because the owners of these are ready to make a decision. Do it even if you already made your suggestions to these when they initially appeared, because many clients feel overwhelmed when they receive several hundred suggestions within the first 24 hours. As the volume of suggestions drops down, they have more time too look at each individual suggestion - and if you are smart, these suggestions are going to be yours. This drop in volume is very significant, we've had one client tell us that they like the service, but here were too many suggestions and then the same person asked, why so few suggestions are coming in after the order was active for three days. Take advantage of that.

Looking For Domain Name Ideas? Use These Tools.

2011-06-25T02:02:00.000-07:00

Tools To Use If You Have Troubles Coming Us With Domain Name.

It all starts with a domain name and unfortunately cool domain names are harder to come by with each passing day. It seems that either cybersquatters registered every domain out there or somebody had the same idea just before you did. Don't despair, there are a lot of free or almost free online tools and services that will help you find great domain name.

1. Nameboy.Com

Nameboy is a free domain suggestions tool (others include ShoutDomains.com, NameTumbler.com, etc.) that uses keyword algorithms to automatically create domain names and check them for availability. Since all domains are generated by machine, most of suggestions are outright unusable, however you can get some ideas by using NameBoy. Free is free.

2. PickyDomains.com

Unlike automatic tools, PickyDomains is powered by humans (44,000+ registered contributors). This service isn’t free, but it’s inexpensive ($50) and you pay only if you decide to register one of the suggested domains. If you don’t like anything, you don’t pay anything. Risk-free crowdsourcing model in action. If you are good with words, you might want to try it on the contributor side, as 40%-60% of that client fee is paid to the contributor who made the winning suggestion via PayPal.

3. StuckDomains.com

There are a number of services in this niche both free and paid, easily found via search engine (‘expired domains’, ‘expired domain lists’). Expired domains are just what their name suggests – domains that have been previously registered and had since been dropped. The advantages and disadvantages of buying expired domain are the same – you inherit all the history, which could be free type-in traffic and existing backlinks, but it also could be ban from search engines for violations.

4. USPTO.Gov

If you need domain name for commercial purposes, it might be worthwhile to see if related trademarks have already been registered. Uncle Sam gives you antiquated but free online service for that. You can also file for trademark registration online, but brief visit to the site will make it clear why most companies rely on patent lawyers for that.

5. Google Translator

DuraLabs may sound cool, but ‘dura’ means ‘fool’ in a number of Slavic laungages. And if Kurva Technologies opens its office in Poland, expect riots in the street. While fear of ‘what it may mean in other languages’ may be overblown somewhat, it never hurts to check. You can also use Google Translator backwards. Some words, like ‘smart’ are overused in domain names. How about ‘cliste’, which is 'smart' in Irish. What about Swahili? Give it a try.

6. Rhymer Naming Tool

While Rhymer.com, as the name suggests, obvously has been created for a different reason, they do have a really cool naming tool that comes in handy. In basically adds different endings to a word you enter. For instance, you enter 'cat' and you get 'CatAdze', 'CatAsked' and 'CatAuled' (+ 8000 other suggestions). Thihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifs tool is cool for creating meaningless 2.0-ish domain names.

7. ReadableDomains.com

This is an automatic suggestion tool with a unique twist. If suggests domains based on a domain name you already liked. For instance, if you liked Bytex.Com, RD will offer you Betix.com, Batex.com, Bityx.com and a few others.

Happy (domain) naming!

Risk Free Business Name Ideas

2011-06-01T01:57:00.001-07:00

Free Business Name Ideas

Looking for business name ideas? Pickydomains.com is world’s first risk-free naming agency that opened its doors in 2007 and has come up with thousands of cool business and domain names, like GymGenius.com, Xutta.com, Geomium, Eyes On Fries Diets or GetMapped.Com since then.

The idea behind Pickydomains.com is brilliantly simple. If you need a business name that perfectly describes what you do and immediately stands out, you simply place your order. Right away you start getting dozens of suggestions from our contributors. If you find the name that fits you perfectly, you pay $50. If you don’t like any suggestions, you don’t pay anything. Hence, risk free naming service.

Currently, there are over 40,000 registered contributors, with several hundred being active on any given day. The system automatically tracks performance of each copywriter, by measuring how many submitted suggestions were liked or disliked by other clients. Based on that performance, each contributor is ranked 1 though 5. Higher ranked copyrighters receive better pay and can submit more suggestions. This way you don’t have to waste your time on sub par suggestions as the system automatically promotes best namers and pushes out the ones with little skills. We’ve also been told by several clients that they like our work better than that of branding agencies that charge anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000.

So if you are looking of business name ideas on a small budget, Pickydomains.com is the way to go. Hey, some folks even trust us to name their pets. And we named a strip club in Las Vegas too!

Car Sharing

2011-05-17T03:16:00.001-07:00

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

http://www.business-opportunities.biz/GoCarShare.com

A YOUNG entrepreneur is on the road to success after his car sharing business clocked up 5,000 users.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Drummond Gilbert came up with the idea for GoCarShare.com after seeing queues of cars each carrying just one person.

The 29-year-old, from East Hendred, near Wantage, launched his firm 18 months ago to reduce the number of car journeys on Britain’s road.

Now GoCarShare has linked up with Steventon’s Truck Festival, and its spin-off event, Wood, along with Glastonbury and the Hay Festival of Literature to get visitors sharing their vehicles.

Mr Drummond, a former accountant, said: “Things have really taken off and we have seen a big rise in the number of people who have signed up to the service. It was something I had wanted to do for a while and it’s great to see it becoming a reality.”

Last year the firm was shortlisted for a European best environmental start–up award.

Mr Drummond said the website, which is linked to social networking site Facebook, means people can get to know their co-travellers before setting off.

He said: “If I’m being honest, I would be very reluctant to get into a car with somebody I knew nothing about. That’s why we have incorp-orated Facebook.

“It means that, at the very least, people can see if they have anything in common with the people, or share the same friends, or maybe listen to the same music.

“That is what sets it apart from hitch-hiking.”

With more than 38 million empty car seats on Britain’s roads every day, car sharing can reduce the impact of vehicles on the environment.

And Mr Drummond said a lot of people are signing up because of the soaring cost of petrol.

He said: “Fuel costs went up 16 per cent last year and driving is becoming increasingly expensive.

“Obviously sharing a car makes commuting and travelling to one-off events a lot cheaper in the long run, which is appealing to a lot of people using the service.”

He added that it was “extremely exciting” to be partnering some of Britain’s biggest cultural festivals.

The former Radley School pupil, who runs the website from home, said: “It is a big move forward for us.

“It makes sense really – if you are driving to Glastonbury, then it is very likely that others from where you live will be doing the same. Why not travel down together?”

Truck Festival organiser Drew Brammer said using the service would help reduce the event’s overall carbon footprint.

He said: “I think using GoCarShare is a brilliant idea because it will bring down our environmental impact. Not only that, our festival-goers will get to meet other people on the way up and make new friends.

“I’ve done it before and always found it works fantastically well.”

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[Via - HeraldSeries]

All diets in review: detox diets, low fat, low carb diets and more

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

Who Would Pay For Punishing Themselves?

2011-03-24T03:30:00.000-07:00

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

http://www.ultrinsic.com/

With a college exam looming, Jeremy Gelbert found himself struggling for the motivation to sit down and focus. His friend Steven Wolf gave him a little incentive: He said he'd shell out $100 if Gelbert got an A -- but if Gelbert didn't, he'd have to pay Wolf $20. Gelbert took the bet and aced the exam.

That's when Ultrinsic was born. If the thrill of putting money on an exam provided some motivation for Gelbert, then it might do the same for other students, he reasoned.

"We recently got notice from the U.S. Patent Office that we got the patent for betting on grades," Gelbert says. "So that is a big win for us."

Gelbert, 23, and Wolf, 27, work full-time on Ultrinsic but aren't taking salaries. The company isn't yet profitable. About 7,900 students have created accounts, but only a few hundred actually have money in them.

Gelbert is confident the idea will take root.

"The business model is there. We have proof of concept," he says. "Now that we understand the model we are going to go ahead and ramp up. I wouldn't do it if I couldn't make money."

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[Via - CNNMoney.Com]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

10 Crazy Business Ideas That Made A Six Figure Profit

2010-06-29T04:45:00.001-07:00

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

1. Million Dollar Homepage

1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.

2. PickyDomains

Hire another person to think of a cool domain name for you? No way people would pay for this. Actually, naming domain names for others turned out a thriving business, especially, when you make the entire process risk free. PickyDomains currently has a waiting list of people who want to PAY the service to come up with a snappy memorable domain name. PickyDomains is expected to hit six figures this year. Full Story

3. Doggles

Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me.

4. LaserMonks

LaserMonks.com is a for-profit subsidiary of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank, an eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your cartridges. Hallelujah! Their 2005 sales were $2.5 million! Praise the Lord. Full Story

5. AntennaBalls

You can’t sell antenna ball online. There is no way. And surely it wouldn’t make you rich. But this is exactly what Jason Wall did, and now he is now a millionaire. Full Story

6. FitDeck

Create a deck of cards featuring exercise routines, and sell it online for $18.95. Sounds like a disaster idea to me. But former Navy SEAL and fitness instructor Phil Black reported last year sales of $4.7 million. Surely beats what military pays.

7. PositivesDating.Com

How would you like to go on a date with an HIV positive person? Paul Graves and Brandon Koechlin thought that someone would, so they created a dating site for HIV positive folks last year. Projected 2006 sales are $110,000, and the two hope to have 50,000 members by their two-year mark.

8. Designer Diaper Bags

Christie Rein was tired of carrying diapers around in a freezer bag. The 34-year-old mother of three found herself constantly stuffing diapers for her infant son into freezer bags to keep them from getting scrunched up in her purse. Rein wanted something that was compact, sleek and stylish, so in November 2004, she sat down with her husband, Marcus, who helped her design a custom diaper bag that’s big enough to hold a travel pack of wipes and two to four diapers. With more than $180,000 in sales for 2005, Christie’s company, Diapees & Wipees, has bags in 22 different styles, available online and in 120 boutiques across the globe for $14.99.

9. SantaMail

Ok, how’s that for a brilliant idea. Get a postal address at North Pole, Alaska, pretend you are Santa Claus and charge parents 10 bucks for every letter you send to their kids? Well, Byron Reese sent over 200000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him a couple million dollars richer. Full Story

10. Lucky Wishbone Co.

Fake wishbones. Now, this stupid idea is just destined to flop. Who in the world needs FAKE PLASTIC wishbones? A lot of people, it turns out. Now producing 30,000 wishbones daily (they retail for 3 bucks a pop) Ken Ahroni, the company founder, expects 2006 sales to reach $1 million.

To see other businesses that have not made the top 10 list but came pretty close, visit Uncommon Business Ideas Blog

Naked Science - Telepathy

2009-12-16T02:29:00.000-08:00

Link of the day - I will pay you $25, if you come up with a cool domain name for me.

Other cool documentaries:

Tales From The Jungle: Malinowski

Ideas Into Profit

Secrets of the Lost Empire / Pharaoh's Obelisk

How Much Protein Do You Really Need to Stimulate Muscle Growth

welcome to twitts - twittering society

Link of the day - I will pay you $25, if you come up with a cool domain name for me.

High Frontier

2009-08-18T02:31:00.000-07:00

Link of the day - I will pay you $25, if you come up with a cool domain name for me.

Outer space is open for business. From orbits 36,000 km away, satellites run our daily lives. They see and hear everything. But this booming $50 billion dollar a year industry is virtually unregulated. Space has become the exclusive domain of the biggest and strongest with America, Russia and China all developing weapons to take out each other's satellites. As space becomes increasingly commercialized and militarized, are we allowing the dangers to outweigh the potential benefits?

If Your Goal is to Lose 90 Pounds, Try Eat Stop Eat - but Please, Don't Expect a Fast Magic

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

How Shadow Economy Works - Explained In 10 Books

2009-06-13T01:36:00.000-07:00

1. Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor

In this revealing study of a Southside Chicago neighborhood, sociologist Venkatesh opens a window on how the poor live. Focusing on domestics, entrepreneurs, hustlers, preachers and gangs linked in an underground economy that "manages to touch all households," the book reveals how residents struggle between "their desires to live a just life and their needs to make ends meet as best they can." In this milieu, African-American mechanics, painters, hairdressers, musicians and informal security guards are linked to prostitutes, drug dealers, gun dealers and car thieves in illegal enterprises that even police and politicians are involved in, though not all are criminals in the usual sense. Storefront clergy, often dependent "on the underground for their own livelihood," serve as mediators and brokers between individuals and gang members, who have "insinuated themselves—and their drug money—into the deepest reaches of the community." Although the book's academic tenor is occasionally wearying, Venkatesh keeps his work vital and poignant by using the words of his subjects, who are as dependent on this intricate web as they are fearful of its dangers.

2. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds. In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. For example, Levitt traces the drop in violent crime rates to a drop in violent criminals and, digging further, to the Roe v. Wade decision that preempted the existence of some people who would be born to poverty and hardship. Elsewhere, by analyzing data gathered from inner-city Chicago drug-dealing gangs, Levitt outlines a corporate structure much like McDonald's, where the top bosses make great money while scores of underlings make something below minimum wage. And in a section that may alarm or relieve worried parents, Levitt argues that parenting methods don't really matter much and that a backyard swimming pool is much more dangerous than a gun. These enlightening chapters are separated by effusive passages from Dubner's 2003 profile of Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, which led to the book being written. In a book filled with bold logic, such back-patting veers Freakonomics, however briefly, away from what Levitt actually has to say. Although maybe there's a good economic reason for that too, and we're just not getting it yet.

3. Ragnar's Guide to the Underground Economy

Through detailed case studies Ragnar shows you how carpenters, woodcutters, farmers, housecleaners, computer consultants, mechanics, lawyers, vendors, locksmiths and others are cashing in on today's booming economy - and keeping what they earn by not paying taxes. From these undergrounders you'll learn how to locate work, get paid without supplying identifying numbers, prepare a realistic budget, advertise your services or product and finance your project when you can't go to the bank. You'll also learn the pitfalls of working off the books and what you can do to prepare for them.

4. How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning How to Live the Conserver Lifestyle

I thought that this book was so funny in places that I haven't laughed so hard, so much, for a long time. Charles is a skilled writer; the book is very readable, intelligent, thoughtful,and well organized. It contains a copious (even prodigious) amount of tips, for a 200-page book. Very practical, and at the same time touches on abtruse philosophical areas, especially at the end of the book.

Hey, I used to think I was cheap. This guy is CHEAP. His anecdotes include waiting for it to rain to take a shower instead of installing indoor plumbing. He had a big hole in the floor of his entryway, or somewhere in his house, into which the kids and a few guests fell. He refused to spend one cent covering the hole, until a neighbor told him about a steel grate they threw away years ago, so he went to the dump and found it.

The point is that you can learn from a top-notch "conserver"; an applied example I would give is to buy two gallons of milk when it's on sale and freeze one for later use (works well!). This guy probably drinks powdered milk though.

I disagree with his economic analysis; prudence CAN be a vice, as any virtue most certainly is in its extreme, or even overdone. But Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is not just about "McPimple Burger" or keeping up with the Joneses. Any system on a mass scale is going to have gaping faults, and the weaker of us might succumb to our basest impulses. But perhaps Long goes a bit too far the other way...

At any rate, he sounds like an economic anarchist. Very well thought out book, great advice.

5. Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

In Freakonomics, many people were fascinated by a section that described how most crack cocaine dealers lived at home with their mothers. Why? They make less money than minimum wage. The source of that factoid was research conducted on site by Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day, who describes in this book how he did that research and came to make decisions one day for part of the Black Kings gang in Chicago.

In the process of reading this book, you'll learn more than you ever expected to know about the ways that the poorest people support and protect themselves. You'll also find how drug-dealing gangs are both a help and a hindrance to the poor.

More powerfully, you'll be exposed to the great difficulties involved in observing the lives of the poor and the gangs that spring from them. The moral and ethical dilemmas this book presents are almost beyond belief.

6. Under the Table and Into Your Pocket: The How and Why of the Underground Economy

Under The Table And Into Your Pocket: The How And Why Of The Underground Economy by Bill Wilson will provide the non-specialist general reader with a complete education on a facet of the American economy rarely (if ever) covered in school. Beginning with an introduction to just some of the ways governmental regulations strangle business, overtax the little guy, and enable Washington to be the drunken big spender that it is today (if you overpay your taxes by $7,000 and don't reclaim it within three years you're out of luck - but underpay it by $7,000 and the IRS can and will come after you no matter how much time has passed!), Under The Table proceeds to demonstrate how the little guy can circumvent taxes by doing business away from Big Brother's prying eyes. From boarding houses and flea markets to roadside merchants and dominatrix work, Under The Table covers the benefits, disadvantages, tips, tricks, techniques and much more of common underground ways to earn a living. Under The Table is emphatically not a legal guide; neither the author nor the publisher assume any responsibility for the use or misuse of information contained within - but the eye-opening ins and outs of a truly free economy make for quite fascinating and advantageous reading.

7. Deep Inside the Underground Economy: How Millions of Americans are Practising Free Enterprise in an Unfree Economy

Are you fed up with giving so much of your hard earned cash to the government, then watching it get spent on ridiculous pork-barrel special-interest projects? Would you like to hold on to more of your money for your own special-interest boondoggles? The underground economy continues to grow in spite of ever-widening atttempts by the government to regulate and tax everything we do. Millions of Americans are practising fee enterprise in today's increasingly unfree tax society. This is the most comprehensive how-to book ever written for those entrepreneurial individuals who have decided to end their slavery to a wage and to government taxation as well. Discover how you can keep more of what you earn for yourself. Here you will find complete and up-to-date information on the ins and outs of guerrilla capitalism and the underground economy in this country.

8. Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging.

In December of 2001 Jeff Ferrell quit his job as tenured professor, moved back to his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, and, with a place to live but no real income, began an eight-month odyssey of essentially living off of the street. Empire of Scrounge tells the story of this unusual journey into the often illicit worlds of scrounging, recycling, and second-hand living. Existing as a dumpster diver and trash picker, Ferrell adopted a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. Riding around on his scrounged BMX bicycle, Ferrell investigated the million-dollar mansions, working-class neighborhoods, middle class suburbs, industrial and commercial strips, and the large downtown area, where he found countless discarded treasures, from unopened presents and new clothes to scrap metal and even food.

9. McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

In McMafia, Misha Glenny draws the dark map that lies on the other side of Tom Friedman's bright flat world. That connected globe not only brings software coders and supply-chain outsourcers closer together; it's also opened the gates to a criminal network of unsettling vastness, complexity, and efficiency that represents a fifth of the earth's economy, trading in everything from untaxed cigarettes and the usual narcotics to human lives and nuclear material. Glenny's a Balkans expert, and he begins his story there, with the illicit--but often state-sponsored--underworld that grew out of the post-Soviet chaos, but he soon follows the contraband everywhere from Mumbai and Johannesburg to rural Colombia and the U.S. suburbs. It's not just a hodgepodge of scare clips, though: Glenny reports from the ground but follows the leads as high as they go, showing how the dark and bright sides of the flat world are more connected than we imagine.

10. Living Well on Practically Nothing

Living Well on Practically Nothing: Revised and Updated Edition is for people who need to live on a lot less money. If you have been fired, demoted, retired, divorced, widowed, bankrupted or swindled - or you just want to quit your job and remain financially self-reliant - this book is for you. In it are hundreds of tips, secrets and necessary skills for living well on little money. Chapters include: Save Up to $37,000 a Year and Live on $12,000 a Year; Low-Cost Computers for Fun, Profit, and Education; Some Ways to Live on No Money at All; A Day of Cheap Living; A New Career or Business for You; Fix Things and Make Them Last; and Protect Your Investments and Make Them Grow. From cover to cover, this book is stocked with proven methods for saving money on shelter, food, clothing, transportation, entertainment, health care and more. The author left the "system" in 1969 and has worked for himself ever since. Let him show you how you, too, can live happily, comfortably and with complete financial freedom.

P.S. If you'd like to know how I make my money (it's not really "shadow" or illegal at all, but it give me freedom to do anything I want to, while providing steady stream of income), feel free to check out my websites - PickyDomains.com, NicheGeek.Com, StandupKings.com, SoftwareJudge.Com, Best Free Documentaries.

THE ILLUSION OF REALITY

2009-03-08T04:29:00.000-07:00

Link of the day - I will pay you $25, if you come up with a cool domain name for me.

In the last in the series Professor Jim Al-Khalili explores how studying the atom forced us to rethink the nature of reality itself. He discovers that there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist, finds out that empty space isn't empty at all, and investigates the differences in our perception of the world in the universe and the reality.

In the Dark Places of Wisdom

Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics

The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications

When Technology Fails

2009-02-28T03:39:00.000-08:00

Link of the day - The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life

Rarely in the specialized milieu of industrial civilization does one encounter a Renaissance man or woman-someone who is well-versed in a wide spectrum of disciplines and who can expound upon them in writing that is both articulate and engaging. So when I discovered Mat Stein's phenomenal When Technology Fails: A Manual For Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving The Long Emergency, I immediately contacted the publisher, Vermont's own Chelsea Green, for a review copy of this fabulous tome on preparing wisely for the end of the world as we have known it.

While this book at first glance may resemble something of a 21st century Whole Earth Catalog, it is so much more. Whereas that classic of some three decades ago served as a primer for individuals and groups seeking to live simply and sustainably, primarily because it felt good and seemed like the right thing to do, When Technology Fails, feels as if it has erupted out of the urgent necessity of this moment. Its intention is unmistakable: to offer a "bible for emergency preparation and survival" as well as green and healthy living. However, one should not assume that this book is a "survivalist" manual. It isn't about grabbing your bug-out bag with a few cans of beans in it and running into the woods dressed in camo. It is a book about surviving but also about living well in harmony with the earth community while using methods that allow one's lifestyle to endure and flourish.

The book begins by noting that technologies frequently fail and that the greater the number of earth's population and the more is consumed by it, the more the likelihood of irreversible failure of many aspects of technology. "Emergency preparedness," Stein says, "is cheap disaster and terrorism insurance." After offering a number of resources to introduce the reader to self-sufficiency, the book offers an explanation of the various threats now facing humankind: eco-threats, Peak Oil, bio and terror threats, and of course, natural disasters. As if to underscore humanity's intuitive sense of what lies ahead, Stein references the plethora of prophecies that have been around for millennia, originating primarily from indigenous peoples, and pointing to a culmination of catastrophes.

From here Stein launches into a chapter on short and long-term preparation-survival kits, first aid kits, and of course, food storage-recommending if possible, a cache of one year's supply. In the following chapter on "Emergency Measures for Survival", he includes not only the proper equipment and how to use it, but a remarkable section on developing a survivor personality and the importance of paying attention to one's intuition. Because some individuals may feel "intuition challenged"-as if they can't quite access it when they need it, Stein offers a "Testing Your Intuition" exercise which facilitates the process. Concluding this chapter and indeed all chapters in the book, are abundant references to books, websites, DVD's and other resources related to the topics at hand.

An extensive chapter on water discusses acquisition, how to disinfect, treat, and preserve it. In the face of energy depletion, one must assume that clean water may be available in the ground but power losses may make it inaccessible. Therefore, the use of hand pumps is suggested and a number of sources for purchasing them provided at the conclusion of the chapter.

A lengthy chapter on food growing, foraging, hunting, and storage includes basic principles of permaculture planting, pest control, a brief guide to wild edibles, methods of storing, drying, smoking, and preserving food, basic principles of hunting and trapping, fishing-all followed by a host of references to resources on each topic.

Trained as an engineer at MIT, Stein has produced an extensive chapter on "Shelter and Buildings" that leaves little to be desired. Anyone considering building a structure from scratch or remodeling parts of an existing structure should study this chapter which I would describe as thorough yet not technologically overwhelming.

One of the most daunting challenges of a post-industrial world will be what has been known in the age of oil as "health care." As all institutions collapse, we will be on our own entirely in terms of healing our bodies and minds. Stein offers us the best information I personally have ever seen on first aid, as well as a chapter on life after high-tech medicine. As well as a fascinating chart that illustrates the herbal medicinal counterparts to specific modern pharmaceuticals, Stein includes a section on colloidal and ionic silver, making one's own colloidal silver generator; recipes for colon, kidney, liver and parasite cleanses; homeopathy, electromagnetic fields, and various energy healing techniques. This chapter is so thorough and fascinating that I can only wish that it were required reading for 21st century medical students.

One of Richard Heinberg's favorite questions when discussing collapse preparation is: Do you know how to make shoes? While I don't know if Stein has ever heard Heinberg ask that question, his chapter on "Clothing and Textiles" would no doubt delight Heinberg or anyone who has given thought to the lack of access to new clothing in a post-industrial world. Here one finds a wealth of information on spinning, weaving, tanning, and footware.

Stein, the engineer, excels in his chapter on "Energy, Heat and Power" as well as the chapters on "Metalworking", "Utensils and Storage", and "Engineering, Machines and Materials." Equally fascinating is the chapter on "Better Living Through Not-So Modern Chemistry" in which he explains soap and candle making and the manufacturing of alcohol as a biofuel. Additionally, he discusses the making of vinegar, glue, and vegetable oils.

So is there any point on which I disagree with Stein? Yes indeed. Whereas he states his intention to prevent the collapse of civilization, from my perspective, collapse is well underway and has been for some time; our challenge at this point in history is not to prevent it, but to consciously open to it with honesty and logistical and emotional preparation. In the final chapter of When Technology Fails "Making The Shift to Sustainability" Stein addresses the attitude we must hold as we witness the dizzying changes around us and the dissolution of a global economy engendered and fueled by mindless, rampant consumerism. Here, Stein offers suggestions for collective action as well as how we can live our own "great turning."

In a recent communication with Mat Stein we observed that When Technology Fails and my forthcoming book Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse are natural companion pieces-one offering extraordinary training in logistical preparation for a post-industrial world, and the other offering an emotional and spiritual roadmap for navigating what will invariably be a daunting-sometimes protracted, sometimes sudden-transition.

I cannot recommend highly enough When Technology Fails for everyone who takes the "long emergency" even a little bit seriously. For as the ancient Chinese proverb states, "Is it not already too late if one waits until one is thirsty to begin digging a well?"

Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy

Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak

Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash

Ralphie May - Prime Cut

2009-01-16T04:18:00.000-08:00

Link of the day - A Practical Guide to Racism

I have become a huge fan of Ralphie's in this past year. I started with his first DVD, Just Correct, and thought it was well above average. His second DVD, Girth of a Nation, is one of the best stand up shows I have ever seen. Prime Cut is his third, and while it isn't as good as Girth of a Nation, it's still hilarious!

I was appalled at the other reviews here. I had seen this act on Comedy Central and had loved it. I needed to get a copy, but thought I must have the wrong DVD when I saw these few negative reviews. I bought it anyway, and it is the right DVD, and it is still a riot. So here I am to speak up for Ralphie, and hopefully others won't be put off by any unjust low ratings.

One reviewer thought he was too "toned down" or censored in this show and the other thought he was too "raw" or offensive for her tastes. I guess my girlfriend and I are in the middle- we both laughed our a*s*s off.

He doesn't curse much in this DVD, but he does not shy away from being offensive or sexually crude (to put it lightly), but that is either fine with you or it isn't. This is your only warning. Don't act surprised. Don't.

Ape man: adventures in human evolution

Man Hunters: Turkish Toyboys

Live & Smokin' - Richard Pryor Documentary

A People's History of American Empire

Who Owns Culture?

2008-06-26T00:35:00.000-07:00

Link of the day - Who Is Shawn Casey? Is He For Real?

Link of the day - Who Is Shawn Casey? Is He For Real?

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Was Da Vinci’s Mother a Slave?

Five Online Millionaires You’ve Never Heard About

A&E - Heroin Hits Home

Homeboy No More

Sex.com: One Domain, Two Men, Twelve Years and the Brutal Battle for the Jewel in the Internet's Crown

2008-06-18T01:52:00.000-07:00

Link of the day - 100% Free Ringtones, Wallpapers And Games

Link of the day - 100% Free Ringtones, Wallpapers And Games

Forget the lubricious or lascivious, there's little if any of that in Kieren McCarthy's business-thriller/page-turner. Its essential subject matter is on the face of it dry as a bone: trademarks, internet domain names or URLs, intellectual property rights, and the civil legal system that arbitrates on all of the above.

Yet McCarthy makes the topic alive, fraught, fascinating and above all important: to you and me as media users, to would-bet net entrepreneurs, to anyone to whom ideas - and their protection and promotion - is important.

If you were to derive just one lesson from McCarthy, it would be this:

Don't bother staking your claim to ANY I.P. (intellectual property) unless you are prepared to defend it (metaphorically speaking) by blood and the sword.

Personally, I would have been quite unable to withstand the legal, financial and emotional pressure to which the founder of sex.com was subjected when his site was stolen from him and, finally, after years of legal battles, restored.

It is quite likely that, by winning the battle for himself, he fought and won what would have been many a future battle for the rest of us. URLs (including the very one you're looking at now!) are that bit safer from thieves and pirates because of the victory described in this book.

But oh how close, in the dying days of the saga, victory looked like turning to the sourest possible defeat!

Rush to your credit card wallet and buy this book now. Buy two: you're sure to know a net fiend who'll find it instructive and enthralling.

Judge reduces trust fund for Leona Helmsley's dog

The Craziest Way To Buy A Lobster

Data Fudging 101. The History Of US Government Statistics Manipulation

Wow! You'll Pay Me To Do What?

2008-05-13T03:25:00.001-07:00

http://www.pickydomains.com/

PickyDomains.Com is a perfect example of how to turn one’s talent into a profitable business. With ever expanding Internet and tens of millions existing websites, finding an available domain name that’s not already taken by cybersquatters can be a real nightmare.

But one man’s problem is another man’s solution. Rather than to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a domain name on the aftermarket, an increasing number of web entrepreneurs turn to professional “domain namers�?.

While most naming agencies charge a non-refundable fee that can be as high as $1500 for a corporate domain, one service that unites 17 professional domain namers from countries like United States, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, decided to offer a risk-free service that costs only 50 dollars per domain.

After 50 dollars are deposited, clients start getting a list of available domain names via e-mail for a period of 30 days. If they see a domain they like, they register it and notify the service about domain acquired. The individual, who came up with the name, gets $25, the other half going to the service. If no domain is registered, the money is refunded in full.

While the idea is brainlessly simple, it appears that PickyDomains.Com has no competition with its risk-free business model. But that is almost certain to change as more people find out that finding available domain names for other people can be a profitable business.

Hofmanns Potion

The Bridge

The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer

One Documentary That's Sure To Shock You.

The Secret Life of Cats

Victim of burglary uses remote connection to get her laptop back

2008-05-11T03:07:00.000-07:00

The Journal News reports that: "A tech-savvy White Plains woman whose apartment was burglarized solved the crime herself after she was able to log on to her stolen laptop, photograph one of the suspects with it and get photos of another, police said."

The alleged burglars, Edmon Shahikian and Ian Frias, went online with the stolen laptop. One of the victims, who works at The Apple Store in The Westchester mall, went online with another computer

and used the "Back to My Mac" program to determine that her stolen MacIntosh laptop indeed was signed onto the Web and that someone was using it to shop online. She then activated the stolen computer's camera, allowing her to "see" what was in front of the laptop.
.
At first, police said, she saw only an empty chair. But a short time later, they said, she was able to photograph a man, Shahikian, sitting in front of her stolen laptop. The victim then was able to find photos of Frias using the computer after it had been stolen, police said.

No Sex Life For Startup Founders

Do Online Reputation Management Services Work?

Startups That Came Back From The Dead

The Dumbest Business Decisions Of All Times

Welcome to Your Brain

2008-04-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

"Welcome to Your Brain" examines the kinds of questions that got me interested in neuroscience 20 years ago when I was a college student fascinated by Oliver Sacks.

The tour of our mental landscape is presented in very short chapters that are punctuated by "Did you know?" "Practical tip" and "Myth" pullout boxes. The scientifically-accurate, up-to-date information covers details about how the brain works, while also providing a plethora of fun dinner-table conversation starters.

"Welcome to Your Brain" provides a great entry point for curious students and anyone interested in learning more about science. It's unusual to find a book that covers both the biological details as well as the science and society issues related to the brain.

So if you are curious why you can't tickle yourself, what the Dalai Lama thinks about reaching enlightenment through "artificial" means like drugs or surgery, and how brain function is related to prejudice, you'll want to check out "Welcome to Your Brain."

Textbook Rentals Can Be A Profitable Business

BookMooch.Com Success Story

Google Continues Hiding Parked Domain Clicks

PickyDomains.Com Reviewed By John Chow

Brain Rules

2008-04-14T01:54:00.000-07:00

With a fabulous DVD (stimulate more of the senses, Rule #9 and the visual trumps all, Rule #10) to kick off the book, this direct, funny, fast romp through about 30 years of brain research makes neurocognitive findings fun! "If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom," says Medina--and we thank him for confirming what a lot of us have sensed for a long time.

Other important Brain Rules: we need to move to learn better, every brain is wired differently (there is no one type of learner and we need to construct environments that celebrate cognitive diversity in schools) and perhaps most important: We are powerful and natural explorers! I sure do wish everyone who designs instruction, works in schools, or (tries to!) learn in schools would read this. We don't pay attention to boring things.

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Yahoo not opposed to Microsoft deal: source

2008-04-07T02:24:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Yahoo is not opposed to a deal with Microsoft but Microsoft should pay more than $31 a share if it wants to buy the company, Yahoo plans to say in a letter to Microsoft, a person familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

In the letter to be sent on Monday, Yahoo is also expected to reject Microsoft's suggestion that its business is deteriorating, the person said.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer in a letter to Yahoo's board on Saturday threatened to lower his company's bid and mount a proxy campaign if the Internet company does not agree to a deal in the next three weeks.

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2008-03-18T02:22:00.000-07:00

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Software engineer is top U.S. "mental athlete"

2008-03-10T02:58:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A 31-year-old software engineer recalled the correct order of an entire deck of playing cards in 2 minutes and 27 seconds on Saturday to take the title of having the best memory in the United States.

Chester Santos of San Francisco beat two other finalists to win the USA Memory Championships in New York that saw dozens of "mental athletes" over age 12 battle through seven rounds of competition in a Manhattan auditorium.

"I'm in a good mood," Santos told Reuters after his win, in which he correctly recalled the 10 of diamonds to qualify for the World Memory Championships scheduled to take place later this year in Bahrain.

He attributed his win to spending a few hours each night after work practicing his memory.

Championship challenges included memorizing a long and previously unpublished poem, recalling the names of 99 people whose photos had been shown 15 minutes earlier and retaining a list of numbers 20 digits wide and 25 rows long.

"These people are not freaks, they are not nerds, they are people that have trained their brain," said event founder Tony Dottino.

"People are deathly afraid of losing their memories, but if you practice and use the right techniques, you can develop your memory at any age," said Dottino, a management consultant.

Finalist Daniel Naftalovich, 18, a New York high school student, who like Santos had just five minutes to learn the order of the deck before reciting it onstage in front of an audience, said visualizing a card or word was key to memorization.

Santos, who won the contest for the first time after five tries, said he matched a person, action and object with each of the 52 cards to help jog his memory.

Using these kinds of techniques, memorizing phone numbers "are a piece of cake," he said.

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Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words

2008-03-02T01:52:00.000-08:00

NEW DELHI — The latest bane of office productivity is Scrabulous, a virtual knockoff of the Scrabble board game, with over 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users.

Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once.

Everyone seems to love the online game — everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.

In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company. Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game.

Jayant Agarwalla, 21, said they did not create Scrabulous to make money, even though they now collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising. They just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers, and their favorite (unauthorized) site had started charging, he said.

“Our family has been playing the game for 50 years now,” he said, and received a set when the game first came out in India. His mother encouraged him and his 26-year-old brother, Rajat, to play as a learning tool, often with a dictionary by the board.

Scrabulous, which most users play on the Facebook social-networking site, has a board that looks just like Scrabble, and the same number of letter tiles with the same point values. Players can send invitations to others on Facebook or search for strangers to play with by posting messages.

There is no time limit for moves or games. Scrabulous keeps track of player statistics, and it does not allow fake words. It cannot, however, prevent players from cheating. One method is an unaffiliated online “helper” program, which generates a list of possible words based on the letters a user has.

Two game companies, RealNetworks of Seattle and Electronic Arts of Redwood City, Calif., say they have signed deals with Hasbro to create online versions of the company’s games. Both say their versions of Scrabble will be out shortly. But Scrabulous has already brought Scrabble a newfound virtual popularity that none of the game companies could have anticipated.

The threat of legal action has not gained the companies many admirers. Many Scrabulous fans, some of whom say they bought the board game for the first time after playing the online version on Facebook, call their approach heavy-handed and out of touch.

“The big thing that Hasbro is missing is that this is targeting a young audience that in general is not into board games,” said Venkat Koduru, the 15-year-old founder of the Facebook group “Save Scrabulous.”

Mr. Koduru had three Scrabulous games going as of Wednesday. He has gathered names of more than 1,000 people who have pledged to never buy a Scrabble board if Hasbro and Mattel shut down the online game.

Other groups devoted to saving the game have recently been created on Facebook, including “Please God, I Have So Little: Don’t Take Scrabulous Too.” Tens of thousands of fans have joined in, threatening to boycott Hasbro and Mattel products.

Iain Morgan, 34, a music producer in London who goes by the name Iain Easy, is playing 25 games of Scrabulous at the same time. The funny thing is, he said, he was never a fan of the original board game.

Mr. Morgan, who is the host of a Facebook group called “Help, I’m a Scrabulous Addict,” attributes the game’s popularity to “all these people who are bored at work in their office,” and added that the game keeps him in regular contact with his mother.

The legal questions concerning Scrabulous are complicated by the interests of the companies that own the rights to Scrabble.

Harold Zeitz, senior vice president for games at RealNetworks, said Friday that he was working closely with the Agarwalla brothers to bring the official Scrabble game to Facebook users.

Hasbro, meanwhile, said in a statement that Electronic Arts was planning to release an online version of Scrabble this spring. And Mattel, which signed a deal with RealNetworks last July, says that settling with the Agarwallas would set a bad precedent.

Neither Hasbro nor Mattel would disclose the number of Scrabble board games they have sold since Scrabulous started becoming popular last year. Hasbro estimates it sells one million to two million Scrabble boards a year in North America.

To some online marketing experts, Scrabulous represents a turning point for the board game industry, which has struggled for years to recreate itself as new generations turned alternatives like the Xbox and the GameBoy.

“If you’re Hasbro or Mattel, it isn’t in your interest to shut this down,” said Matt Mason, a consultant to the entertainment industry and author of “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.”

The board game industry will be forced to adapt, Mr. Mason predicts, just as the music industry has adjusted to unauthorized downloads of songs. “If something’s already out there and proven, the companies should go with it,” he said.

For their part, Mattel and Hasbro are trying to protect their franchise as consumers turn increasingly to the Internet for entertainment. They say they consider Scrabble a crown jewel and are working on marketing campaigns for the game’s 60th anniversary this year. The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board.

Scrabble began as Lexico in 1931, the creation of an out-of-work architect, Alfred Mosher Butts. He determined the frequency of each letter in the game and its value by reviewing the front page of The New York Times. His patent was denied, and it was 17 years before he found a manufacturer, which renamed the game Scrabble.

It took many more years before Scrabble became popular, thanks in part to a Macy’s chairman who was a fan, according to the game’s official history.

The Scrabble brand in North America was passed from manufacturer to manufacturer. It landed with Hasbro in 1989. The British game maker J. W. Spear & Sons owned the rights outside North America until the company was bought by Mattel in 1994.

The board game has had a core group of close-knit, intense fans for decades. They attend tournaments, refer to amateurs as “living room players,” and memorize lists of two-letter words.

Until Scrabulous landed on Facebook, no one could have mistaken the game, which had only a few thousand users, for a fast-growing phenomenon.

The Agarwallas introduced their first Scrabble knockoff Web site, bingobinge.com, in August 2005, and renamed it Scrabulous.com a year later. In May 2007, one of the site’s users suggested they adapt the game as a Facebook application, and it took off.

After 25 years with the National Scrabble Association, John D. Williams Jr., the executive director, said he had seen numerous copyright infringements of Scrabble, but the Scrabulous program on Facebook was the most “widespread and intense.”

Dozens of other Web sites offer unauthorized versions of Scrabble, but most force users to play in real time or require clunky downloads to play.

“People believe it to be in the public domain, like chess,” Mr. Williams said. “The idea that Scrabble belongs to a corporation is something that people don’t or are unwilling to accept.”

The Agarwalla brothers are avid players themselves — Jayant had 14 Scrabulous games going as of Saturday, and Rajat was playing 19.

Jayant, who is responsible for the game’s player interface and customer support, said, “People rarely find time to sit down anymore with their family and friends, to invite people over, to prepare the tea and biscuits.”

Even though it is easy to cheat at Scrabulous, he says he thinks few players actually do. “You may be doing it for personal glory, but it really takes the fun out of the game,” he said.

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Smugglers Return iPhones to China

2008-02-18T02:43:00.000-08:00

SHANGHAI — Factories here churn out iPhones that are exported to the United States and Europe. Then thousands of them are smuggled right back into China.

The strange journey of Apple’s popular iPhone, to nearly every corner of the world, shows what happens when the world’s hottest consumer product defies a company’s attempt to slowly introduce it in new markets.

The iPhone has been swept up in a frenzy of global smuggling and word-of-mouth marketing that leads friends to ask friends, “While you’re in the U.S., would you mind picking up an iPhone for me?”

These unofficial distribution networks help explain a mystery that analysts who follow Apple have been pondering: why is there a large gap between the number of iPhones that Apple says it sold last year, about 3.7 million, and the 2.3 million that are actually registered on the networks of its wireless partners in the United States and Europe?

The answer now seems clear. For months, tourists, small entrepreneurs and smugglers of electronic goods have been buying iPhones in the United States and then shipping them overseas.

There the phones’ digital locks are broken so they can work on local cellular networks, and they are outfitted with localized software, essentially undermining Apple’s effort to introduce the phone with exclusive partnership deals, similar to its primary partnership agreement with AT&T in the United States.

“There’s no question many of them are ending up abroad,” said Charles R. Wolf, an analyst who follows Apple for Needham & Company.

For Apple, the booming overseas market for iPhones is both a sign of its marketing prowess and a blow to a business model that could be coming undone, costing the company as much as $1 billion over the next three years, according to some analysts.

But those economic realities do not play into the mind of Daniel Pan, a 22-year-old Web site designer in Shanghai who says a friend recently bought an iPhone for him in the United States.

He and other people here often pay $450 to $600 to get a phone that sells for $400 in the United States. But they are happy.

“This is even better than I thought it would be,” he said, toying with his iPhone at an upscale coffee shop. “This is definitely one of the great inventions of this century.”

Mr. Pan is among the new breed of young professionals in China who can afford to buy the latest gadgets and the coolest Western brands. IPhones are widely available at electronic stores in big cities, and many stores offer unlocking services for imported phones.

Chinese sellers of iPhones say they typically get the phones from suppliers who buy them in the United States, then have them shipped or brought to China by airline passengers.

Often, they say, the phones are given to members of Chinese tourist groups or Chinese airline flight attendants, who are typically paid a commission of about $30 for every phone they deliver.

Although unlocking the phone violates Apple’s purchase agreement, it does not appear to violate any laws here, though many stores may be avoiding import duties.

Considering China’s penchant for smuggling and counterfeiting high-quality goods, the huge number of iPhones being sold here is not surprising, particularly given the popularity of the Apple brand in China.

Indeed, within months of the release of the iPhone in the United States last June, iPhone knockoffs, or iClones as some have called them, were selling here for as little as $125. But most people opt for the real thing.

“A lot of people here want to get an iPhone,” says Conlyn Chan, 31, a lawyer who was born in Taiwan and now lives in Shanghai. “I know a guy who went back to the States and bought 20 iPhones. He even gave one to his driver.”

Negotiations between Apple and China Mobile, the world’s biggest mobile-phone service operator with more than 350 million subscribers, broke down last month, stalling the official release of the iPhone in China. Long before that, however, there was a thriving gray market.

“I love all of Apple’s products,” said a 27-year-old Beijing engineer named Chen Chen who found his iPhone through a bulletin board Web site. “I bought mine for $625 last October, and the seller helped me unlock it. Reading and sending Chinese messages is no problem.”

An iPhone purchased in Shanghai or Beijing typically costs about $555. To unlock the phone and add Chinese language software costs an additional $25.

For Apple, the sale of iPhones to people who ship them to China is a source of revenue. But the company is still losing out, because its exclusive deals with phone service providers bring in revenue after the phone is sold. If the phones were activated in the United States, Apple would receive as much as $120 a year per user from AT&T, analysts say.

But there are forces working against that. Programmers around the world collaborate on and share programs that unlock the iPhone, racing to put out new versions when Apple updates its defenses.

While Apple has not strongly condemned unlocking, it has warned consumers that this violates the purchase agreement and can cause problems with software updates.

Some analysts say abandoning the locked phone system and allowing buyers to sign up with any carrier they choose, in any country, could spur sales.

“The model is threatened,” Mr. Wolf, the analyst, said. But “if they sold the phone unlocked with no exclusive carrier, demand could be much higher.”

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the proliferation of iPhones in China. When asked about the number of unlocked iPhones during a conference call with analysts last month, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, said it was “significant in the quarter, but we’re unsure how to reliably estimate the number.”

The copycat models are another possible threat to Apple. Not long after the iPhone was released, research and development teams in China were taking it apart, trying to copy or steal the design and software for use in knockoffs.

Some people who have used the clones say they are sophisticated and have many functions that mimic the iPhone.

In Shanghai, television advertisements market the Ai Feng, a phone with a name that sounds like iPhone but in Chinese translates roughly as the Crazy Love. That phone sells for about $125.

Some of the sellers of the copycats admit the phones are a scam.

“It’s a fake iPhone, but it looks nearly the same,” said a man who answered the phone last week at the Shenzhen Sunshine Trade Company, in southern China’s biggest electronics manufacturing area. “We manufacture it by ourselves. We have our own R. &D. group and manufacturing plant. Most of our products are for export.”

Most people here seem to want the glory that comes with showing off a real iPhone to friends.

“My friends envy me a lot,” says Mr. Pan, the Web designer. “They say, “Wow, you can get an iPhone.’ ”

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Can Yahoo avoid being gobbled up by Microsoft?

2008-02-14T02:37:00.000-08:00

Can Yahoo avoid being gobbled up by Microsoft?

Many analysts say it is increasingly unlikely.

Since Microsoft first made public its buyout offer on Feb. 1, Yahoo has held talks with several potential partners, including Google, the News Corporation and Time Warner’s AOL unit, about an alternate deal that would keep Yahoo out of the hands of the software giant.

While some of those conversations continue, no deal has emerged and a growing chorus of analysts and investors say it is improbable that anyone will come up with an offer that is more attractive to Yahoo shareholders than Microsoft’s, which was originally valued at $31 a share.

“It seems like Yahoo’s strategic options are relatively limited,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst with Citigroup. “It is hard to see a scenario that could create as much value for shareholders as quickly as a Microsoft offer.”

The latest to have intensified talks with Yahoo is the News Corporation, but participants on both sides describe the discussions as “a long shot.”

The talks center on merging some of Fox’s interactive assets — led by MySpace — with Yahoo. The News Corporation would emerge as a major shareholder of Yahoo. It is engaged in the talks partly because, as one participant said, “there’s nothing to lose.”

The News Corporation had sought a similar combination of MySpace and Yahoo last year, people involved in the talks said, but Yahoo rebuffed the overture before a formal bid was ever made.

At the time, the News Corporation had teamed with Providence Equity Partners, a private equity firm that focuses on media. The latest round of discussions is unlikely to include Providence, these people said, though it remains a possibility.

Yahoo and the News Corporation both declined to comment.

The talks with the News Corporation follow a show of interest from Google, whose chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, called his counterpart at Yahoo, Jerry Yang, to offer his company’s help in keeping Yahoo independent after Microsoft’s bid. The two companies discussed the possibility of Yahoo’s outsourcing its search-related ad business to Google, according to people briefed on the talks.

Many analysts believe that such a deal would generate more revenue for Yahoo because Google’s advertising technology generates more cash for every search query, on average, than Yahoo’s own technology. It would also produce substantial savings, as Yahoo could scrap its sizable engineering dedicated to search advertising.

This option had long been recommended by some Yahoo investors and analysts, but Yahoo executives had rejected it. They began considering it anew as a way to remain independent after Microsoft’s bid. But while talks between the two companies are not dead, many analysts and some Yahoo shareholders said that a deal was unlikely, in part because of antitrust concerns.

Meanwhile, two Time Warner executives confirmed that Yahoo has also proposed some sort of combination of Yahoo and AOL, but said that Jeffrey L. Bewkes, Time Warner’s new chief executive, is not likely to agree to such a deal. After the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, Mr. Bewkes is wary of big deals with Internet companies, one of the executives said.

Partnerships between Yahoo and MySpace or AOL could be complicated because Google is a leading seller of ads on both of those properties and owns 5 percent of AOL.

Google and Time Warner declined to comment for this article.

The narrowing of Yahoo’s options comes as some large shareholders are beginning to favor a deal with Microsoft — as long as Microsoft raises its price a bit.

On Wednesday, Bill Miller, a well-known portfolio manager at Legg Mason, which is Yahoo’s second-largest shareholder after Capital Research and Management, said he favored a deal with Microsoft, albeit at a higher price. Mr. Miller said that it would be hard for Yahoo to come up with alternatives that deliver more value than Microsoft would be willing to pay.

A person representing another large Yahoo shareholder said Wednesday that a deal with Microsoft appeared to be the only practical alternative for Yahoo.

“Both the AOL and News Corp. guys have been talking for the last year about the potential of merging AOL into Yahoo or MySpace into Yahoo,” the person said. “But it is too late. They blew it by not acting earlier.”

On Monday, Yahoo officially rejected Microsoft’s buyout offer, saying it was too low. The offer, a mix of cash and stock, was initially priced at $44.6 billion. After decline in Microsoft’s share price, it is now valued at $42.1 billion.

Microsoft vowed to press on with its bid, calling it “full and fair.” It has hired Innisfree M&A, a proxy solicitation firm, in preparation for a possible proxy fight to oust Yahoo’s board.

The person representing the large Yahoo shareholder predicted that Yahoo would soon begin negotiating a deal with Microsoft, and that the two would clinch a deal at a slightly higher price. “All this dancing around with partners will be quickly exhausted,” the person said.

On Wednesday, Microsoft said in a statement: “We are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties.”

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HarperCollins Will Post Free Books on the Web

2008-02-11T01:18:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine.

The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore.

“It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,” said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. “The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.”

Starting Monday, readers who log on to www.harpercollins.com will be able to see the entire contents of “The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter.

HarperCollins also plans to upload a different title by Mr. Coelho each month for the rest of the year.

For more than a year, visitors to HarperCollins’ Web site have been able to use the company’s Browse Inside function to look at some pages of most of the publisher’s current titles. Ms. Friedman said she believed that by displaying even more of the book’s content free, more readers would be enticed to buy.

Brian Murray, president of HarperCollins, said that the free electronic editions would be available only for one month, and readers would not be able to download them to laptops or to an electronic reader like Kindle from Amazon.com. The print function will also be disabled, but readers will be able to link to retailers like Amazon.com to buy copies of the books.

Ms. Friedman said she doubted most people would read the entire versions online, but HarperCollins would track whether the editions actually helped increase sales. “We will know very soon if we sense any kind of cannibalization,” she said.

There is evidence that readers still buy books even if they can get the content free on the Web. “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” a children’s novel illustrated with cartoons, was published online three years ago at Funbrain.com, an educational Web site. But the physical book has spent 42 weeks on the New York Times Children’s Chapter Books best-seller list.

Reached by telephone in Paris, Mr. Coelho said: “I believe that generosity pays off.” On his own blog, he gives readers links to pirated editions uploaded by readers in numerous languages. “I believe that they are not going to go beyond 20 or 30 pages” when reading on the Internet, he said.

Neil Gaiman, the fantasy novelist, short story and comics writer, is asking readers of his blog to vote on the title they would most like to give as a gift. An electronic scan of the winning title will be offered free on the HarperCollins site later this month. Mr. Gaiman said the online effort was not so different from what has been going on for generations.

“I didn’t grow up buying every book I read,” said the English born Mr. Gaiman, 47. “I read books at libraries, I read books at friend’s houses, I read books that I found on people’s window sills.” Eventually, he said, he bought his own books and he believes other readers will, too.

HarperCollins will also begin offering 20 percent of some books two weeks before the hardcover editions go on sale. Starting Tuesday, readers can see the first fifth of “The Perfect Wife” by Victoria Alexander; “Deep Dish” by Mary Kay Andrews; and “Friend of the Devil” by Peter Robinson, all books that go on sale later this month.

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Books You Have To Read To Understand What's Really Going On With US Now

2008-02-10T01:02:00.000-08:00

1. Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics

In Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets, Bonner and freelance journalist Lila Rajiva use literary economics to offer broader insights into mass behavior and its devastating effects on society. Why is it, they ask, that perfectly sane and responsible individuals can get together, and by some bizarre alchemy turn into an irrational mob? What makes them trust charlatans and demagogues who manipulate their worst instincts? Why do they abandon good sense, good behavior and good taste when an empty slogan is waved in front of them. Why is the road to hell paved with so many sterling intentions? Why is there a fool on every corner and a knave in every public office?

2. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

The author's thesis is simply stated: that neoliberal economic programs have repeatedly been implemented without the consent of the governed by creating and/or taking advantage of various forms of national shock therapy. Ms. Klein asserts that in country after country, Friedman and his Chicago School followers have foisted their tripartite economic prescription - privatization, deregulation, and cutbacks in social welfare spending - on an unsuspecting populace through decidedly non-democratic means. In the early years, the primary vehicle was dictatorial military force and accompanying fear of arrest, torture, disappearance, or death. Over time, new organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank were employed instead, using or creating impossible debt burdens to force governments to accept privatization of state-owned industries and services, complete removal of trade barriers and tariffs, forced acceptance of private foreign investment, and widespread layoffs.

3. The Other America

Few works of contemporary non-fiction have had more lasting impact on the social consciousness of the overall society from which it arose than "The Other America", Michael Harrington's now classic tome on the egregious conditions under which what we would now call the "underclass" lived in mid-20th century American society. With an uncommon verve and uncanny precision, Harrington painstakingly detailed the disgusting and shocking realities of life for those many millions of Americans of both color and ethnicity living lives of desperate poverty in the midst of the affluent society. Millions of readers, myself included, were shocked to discover the extent to which this world coexisted with our own, and many of the social action programs that arose in the 1960s and thereafter used this book as a kind of reference guide to the realities of poverty in contemporary society.

4. Hegemony or Survival : America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project)

In this highly readable, heavily footnoted critique of American foreign policy from the late 1950s to the present, Chomsky (whose 9-11 was a bestseller last year) argues that current U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are not a specific response to September 11, but simply the continuation of a consistent half-century of foreign policy-an "imperial grand strategy"-in which the United States has attempted to "maintain its hegemony through the threat or use of military force." Such an analysis is bound to be met with skepticism or antagonism in post-September 11 America, but Chomsky builds his arguments carefully, substantiates claims with appropriate documentation and answers expected counterclaims. Chomsky is also deeply critical of inconsistency in making the charge of "terrorism." Using the official U.S. legal code definition of terrorism, he argues that it is an exact description of U.S. foreign policy (especially regarding Cuba, Central America, Vietnam and much of the Middle East), although the term is rarely used in this way in the U.S. media, he notes, even when the World Court in 1986 condemned Washington for "unlawful use of force" ("international terrorism, in lay terms" Chomsky argues) in Nicaragua. Claiming that the U.S. is a rogue nation in its foreign policies and its "contempt for international law," Chomsky brings together many themes he has mined in the past, making this cogent and provocative book an important addition to an ongoing public discussion about U.S. policy.

5. Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis

Many Americans have resisted the notion that their country is an imperial power. The idea seems to contradict the values of the Republic and its Founding Fathers. But in Empire of Debt, prominent financial analysts Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin argue passionately that not only is the United States an empire, but it is also one whose end is coming soon. Bonner and Wiggin are the brains behind www.dailyreckoning.com, an iconoclastic and irreverent market advisory service that has long raised concerns about American indebtedness and warned of a looming dollar crisis. In Empire of Debt, a sequel to their earlier doom-and-gloom book Financial Reckoning Day, they elaborate on their argument that the U.S. economy is about to implode.

6. Superpatriotism

Superpatriots, writes Michael Parenti, are those people who place national pride and American supremacy above every other public consideration, those who follow leaders uncritically, especially in their war policies abroad. Superpatriotism is the nationalistic hype propagated by officialdom, the media, and various flag-waving groups. Parenti demonstrates how superpatriotism attaches itself to religion, sports, the military, the schools and big business. He questions whether its top politico-economic propagators are themselves really patriotic, given how they evade taxes, export our jobs, pollute our land and plunder the public treasury. With incisive probing and a humorous touch, Parenti addresses such urgent questions as: What does it mean to love one's country? Why is it so important to be Number One? What determines America's "greatness?" He examines how US leaders and the corporate media fan the flames of fear to win support for huge arms budgets, global aggrandizement, and the suppression of political dissent at home and abroad.

7. A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation

Why do markets keep crashing and why are financial crises greater than ever before? As the risk manager to some of the leading firms on Wall Street–from Morgan Stanley to Salomon and Citigroup–and a member of some of the world’s largest hedge funds, from Moore Capital to Ziff Brothers and FrontPoint Partners, Rick Bookstaber has seen the ghost inside the machine and vividly shows us a world that is even riskier than we think. The very things done to make markets safer, have, in fact, created a world that is far more dangerous. From the 1987 crash to Citigroup closing the Salomon Arb unit, from staggering losses at UBS to the demise of Long-Term Capital Management, Bookstaber gives readers a front row seat to the management decisions made by some of the most powerful financial figures in the world that led to catastrophe, and describes the impact of his own activities on markets and market crashes. Much of the innovation of the last 30 years has wreaked havoc on the markets and cost trillions of dollars. A Demon of Our Own Design tells the story of man’s attempt to manage market risk and what it has wrought. In the process of showing what we have done, Bookstaber shines a light on what the future holds for a world where capital and power have moved from Wall Street institutions to elite and highly leveraged hedge funds.

8. How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative

This book confirms everything you suspected was true about how politicians get elected in the country. It has the tone of a P.J. O'Rourke novel, hilarious and all too real at the same time because it happened. I laughed all the way through it, and then watched Hardball with Chris Matthews in a whole new light once I was done. One reviewer asked "who has ever heard of this guy?" and that is exactly the point! These nameless, faceless operatives and consultants are legion in both political parties and they are the ones who actually decide what candidates say, do, wear, etc. Raymond was a very high level player at the Republican National Committee, chief of staff to a republican congressman and ran numerous campaigns at the national level, he saw it all from the inside and it's not pretty. A great read, I highly recommend.

9. Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations

In "Peddling Prosperity", P. Krugman describes with clear and simple words what America's economic problems have been in the last 25 years. He presents theory, ideas, Government policies (or lack of) and individual stories - history, in fact - with such penetrating views that, while reading, one wishes the book could go on forever. We can only hope that he will repeat this achievement in the next book.

10. Battle For The Soul Of Capitalism

Jack Bogle, often called the "concience of the industry," has written a powerful book on a subject that concerns every American--"capitalism." As founder and retired CEO of the second largest mutual fund company in the world, Mr. Bogle understands capitalism. He has the unusual ability (for a businessman) to write beautifully, logically and understandably for the average reader. "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism" is the result. The thrust of Mr. Bogle's message (documented over and over) is that corporations are now controlled by their managers--not by their owners (shareholders). (The average CEO compensation has soared to 280 times that of the average worker.) Mr. Bogle deftly lays out the problem, but more importantly, he gives us the solution that will return capitalism to its owners and value creation. I could not put the book down.

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Google Works to Torpedo Microsoft Bid for Yahoo

2008-02-04T01:34:00.000-08:00

Standing between a marriage of Microsoft and Yahoo may be the technology behemoth that has continually outsmarted them: Google.

In an unusually aggressive effort to prevent Microsoft from moving forward with its $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo, Google emerged over the weekend with plans to play the role of spoiler.

Publicly, Google came out against the deal, contending in a statement that the pairing, proposed by Microsoft on Friday in the form of a hostile offer, would pose threats to competition that need to be examined by policy makers around the world.

Privately, Google, seeing the potential deal as a direct attack, went much further. Its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, placed a call to Yahoo’s chief, Jerry Yang, offering the company’s help in fending off Microsoft, possibly in the form of a partnership between the companies, people briefed on the call said.

Google’s lobbyists in Washington have also begun plotting how it might present a case against the transaction to lawmakers, people briefed on the company’s plans said. Google could benefit by simply prolonging a regulatory review until after the next president takes office.

In addition, several Google executives made “back-channel” calls over the weekend to allies at companies like Time Warner, which owns AOL, to inquire whether they planned to pursue a rival offer and how they could assist, these people said. Google owns 5 percent of AOL.

Despite Google’s efforts and the work of Yahoo’s own bankers over the weekend to garner interest in a bid to rival Microsoft’s, one did not seem likely, at least at this early stage.

For example, a spokesman for the News Corporation said Sunday night that it was not preparing a bid, and other frequently named prospective suitors like Time Warner, AT&T and Comcast have not begun work on offers, people close to them said. They suggested that they did not want to enter a bidding war with Microsoft, which could easily top their offers.

A spokesman for Time Warner declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Comcast. A representative for AT&T could not be reached.

In the meantime, people close to Yahoo said that the company received a flurry of inquires over the weekend from potential suitors. Some people inside Yahoo have even speculated about the prospect of breaking up the company. That could mean selling or outsourcing its search-related business to Google and spinning off or selling its operations that product original content, these people said.

“Everyone is considering all kinds of options and deal on search is one of them,” a person familiar with the situation said.

One person involved in Yahoo’s deliberations suggested that “the sum of the parts are worth more than the whole,” arguing that its various pieces like Yahoo Finance, for example, could be sold to a company like the News Corporation for a huge premium while Yahoo Sports could be sold to a company like ESPN, a unit of the Walt Disney Company.

Executives at rival companies were less optimistic about such a breakup strategy. “No one can get to a $44 billion price,” one executive at a major media company said, “even if you split it into a dozen pieces.”

In making its bid for Yahoo, Microsoft is betting that past antitrust rulings against it for abusing its monopoly power in personal computer software will not restrain its hand in an Internet deal.

In the United States, a federal district court in Washington ruled in 2001 that Microsoft had repeatedly violated the law by stifling the threat to its monopoly position posed by Netscape, which popularized the Web browser. The suit, brought during the Clinton administration, was settled by the Bush administration. But as a result of a consent decree extending through 2009, a federal court and a three-member team of technical experts monitors Microsoft’s behavior.

In 2006, for example, after Google complained to the Justice Department and the European Commission that Microsoft was making its MSN search engine the default in the most recent version of its Web browser, Microsoft modified the software so that consumers could easily change to Google or Yahoo.

In Google’s statement on Sunday, it said that the potential purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft could pose threats to competition that needed to be examined by policy makers.

Google’s broadly worded concerns lacked detailed claims about any anticompetitive effects of the deal, and the company did not publicly ask regulators to take specific actions at this time.

“Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?” asked David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, writing on the company’s blog.

Yahoo and Microsoft declined to comment Sunday on Google’s actions. Earlier on Sunday, Microsoft’s general counsel, Bradford L. Smith, said in a statement: “The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling No. 2 competitor for Internet search and online advertising.”

Google’s effort to derail or delay the deal on antitrust grounds mirrors Microsoft’s own actions with respect to Google’s bid for the online advertising specialist DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, announced in April.

The strategy is not surprising, considering that any delays would work to Google’s benefit. “Google can tap into all of the ill will that Microsoft has created in the last couple of decades on the antitrust front,” said Eric Goldman, director the High-Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law.

The outcome of any antitrust inquiry will hinge, in part, on how regulators define various markets. Microsoft-Yahoo, for instance, would have a large share of the Web-based e-mail market, but a smaller share of the overall e-mail market.

“The potential concern would be that Microsoft, if it acquires Yahoo, could do on the Internet what it did in the personal computer world — make technical standards more Microsoft-centric and steer consumers to its products,” said Stephen D. Houck, a lawyer representing the states involved in the consent decree against Microsoft.

Yahoo has not made a public statement about the proposed deal since Friday, when it said it was weighing Microsoft’s offer as well as alternatives and would “pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.”

Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said an antitrust review of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal could take a long time and “may well bleed into a new administration with an entire new view on antitrust than the Bush administration.”

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AeroGarden Review And How To Get One For Free

2008-02-03T01:18:00.000-08:00

I was lamenting about only having frech lettuce, herbs, chives, and tomatoes from may garden during the long fall-winter-spring parts of the year. The refrigerated stuff from the grocery store goes bad right away and does not taste as good as the fresh stuff from the garden, either.

Then I saw a Time Magazine page on the new AeroGrow AeroGarden, and I just had to try it out. After reading the AeroGrow website before making the purchase, I realized that buying one garden would not work for me, as the tomatoes cannot be grown in the same garden as lettuce & herbs. This is partially due to the large amount of room taken up by the tomatoes, and also because the lamp/watering cycle is different and finally because the nutrients are different.

So, I bought two gardens, along with the Salad Greens seed kit and Cherry Tomato seed kit. Each garden comes with a mixed herb kit, so I figured to mix in a few herbs with the other seeds, and if they did not work, no big loss.

The products came quickly and the instructions for assembly were very clear and well written with excellent diagrams. I came to realize that this somewhat pricey product at least comes from a company that produces a classy product (a rare thing these days). I found a space on a shelf beside the basement stairs, and placed both assembled gardens there. I also bought and placed a digital thermometer with maximum/minimum temperature memory readouts ($10 at Radio Shack), because I was unsure of what temperature extremes the plants might experience in that location (68-72 as it turns out).

The seed kits contain pre-seeded planting pods. Each pod is basically a plastic cup shaped frame with two pieces of foam rubber inside the cup part, like two slices of bread with the seeds sandwiched between them. They simply insert into the seven holes in the top of the garden's water tank. The Salad Greens and Herbs come with seven pods per kit, while the Tomatos come with three pods plus four hole plugs-the plants are bigger so three of them take up thw whole space available. The hole plugs prevent evaporation of the water through the unoccupied holes.

The water tank holds exactly one gallon of regular drinking water. Well water is not recommended, presumably because of impurities, and since I am on a well I bought two one-gallon plastic jugs of 'drinking water' at the store for 50 cents each and filled the tanks with their contents. A pump in the tank takes water and pipes it to the rim of each of the seven holes in the tank's top, and here the trickle of water flows into the foam sandwich of each seed pod. The foam stays moist and the rest of the water drips back down into the tank. The garden's 'computer' cycles the water flow on and off according to the amount recommended for the type of plant being grown. A water level sensor turns on a flashing red light when it is time to add more water to the tank.

The top of the garden is a reflector with two compact-fluorescent lamps, of the variety that has the special ultraviolet (UV) coating that causes the emmitted light to resemble sunlight. The reflector rides on a vertical pole that extends up from the garden's base, so you can raise and lower the lamps as required to keep them the correct distance above the plants. The garden's 'computer' also turns the lamps on and off according to a schedule tailored to the type of plant. If using the gardens in a place where the light might be a problem at night, you can syncronize the computer so that the lights are on only during the daytime and off when you are trying to sleep.

The seed kits come with little clear plastic cups that cover each pod until the seeds have germinated, then you can dispose of them. The kits also come with a bag of nutrient tablets, which you add to the water tank when the computer prompts you to by flashing a red light. The nutrients are tailored to the type of plant being grown, and there are enough of them to feed the plants during their anticipated life span.

I planted one garden with five salad green (leaf lettuce) pods, plus one pod each from the Herb kit, chives and parsley. The other garden got the threee pods from the Cherry Tomato kit; two reds and one yellow variety.

Each seed pod has a label that tells you how many days to wait for plants to appear after germination. All of my plants appeared like clockwork.

I have had the gardens for about six weeks now, and have been enjoying salads containing lettuce, parsley and chives plus other odds and ends from the fridge, for the last two or three weeks. The lettuce and herbs are all beautiful, with no problems from bugs or too much/too little water, excessive temperatures, etc. No need to wash the plants or check for bugs or pick off bad spots, everything goes straight to the salad bowl. What a joy! Even with only five lettuce plants, I have to eat two meals including salad each day to keep up with the growth. This would easily feed two people, and if all seven salad green pods had been used, three people.

The tomatoes are all doing well ahnd have been pruned according to instructions. It will be some time yet before they produce flowers, and then fruit. But based on the health of the plants, I expect a good yield.

Each seed kit comes with a full color manual/booklet that covers all aspects of 'planting', germinating, feeding, pruning (if required) and then harvesting the plants. There are also photos of plants where things have gone wrong (leaves burned because the lamps were not raised up as the plants grew taller, etc) with clear instructions on how to recognize problems and correct them. Harvesting instructions clearly tell how much can be taken at a time without killing the plant, and so on.

The AeroGrow gardens are a well designed, well built product with excellent documentation. All my visitors are amazed at how well the product works, and many have gone out and bought their own. I anticipate years of improved eating because of this product.

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A&E Biography - Tony Robbins

2008-02-01T01:29:00.000-08:00

Robbins was born Anthony J. Mahavorick in North Hollywood, California. He was raised in Azusa, California, and he attended Glendora High School. His parents divorced when he was seven years old, and his mother later remarried twice. Tony took on the surname of Jim Robbins, his second stepfather. Inspired by motivational speaker Jim Rohn, Robbins began selling his own seminars. He then went on to study neurolinguistic programming and to establish his career. In 1989, Robbins saw success using infomercials to promote his products.

In 1994, a routine medical check revealed a tumor in Robbins' pituitary gland. According to his recounting in Personal Power the tumor was actually an adenoma that had infarcted several years prior. Due to the pressure of the adenoma on his pituitary gland, he had circulating levels of growth hormone several times higher than what would be normal for an adult his age. This had resulted in a subclinical manifestation of the disease known as acromegaly, which doctors told Robbins was responsible for his remarkable growth spurts as a teenager, as well as his large hands and feet (He is 6 feet 7 inches tall, or 201 cm). After consultation with a number of different physicians, Tony eventually decided not to have the adenoma resected, as it was not causing any clinical manifestations, such as organomegaly or heart valve defects.

In a CNN interview in 2001, Robbins said it was difficult to end his 15-year marriage to Becky Robbins, saying it was the toughest decision of his life. He said that he also knew if he stayed with her, he'd be ruining her life and his. Robbins reiterates similar comments about his previous relationship in his recent Ultimate Relationship Program (recorded with family therapist Dr. Cloe Mandanes and also Sage Robbins).

In the same year he married Bonnie Humphrey (now Sage Robbins).

Anthony Robbins calls himself a peak performance coach as opposed to a motivational speaker. Robbins says that he attempts to find out what people do when they are at their peak, and then help them access that peak state whenever necessary, and he believes what he does is more effective than providing a rousing half-time speech and temporary motivation.

Robbins started his career promoting seminars for Jim Rohn, and then started teaching neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) after learning it from NLP co-founder John Grinder, who encouraged him to look into the firewalking experience. In 1983, Robbins located Tolly Burkan and learned how to firewalk from him. Robbins then added firewalking to his seminars, which enabled him to gain media coverage and launch his celebrity status. Robbins later began to teach what he referred to as Neuro-Associative Conditioning (NAC), and recently collaborated with Dr. Cloe Madanes on what they call Human Needs Psychology.

In his Personal Power program, he says that the difference between NAC and NLP, lies in the use of the word 'conditioning' as opposed to 'programming'. Robbins says his use of the word 'conditioning' implies that the subject has greater responsibility for his or her own change, as opposed to being programmed by someone else. Some free products by Tony Robbins can be found here.

Robbins' techniques, theories, and business practices have been the subject of criticism.

In a 2002 newsletter for the James Randi Educational Foundation, Randi comments on some experiences recounted by a participant at a 2002 "Unleash the Power Within" seminar. The participant recalled some experiences that had him question the credibility of Robbins. For instance, the participant questions the basis for some of the assertions made about Robbins' healthy diet system. There was also a demonstration at the seminar by one of Robbins' associates that was intended to show that the EMF from a mobile phone can weaken an arm as part of the marketing of an EMF reduction device. James Randi calls the applied kinesiology used in the EMF demonstration as "scam."

Roes also relates that some participants arriving with their partners or spouses found themselves separated and paired with strangers, and then were directed to repeatedly massage and confide in these strangers. Some participants were surprised and uncomfortable with this.

The participant was also strongly encouraged to sign up for the next seminar, and then found that, for him, the time span in which he had the opportunity to cancel and obtain a refund was too short.

Freelance writer Steve Salerno in his book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, states "NLP has shown up in many settings inside and outside SHAM" (his acronym for the Self-Help and Actualization Movement) but he particularly criticizes Anthony (Tony) Robbins, who he claims "made NLP his own, refining it and personalizing it into what he christened "neuroassociative conditioning" (a claim with which other proponents of NLP would disagree; see history section in NLP article). Salerno criticizes proponents of self-help, including Tony Robbins, stating it "actually fans the fires of discontent, making people feel impaired or somehow deficient as a prelude to (supposedly) curing them." Salerno opines that there are contradictions in Richard Bandler and John Grinder (the co-founders of NLP) ending up in court over who owned the rights to NLP given NLP's promotion in business for negotiations and conflict resolution and also in Tony Robbins having become divorced while marketing products for the "perfect marriage".

William T. Jarvis identifies what he believes are several flaws and misconceptions in the ideas, in particular about health and diet, in Robbins US national best seller, Unlimited Power : The New Science Of Personal Achievement. Robbins believes that deep breathing activates the lymphatic system, and likens the lymphatic system to the sewerage system of the body. Jarvis states that there is no evidence that different breathing makes long-lasting changes in the lymphatic system, but that any effects are temporary. Jarvis agrees with Robbins' encouraging participants to eat more fruit, but criticizes the way it is presented. According to Jarvis, Robbins incorrectly argues that fruit is the perfect food. In contrast Jarvis argues that milk is the closest to being the most complete food. Jarvis states that some of the information about drinking distilled water gives an inaccurate view of how the body metabolic wastes system functions. Jarvis believes that there are misconceptions about health benefits of food combining, which are supposedly based on Herbert Shelton's ideas, and that Robbins' evidence of a positive effect of undereating is flawed. Jarvis also writes that Robbins makes inaccurate claims about dietary protein requirements.

Robbins also recycles an oft-cited but unsubstantiated reference to the "Yale Study of Goals" in Unlimited Power as scientific evidence of the power of positive thought. The anecdote claims that a survey was taken of the 1953 graduating class at Yale, and only 3% of the class had written goals regarding their financial situations. Twenty years later the class was interviewed again, and the 3% of the class who had written goals were worth more than the other 97% of the students combined. This would have been strong evidence of the power of written goal setting, but the alleged Yale study appears to be an urban legend.

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LeapFrog Hopes for Next Hit With Interactive Reading Toy

2008-01-28T02:06:00.000-08:00

EMERYVILLE, Calif.-- LeapFrog Enterprises needs a knockout hit.

The company’s LeapPad became an instant sensation after it was introduced in 1999 and helped turn the small educational toy maker into one of the fastest-growing toy companies in history. But as the LeapPad aged, LeapFrog’s fortunes sagged.

This week, LeapFrog pulls the wraps off the LeapPad’s successor, the Tag, a thick, white and green plastic stylus that turns paper books into interactive playthings. LeapFrog is betting that the $50 Tag, which will be available this summer along with an 18-volume library that includes children’s classics like “The Little Engine That Could” and “Olivia,” will be the hit it badly needs. It calls the Tag its “biggest launch ever.”

The Tag, officially called the Tag Reading System, works a lot like the LeapPad. Children can tap a word with it and the stylus reads the word, or its definition, aloud. They can tap on an image to hear a character’s voice come alive. Interactive games test their reading comprehension. At its simplest, the Tag can also act as an audio book and simply read a story from beginning to end.

But while the LeapPad system required spiral-bound books to be placed on a clunky, laptop-sized plastic console with a pointing device attached to it, LeapFrog has put all of the Tag’s smarts into the inch-and-a-half-thick stylus. It works on books whose pages are imprinted with invisible dots that allow a small infrared camera at the tip of the Tag to recognize words or images on the page. That makes it far more portable and easier to use than the LeapPad, says Jeffrey G. Katz, the chief executive of LeapFrog.

“LeapPad was a phenomenon,” said Mr. Katz. “But Tag is a better product.”

The real question that LeapFrog investors are asking, however, is whether Tag will match, or even approximate, the commercial success of the LeapPad. “I’m reluctant to say,” Mr. Katz said. “I think it can be bigger, but I’m not going to forecast that.”

It’s not hard to see why Mr. Katz hesitates. The LeapPad quickly became the industry’s best-selling toy — a first for an educational product.

LeapFrog went on to sell 30 million LeapPads and related products worldwide, as well as more than 70 million companion books. In 2003, the LeapPad family of products brought in $330 million, nearly half of LeapFrog’s revenues.

But the LeapPad’s appeal began fading as it faced growing competition from the likes of Fisher-Price and VTech.

For investors, the LeapFrog story quickly turned from fairy tale to bad dream. While LeapFrog has introduced several other award-winning products, none matched the LeapPad in sales or profitability. LeapPad sales plunged and the company racked up losses that, in the past two years alone, are expected to top $200 million. LeapFrog shares closed Friday at $5.81, almost 90 percent below their October 2003 peak.

Analysts say Mr. Katz, the former chief executive of the online travel booking service Orbitz, who became LeapFrog’s chief executive in the summer of 2006, has helped rein in expenses and resolve long-standing inventory and manufacturing problems. He made modest staff cuts. On Friday, he announced another 85 layoffs amounting to about 10 percent of the company’s workforce.

But the linchpin of Mr. Katz’s turnaround strategy is a string of products that LeapFrog plans to introduce in the next few months. None is more important that the Tag.

“Tag needs to be successful,” said Sean McGowan, an analyst with Needham & Company. “LeapFrog needs this to redefine their leadership in the reading market.”

The Tag will be shown at DEMO, a high-profile technology conference in Palm Desert, Calif.

Mr. McGowan and other analysts who have seen the product are upbeat about its prospects and note that it is priced appropriately and aimed at LeapFrog’s core demographic — 4- to 8-year-old children. But predicting success in the toy business is notoriously difficult. “We’ll see if the market wants it,” Mr. McGowan said.

The Tag has already garnered some fans.

“When you put your pen on a character that doesn’t even have a line in the book and there is something funny that comes out of the character’s mouth, it’s a kick,” said Jane O’Connor, author of the best-selling Fancy Nancy series. Two of her titles are being adapted for the Tag.

Ms. O’Connor, who described herself as “not a very pro-technology person,” was a skeptic at first, but has since come around.

“Sometimes it might be easier for a child who is struggling not to have a parent breathing down their neck,” she said. “You get stuck, you tap a word. The only expectation is coming from you, the kid.”

LeapFrog developed the Tag in a relatively short 18 months because it already had much of the technology on hand. The company had licensed the micro-dot reading technology from a Swedish company called the Anoto Group and in 2005 used it in the Fly, a “pentop computer.” Some of the Fly’s capabilities — you could draw a calculator on a piece of paper, for example, and use it to perform everything from additions to square roots by tapping the Fly on it — dazzled critics, and earned top toy industry awards.

But at $99 and aimed at tweens, who tend to gravitate toward sophisticated electronic gadgets like cellphones and MP3 players, the Fly fell far short of expectations and never came close to making up for the LeapPad’s decline. Only about 700,000 units were sold, according to analysts.

(Coincidentally, Jim Marggraff, a former LeapFrog executive who was a driving force behind both the LeapPad and the Fly, is now chief executive of Livescribe and will be at DEMO this week to introduce a more advanced pen-computer based on the Anoto technology, aimed at college students.)

Like the LeapPad, which is used as a learning aid in some 100,000 classrooms across the country, LeapFrog will market the Tag to schools. The Tag will also have something that the LeapPad and most other LeapFrog products have lacked: an Internet strategy.

Tag will be sold with a single book. Parents who purchase additional titles, which will cost $14 each, have to connect to the company’s Web site to download the digital versions of those books into the Tag’s memory. At the Web site, parents will be encouraged to create a profile page for their child. Every time they connect the Tag to the computer, a record of the child’s activities will be uploaded to that profile, giving parents a detailed look at what the child read, learned and struggled with.

Future LeapFrog products will work the same way, so parents will be able to track their children’s progress as they grow out of one LeapFrog toy and into another.

The site will also recommend new LeapFrog products, depending on a child’s progress.

“Historically, a shortcoming of LeapFrog is that we sold great products, but we had no up-sell,” Mr. Katz said. “The Web is the glue that hangs it all together.”

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Survey Suggests US Businesses Spend Limited Time Considering Web Addresses

2008-01-25T03:30:00.000-08:00

January 25, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – A survey conducted by 1&1 Internet Inc. suggests that US businesses spend only a limited amount of time considering appropriate web addresses, it was reported yesterday. The survey took in 1074 American businesses and suggests 40 % of SMBs spend the “same amount of time choosing their coffee maker” while “1 in 3 companies believe their revenue would increase with a better web address”.

The survey went on to suggest 42% of companies invest under 1 hour of thought in deciding on a domain name, while the average business spends less than 12 hours choosing a domain name. Only 40% took a second opinion on a name while 57% did not consider .biz or .net domains as options. Most companies thought that their domain name had a “lasting effect” on their businesses, while 37% thought revenues would increase with a better web address. 28% of businesses had “concerns” about their web address effectiveness.

“The selection of a business’ web address is a crucial decision, businesses should consider all available options before purchasing their primary domain name,” explained 1&1 Internet Inc.’s Chairman of the Board, Andreas Gauger. “As the number of registered domains increases, it’s often the case that the best available domains belong to less obvious suffixes, and it is always advisable to seek external opinion on what a domain could suggest about your business.”

The survey concluded that most US small businesses “recognize the benefits of having a website” but few optimized their website’s performance. Around 7% of those surveyed admitted to not being able to remember their own domain name.

“Although purchasing a web address should be one of the first steps in launching a business, it is often bought in haste,” added Gauger. “Every American business must recognize the lasting impact that a domain name can have on sales and image, and business owners shouldn’t delay making necessary changes.”

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2008-01-24T04:32:00.000-08:00

These guys are actively hiring mystery shoppers (must be a US resident over 18). Perhaps 'hiring' is the wrong word, because you don't get paid anything. However, you are given a $500 card and you get to KEEP things that you buy on assignments. I am not sure if this is strictly online mystery shopping assignments that you do from your PC or if there are some offline assignments as well, but either way, it sounds good.

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Internet agency to battle domain name 'tasting,' which ties up millions of names

2008-01-23T04:24:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK (AP) — The Internet's key oversight agency is taking a preliminary step toward combating domain name tasting — the online equivalent of buying expensive clothes on a charge card only to return them for a full refund after wearing them to a party.

Entrepreneurs have been taking advantage of a five-day grace period to sample domain names, keeping the relative few that might generate advertising revenues and dropping the rest before paying.

The grace period was originally designed to rectify legitimate mistakes, such as registrants mistyping the domain name they are about to buy. But with automation and a burgeoning online advertising market, entrepreneurs generated big bucks exploiting the policy to test hoards of names.

The practice ties up millions of domain names at any given time, making it more difficult for legitimate individuals and businesses to get a desirable name.

In a draft report issued this week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers outlined key issues for a committee to study further and craft recommendations. A final report is due after a public comment period closes Jan. 28.

Don't expect any immediate relief. The committee, the Generic Names Supporting Organization, could take months or years to review the matter, after which ICANN's board still would have to vote on any changes.

The operators of the ".org" suffix already won approval to charge companies that make too many returns. The number of deletions dropped to 152,700 in June, compared with 2.4 million in May, after the new fee took effect.

New recommendations would apply to other global suffixes, including the Internet's most popular, ".com."

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Little Love Among Matchmakers

2008-01-20T04:48:00.001-08:00

THE world of Internet dating can be a cold, unforgiving place, particularly when it comes to the fight for customers.

The online dating service Chemistry.com plans to unleash a new campaign that seeks to depict its older and larger competitor, eHarmony.com, as out of touch with mainstream American values. The ads, which will appear in weekly newspapers and magazines starting Monday, attack eHarmony for refusing to match people of the same gender and for the evangelical Christian beliefs of its founder, Dr. Neil Clark Warren.

It is not the first time that Chemistry.com has hit on this theme. In April, the service ran a set of ads called “Rejected by eHarmony” featuring people who were turned away from eHarmony for being gay, not happy enough or simply unmatchable by its system. Chemistry.com spent $20 million on that campaign, and the company plans to increase the budget for this new effort.

Although Chemistry.com has 3.7 million registered users, in contrast to eHarmony’s 17 million, the “Rejected by eHarmony” campaign may be working. Since it was introduced, Chemistry.com has experienced an 80 percent growth rate, said Mandy Ginsburg, general manager of Chemistry.com. She said that enrollments by gays and lesbians have risen 200 percent since the “Rejected” campaign started, and that 10 percent of Chemistry.com’s members are seeking a same-sex match.

Chemistry.com, an offshoot of Match.com, both of which are owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, follows eHarmony’s practice of putting users through an in-depth personality test to generate potential matches. Other online dating sites, like Match.com and Yahoo Personals, allow users to post pictures and profiles of themselves to make connections.

Still, eHarmony says that its approach has little in common with its competitors. “Chemistry.com and eHarmony are fundamentally different companies,” said Jodi Petrie, an eHarmony spokeswoman. “We use our research-driven approach to help people find successful long-term relationships. We don’t consider ourselves a casual dating site.”

EHarmony, which is based in Pasadena, Calif., and was founded in 2000 by Dr. Warren, a clinical psychologist, has long been criticized for its practice of turning away applicants who are gay or lesbian, married or serially divorced. Dr. Warren, a former seminary student who has had several books published by Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian group, has publicly voiced his belief that premarital sex can increase the likelihood of one’s marrying the wrong person.

Ms. Petrie said that eHarmony took no position on premarital sex and had no affiliation with any religion. As for its reason for not offering services to gays or lesbians, she said: “EHarmony’s matching system is based on psychological data collected from heterosexual married couples, and we have not offered a service for those seeking same-sex matches. Nothing precludes us from offering a same-sex service in the future, but it’s not a service we offer now.”

Nonetheless, Chemistry.com is betting that consumers will prefer to associate with a brand that they feel more closely reflects their own values. The campaign imagines a world in which eHarmony’s values — as interpreted by Chemistry.com — were enforced in various ways. For example, one ad shows a sign on a beach that reads “No gays on beach, May-September,” while another features a motel sign declaring, “No premarital sex.” The copy in both ads goes on to assure readers that Chemistry.com does not judge or enforce any moral code on its members.

The ads “demonstrate that eHarmony is out of sync with what is happening in America,” said Ms. Ginsburg of Chemistry.com. The company plans to expand the campaign to include television and more print ads in January.

The ads were developed by Hanft, Raboy & Partners, an independent agency based in New York. “The idea behind the campaign is to globalize eHarmony’s practices, and ask, ‘What would it mean if America had to live by those rules?’” said Adam Hanft, the agency’s founder and chief executive. “What would happen if gays couldn’t go on the beach, or if some paternalistic source says, ‘If you have premarital sex, you can’t get into this hotel’? By amplifying it to that level, it points out the absurdity and discriminatory nature of their practices.”

EHarmony counters that “consumers want to see advertising that is both accurate and positive.” In a statement, the company said: “Chemistry.com’s insinuation that eHarmony is discriminatory is 100 percent false, and we believe that Match.com would be better served improving their own service rather than attacking its competitors.”

Chemistry.com’s increasingly aggressive tactics reflect the heightened competition for customers in the online matchmaking business, which generates nearly $650 million a year in sales. After booming growth in the early part of this decade, with industry revenue increasing by more than 70 percent a year-over-year, the category has slowed down. The market grew 10 percent in 2006, to $649 million, and is projected to grow 8 percent annually until 2011, according to Jupiter Research, an Internet consultancy.

“We’re not projecting any significant growth in the number of new subscribers over the next few years,” said Nate Elliot, a Jupiter Research analyst. “That number is going up relatively slowly.”

As consumers who are new to the category grow harder to come by, competition for those who are already using these sites is heating up, said Mr. Elliot. Hence the negative advertising that seeks to siphon members from other sites. He noted, however, that “double dippers” — people who maintain memberships on more than one site — are becoming more common.

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2008-01-18T02:55:00.000-08:00

TRENTON, N.J. -- A $469,000 payroll error at a New Jersey company has earned an Illinois man a date with police. Anthony Armatys of Palatine, Ill., was arrested Wednesday on theft charges after allegedly receiving electronic payroll bank deposits from a New Jersey company he never worked for, authorities said.

Officials at Avaya Inc., a telecommunications provider located in Basking Ridge, discovered checks had been mistakenly direct deposited into his account for nearly five years, according to the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office.

Armatys, 34, had accepted a position with Avaya years ago, authorities said, but he rescinded the acceptance before he ever started working. However, a system error resulted in checks being deposited into Armatys' bank account from the fall of 2002 to March of 2007, when the company discovered the error, officials said.

During that time, Armatys collected more than $469,000 in pay and even withdrew approximately $1,900 from his company retirement account administered by Fidelity Investments, authorities said.

Somerset County Prosecutor Wayne Forrest said it took investigators 11 months to do a thorough investigation, which resulted in the time gap between the discovery of the error and Armatys' arrest.

"The investigation had to be done, records had to be obtained, the list goes on," he said.

Armatys, who was awaiting extradition to New Jersey on Wednesday, was charged with one count of theft by deception; his bail was set at $50,000.

Commander Kurt Schroeder of the Palatine Police Department in Illinois said Armatys was taken to Cook County Jail in Chicago and would likely have an extradition hearing on Thursday. He did not know if Armatys had retained a lawyer yet.

Attempts to reach Armatys, whose home phone number is unlisted, were unsuccessful.

Avaya spokeswoman Deb Kline said the company had no comment on the matter.

Avaya has 18,000 employees globally and 1,800 in New Jersey, she said.

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Video Game Industry Seeks Political Clout

2008-01-15T03:06:00.000-08:00

Capitalizing on its improved respectability, the video game industry intends to establish a political action committee to donate money to game-friendly politicians and candidates.

Michael D. Gallagher, chief executive of the Entertainment Software Association, the industry’s lobbying arm in Washington, said last week that the group’s board approved the PAC’s creation last fall and that the committee would be up and running by the end of March. The association represents major game publishers including the Walt Disney Company, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

“We will be writing checks to campaigns by the end of this quarter,” Mr. Gallagher said. “This is an important step in the political maturation process of the industry that we are ready to take now. This is about identifying and supporting champions for the game industry on Capitol Hill so that they support us.”

Mr. Gallagher said the PAC would probably donate $50,000 to $100,000 this year to national candidates, an amount he described as commensurate with similar committees associated with the film and music industries. Such political action committees are generally financed personally by industry executives rather than by corporations and under federal law are limited to giving $5,000 to each candidate per election.

The figures are not huge, but Mr. Gallagher, a former Commerce Department official, said such donations are crucial to doing business in Washington by letting politicians know that “we are behind them.”

Mr. Gallagher said his association would not establish or contribute this year to any of the less-regulated political advocacy groups known as 527s, for a section of the federal tax code, saying, “I think that’s a stage down the road.”

But Mr. Gallagher did say that in this election year his association would mobilize the more than 100,000 gamers who have joined the association’s Video Game Voters Network. Like the association and its nascent PAC, the voters group opposes efforts to regulate games more strictly than books, movies and other media.

“If I can walk into the office of a member of Congress and tell them we have 20,000 voters in their state who are already signed up to write letters and act based on game-related issues that concern them, that’s powerful,” he said.

The industry’s new round of muscle-flexing comes as the political and cultural environment for video games has improved significantly.

The high-water mark of political dudgeon about games came in 2005 when scenes of mild sexual provocation were discovered hidden with the code for the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In the wake of the controversy Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed legislation to increase federal regulation of the game industry.

That proposal, however, found little traction on Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, federal courts have consistently invoked the First Amendment in striking down state attempts to regulate games more strictly than other media.

Now, Senator Clinton has appeared to make peace with the game industry, perhaps recognizing that while games were largely a children’s pastime in the 1980s, those children have now grown up, are voting, and are still enjoying video games. The average age of a gamer is now near 30, according to industry surveys.

“Games are a way that more and more people are spending their leisure time, and you do yourself a disservice as a candidate to attack how people spend that leisure time,” Robert A. Kotick, chairman of Activision, a top independent game publisher, said.

Mr. Kotick described the new PAC as “a great first step” but he cautioned that the film and music industries would still enjoy far more sway in Washington than the game industry, not least because “people like Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen help raise millions of dollars for candidates.” (In any case, the game industry is usually aligned with the music and film industries when it comes to lobbying efforts.)

Along with the evolving political climate, games have also become more accessible and less threatening in the broader culture. Nintendo’s Wii console, introduced in 2006, has been a big part of that shift, drawing in both children and older players with its simple point-and-wave control scheme. Music-oriented game franchises like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero have become mass-market hits, while middle-aged women have become the top audience for puzzle games like Bookworm.

All of those developments have helped create a much more favorable and tolerant attitude toward video games, both among the general public and politicians. Mr. Gallagher, the game association chief executive, said that 36 members of Congress and about 300 staffers attended a game industry reception in Washington in November.

(For his part, Mr. Gallagher has said that when he was chief of staff for Representative Rick White, a Washington State Republican, in the 1990s he helped program the office PCs to play Doom, the famous first-person shooter game.)

Mr. Gallagher said the Wii was the hit of the reception and helped drive the message that video games are now a form of mainstream entertainment.

“We had one member of Congress who tried golf on the Wii, and he got a birdie on his first hole and an eagle on the second,” Mr. Gallagher said. “We couldn’t get it out of his hands for 20 minutes.”

Mr. Gallagher declined to identify the politician. He also declined to say whether that politician would be a likely recipient of a donation from the game industry’s new PAC.

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2008-01-14T05:23:00.001-08:00

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Telecommuting not so great for those left in office

2008-01-12T05:29:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Telecommuting may boost morale, and cut stress, but it can have the opposite effect on those left behind in the office, according to a new study.

When a number of their co-workers toil away from the office by using computers, cell-phones or other electronic equipment, those who do not telecommute are more likely to be dissatisfied with their job and leave the company, said Timothy Golden, a management professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Telecommuting has been a growing trend in the United States since about 2000. About 37 percent of U.S.-based and international companies now offer flexible work arrangements, with the number of those programs growing at a rate of 11 percent per year, according to the Society of Human Resource Management.

Several studies have touted the health and morale benefits for flexible workers, but Golden's research suggests that their co-workers tend to find the workplace less enjoyable, have fewer emotional ties to co-workers and generally feel less obligated to the organization.

"While reasons for the adverse impact on non-teleworkers are varied, it possibly is due to co-worker's perceptions that they have decreased flexibility and a higher workload and the greater frustration that comes with coordinating in an environment with more extensive telework," Golden said.

He added that with a greater prevalence of telecommuters in a work unit, non-telecommuters find it less personally fulfilling to do their work.

But by ensuring greater face-to-face contact between co-workers when all employees are in the office and granting greater job autonomy, employers may be able to counter these problems, according to the study published in the journal Human Relations.

"There's little doubt that work life impacts one's role in the family. However, organizational decision makers need to take into account the broader impact of telework on others in the office," Golden said.

He studied a sample of 240 professional employees from a medium-sized company.

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Cat blamed for Idaho blackout

2008-01-09T02:54:00.000-08:00

NAMPA, Idaho - A cat picked the wrong place to come in from the cold, and caused a power outage that blacked out more than 12,000 homes and businesses.

The cat entered an electrical substation, snuggled up to a warm transformer and contacted a live circuit, causing a short that blew out nine feeder lines Monday afternoon, Idaho Power officials said.

Service was restored in less than three hours to most customers, including City Hall where the lights came on in time for a City Council meeting, utility spokesman Dennis Lopez said.

The outage also disabled traffic lights in the city of about 77,000 people. Temporary stop signs were set up at affected intersections and about 15 police officers were assigned to direct and monitor traffic. Police Lt. Eric Skoglund said he didn't know of any accidents that could be blamed on the outage.

The short circuit killed the cat.

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How Domaining Works

2008-01-06T04:00:00.000-08:00

Back in 1999, the internet entrepreneur Jake Winebaum and his associates paid $7.5 million for the domain name business.com – a seemingly crazy price for a simple web address. But the company Winebaum built with the name – a business-to-business directory and advertising network - was recently sold for an impressive $345 million, which shows at the very least that paying a lot of money for a web address can sometimes be worthwhile.

In fact, web addresses have turned out to be a windfall for shrewd speculators, as we predicted in the very first cover story of the Industry Standard back in 1997. The world of "domainers," as such speculators are known, is secretive, and the terms of most domain transactions are never known publicly. But a public company called Marchex has revealed that it acquired more than 100,000 addresses from a secretive Chinese-Canadian domainer for an incredible $160 million.

Common sense would suggest that in the age of Google, where search is the starting point for so much web activity, the actual web address would be less and less important. You don't need to know the address to find a site, so why would the specific URL be so important?

The answer to that question is less than inspirational. First, a chunk of web surfers, perhaps 15 per cent, according to one estimate I saw recently, still type a www address into the browser when looking for something even when they don't know the actual address. This is not a good way to find things on the internet, but people still do it.

Secondly, having the actual domain address make a pretty big difference in search engines results, as might be expected. So, if you type New York Doctors into Google, the site newyorkdoctors.com appears on page three of the search results – presumably much higher than a generic directory site would appear otherwise.

The address alone is powerful enough that domainers run highly profitable businesses based on putting Google AdSense and other syndicated ads onto pages that people looking for a particular thing might land on by accident. If you type in "debts.com" for example, you get a site filled with nothing but paid links to other sites. Presumably, this is not what someone going to that page is looking for, but it's a nice business for the domain owner.

It seems peculiar and unjust that so much money could be made by taking advantage of people’s clumsiness in finding what they are looking for on the web. Sites that exist only to generate pay-per-click revenues from people looking for something else are parasitic by definition; they interfere with the process of finding information, and take money out of the pockets of real information providers. There's no way to know how big a drain this is on the internet economy, but my guess is that it's not trivial.

There isn't any easy remedy in sight. The effort by the internet governing body to reduce scarcity in .com domains by adding suffixes such as .info and .biz has been a flop; few self-respecting businesses will use these addresses. The search engines don't have much incentive to do anything about it, since they get paid for the ads either way. There's no law against taking advantage of naiveté.

I do take some comfort however in the legacy of the business.com domain name sale. Jake Winebaum, whom I have known since he was a Disney executive in the mid-1990s, didn't have any tricky scheme for making money on the name. He just thought it was the logical name for the business-to-business commerce company he wanted to create.

Business.com was initially part of an incubator called eCompanies, which disintegrated in the dot-com meltdown. But Jake soldiered on. The rise of Google threatened to make his concept irrelevant, but he continued to work and evolve the concept and ultimately made it a profitable business, which sold for a good premium.

It was hard work, good management, creativity and a little luck that made business.com successful, not a lucky bet on a web address. That's a rather more encouraging lesson for .com entrepreneurs.

---

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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Sears' Christmas Spyware Surprise

2008-01-04T03:44:00.000-08:00

Did Sears decide to give its holiday shoppers the gift that keeps on taking—spyware?

It appears that Sears isn't disputing that it did distribute spyware, but is merely saying that consumers knew that they were agreeing to spyware.

The $53 billion retailer is learning that the online world—with its thousands of bloggers armed with screen captures—is fairly unforgiving when it comes to marketing excesses.

The latest blogger to capture and dissect the Sears incident is Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Benjamin Edelman, whose posted screen captures and commentary came out Jan. 2. His assessment followed by a couple of weeks a blog from CA that included a detailed response from a Sears vice president.

Here's the consensus of what happened: Sears created something called My SHC Community, which Sears describes as a member-feedback-based online community.

To encourage consumers to join, it offers the following carrots: "It's a community that connects shoppers like you to SHC employees, including the most senior executives, so that together we can build a better shopping experience. In exchange for participating in the community, members will have access to free planning and budgeting tools, special forums to express their views and ideas and will receive exclusive offers and promotions. Members are also eligible to win cash and merchandise prizes via sweepstakes that occur regularly throughout the year."

As part of the project, Sears installs a program from ComScore onto the consumer's PC. Is the consumer asked for permission first? That's an interpretation issue. Sears—correctly—says that the consumer first has to agree.

But Harvard's Edelman said the information is vague and hidden deep within a very long "privacy statement and user license agreement," a document made even more dense because it is presented in a very small scrolling window.

The "2,971 words of text, shown in a small scroll box with just ten lines visible, requires fully 54 on-screen pages to view in full," Edelman wrote. "The tenth page admits that the application 'monitors all of the Internet behavior that occurs on the computer on which you install the application, including ... filling a shopping basket, completing an application form, or checking your...personal financial or health information.' That's remarkably comprehensive tracking—but mentioned in a disclosure few users are likely to find, since few users will read through to page 10 of the license."

An e-mail sent to some site visitors was even more vague. "In seven paragraphs plus a set of bullet points, 582 words in total, the e-mail describes the SHC service in general terms. But the paragraphs' topic sentences make no mention of any downloadable software, nor do the bullet points offer even a general description of what the software does," Edelman wrote.

The software Sears used is from ComScore, Edelman said, but Sears goes out of its way to hide that fact. "The initial SHC e-mail refers to the ComScore software as 'VoiceFive.' The license agreement refers to the ComScore software as 'our application' and 'this application.' The ActiveX prompt gives no product name, and it reports company name 'TMRG, Inc.'" he wrote. "These conflicting names prevent users from figuring out what software they are asked to accept. Furthermore, none of these names gives users any easy way to determine what the software is or what it does. In contrast, if SHC used the company name 'ComScore' or the product name 'RelevantKnowledge,' users could run a search at any search engine. These confusing name-changes fit the trend among spyware vendors."

The above links provided extensive detail, with screen captures galore. But the facts at issue appear to be under minimal debate, which frees us to look at the big picture: Sears seems to have gone out of its way to alienate its customers. The worst part: None of it was necessary.

This particular Sears incident reminds me of the politician who lies—out of habit—when the truth would actually have served him better. Or the product manager who goes out of her way to fabricate four things about her product when the truth of her product would have been sufficient to make the sale.

Sears has put together a decent little package of consumer incentives. If it simply and explicitly said, "In exchange for all of this, we only ask that we can track your every Web effort for seven days," this wouldn't have been an issue. The irony is that such a candid approach would likely have yielded a good group of consumer guinea pigs.

But Sears is a smart outfit, so I am inclined to not think that this was something overlooked. No, the more likely scenario is that Sears knew precisely what it was doing and that it feared that a consumer who knew that he or she was being watched would be self-conscious and would not act normally.

In other words, I'm suggesting that Sears understood that the only way to be able to track the way consumers truly behaved on the Web was to track consumers who didn't realize they were being tracked. To trick them, deceive them.

Like any plan that depends on one's customers to be gullible or overly trusting, this risks violating a fundamental trust. That's a dangerous thing to do when customers can move to a competitor with Web-click ease.

One of the more astute technology observers I've run into, Dave Taylor, president of the PCI Vendor Alliance, was talking about the Sears incident on Thursday and had a fascinating take.

"This is a classic example of a company going overboard in an effort to understand its customers. There is no reason that Sears would need to know all the Web sites a customer visits, or how long they stay, since 95 percent of that activity is not going to change what Sears offers or how it offers those goods or services," Taylor said. "This is simply another blunt instrument that Sears is deploying to gather data. The other issue is: What if this data were stolen? I'm sure Sears isn't immune to security breaches. Why collect data and risk major liability should the data wind up being compromised, by unauthorized employees or by external hackers? The ROI, when these risks are considered, simply isn't there."

The scariest part of this incident is what Sears continues to say on its "My SHC Community" page. In a very prominent part of the page—surrounded by lots of white space—is this proud claim: "My SHC Community does NOT sell personal information." That's true. It doesn't sell it. It steals it and uses it for its own purposes.

The headline on the page reads: "Changing the Way Retail Works—One Experience at a Time." That's perhaps a lot more true than the copywriter had intended.

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Snake Owners In Florida Required To Microchip Their Reptiles

2008-01-03T04:18:00.000-08:00

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (CBS) ― A new Florida law may require exotic pet owners to register their cold-blooded pets with the state. January 1 brought new rules for owning some reptiles in Florida.

Anyone seeking to own a python, green anaconda or Nile monitor lizard is now required to get a permit and microchip, reported CBS station WFOR-TV in Miami.

In addition, owners used to allowing their exotic reptiles to have the run of the house are learning their free-range days are over. The reptiles must now be caged. Owners have to answer questions about basic reptile care and have a "bite response plan." There's also an annual $100 fee.

A permit is also required for red-eared slider turtles. It's illegal to allow the turtles to reproduce, and all eggs must be destroyed.

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Baby Jesus With GPS

2007-12-29T01:46:00.000-08:00

WELLINGTON, Fla. -- Baby Jesus has gone high tech.

Authorities said a baby Jesus stolen from a nativity scene in Wellington is safely back in the manger after it was stolen.

One person was arrested for stealing the figure Wednesday night, which was equipped with a GPS tracking device.

The tracking system was attached in response to previous thefts.

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When will this GPS system track my dog? Putin asks.

2007-12-25T02:07:00.000-08:00

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Monday he was keen to use Russia's planned global positioning system GLONASS to look after his black Labrador Koni.

"When can I buy hardware to equip my dog with so that she won't run away too far?" Putin was quoted as asking First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov during a briefing on progress towards developing a competitor to the U.S. GPS system.

Russia is working to expand GLONASS, a system which locates objects on the ground using orbital satellites, and make it available for civilian use. The project is part of the Kremlin's attempts to boost hi-tech sectors of the Russian economy.

"Producers will be able to offer collars for dogs and cats of commercial users in mid-2008," Itar-Tass news agency quoted Ivanov as replying.

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Geneology.Com Reunites Cousins After 70 Years

2007-12-19T02:06:00.000-08:00

COCONUT CREEK, Fla. - Two South Florida sisters are catching up with their Russian cousin after 70 years apart. Ossie Rasher, 81, and Sophia Altfeld, 78, last saw their cousin Rosalie Berkovich, 80, in 1937 when the sisters fled to the United States with their parents.

The families lost track of each other until decades later, when Berkovich's relatives tracked down the two sisters using a family tree posted on geneology.com.

Berkovich flew from her home in Acton, Mass., for a reunion Friday night at Altfeld's home in Coconut Creek. They are also planning for a larger family reunion.

For now, the three are catching up by exchanging family photos and stories of life journeys.

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U R dumped

2007-12-16T01:53:00.000-08:00

LONDON (Reuters) - U R dumped -- one in seven say they have suffered the same fate as Britney Spears' ex-husband and been told it's all over via text message or email, a survey said on Friday.

While hiding behind technology might appear a cowardly way of splitting up, it contrasts with the four percent who simply drop all communication with their lovers without notice.

"Most of us send emails and texts everyday, so it comes as no surprise they are now being used to ditch someone -- however distasteful this is," said Rob Barnes from moneysupermarket.com, which carried out the survey.

"The results show one per cent of the population would use a social networking site to dump a partner. It would be interesting to see how this changes as sites such as Facebook and MySpace become more apparent in our everyday lives."

One of the most high-profile victims of dumping by text was Kevin Federline, who reportedly received news that pop singer Spears was filing for divorce while being filmed for a television show.

The survey said 15 percent of the 2,194 people questioned had been dumped by text or email, although a quarter of those in the most tech-savvy 18 to 24-year-old age group would choose the traditional method -- a letter.

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Human Calculator Sets New Record

2007-12-13T01:27:00.000-08:00

THE world's fastest human calculator today broke his own record for working out a 200-digit number using nothing but brain power to produce the answer in just over 70 seconds.

Alexis Lemaire, a 27-year-old Frenchman, correctly calculated the 13th root of a random 200-digit number from a possible 393 trillion answers.

The so-called 'mathlete' produced the answer of 2,407,899,893,032,210 in 70.2 seconds, beating his previous record of 72.4 seconds, at London's Science Museum.

A computer was used to produce a random 200-digit number before he sat down to calculate the answer in his head.

The museum's curator of mathematics, Jane Wess, said: "He sat down and it was all very quiet - and all of a sudden he amazingly just cracked it.

"I believe that it is the highest sum calculated mentally.

"He seems to have a large memory and he's made this his life's ambition. It's quite remarkable to see it happen. A very small number of people have this extraordinary ability; nowadays there is only a handful."

Mr Lemaire, who attends the University of Reims in northern France, began demonstrating his prowess by finding the 13th root of a random 100-digit number but gave up trying to improve his performance when he calculated an answer in under four seconds in 2004.

Like an athlete, he trains his brain daily for the far harder task of finding the 13th root of 200-digit numbers.

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Beyond iPod

2007-12-10T02:12:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - At Apple Inc's new store in Manhattan, the smiling "geniuses" and "concierges" standing at attention are as important as the iPods and Mac computers on display.

The store, Apple's second-biggest in the United States, has an entire floor dedicated to customer service and technical help, a key focus for the company and one that has helped drive sales growth.

"What the Apple stores do is give customers a place to come and feel and touch the products, and more importantly, talk to someone who knows the products intimately," said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a consultancy.

"That just does not exist well in the PC side. You can't get a similar experience at Best Buy or Circuit City," Bajarin said.

Apple met widespread skepticism when it opened its first stores in 2001, as many analysts scratched their heads at the company's entry into an unfamiliar business.

But the strategy has paid off in a big way. Apple stores pulled in $1.25 billion in revenue in the company's last fiscal quarter, a 42 percent jump from a year earlier and accounting for a fifth of total revenue.

Apple shares have more than doubled over the past year and closed up 2.4 percent on Thursday at $189.95.

There are more than 200 stores in five countries and Apple said in October it planned to open about 40 outlets in the next year, including its first in China.

The new store, the third in Manhattan, has an entire floor for technical support, one-on-one sessions and "pro labs" -- free classes on how to use Apple computers.

Its 46-foot-long (14-meter-long) "genius bar" can help 100 customers each hour and the store has 50 percent more space for tech support and education than any other Apple store.

"Where other stores end with a transaction, that's really where we like to begin," Ron Johnson, the senior vice president who leads Apple's retail strategy, told Reuters on the sidelines of a news briefing on Thursday.

Known for their clean, minimalist layouts, the stores are hailed by analysts as a model for consumer electronics retail.

Apple has swiftly adopted new technologies such as handheld scanners that ring up purchases on the floor rather than forcing people to line up at registers. Customers can go online to book time in a store with a "Mac genius" trouble-shooter or a "personal shopper" to help out with buying decisions.

The new store is located in Manhattan's former meatpacking district, known for its trendy restaurants and tony boutiques. While not a high-traffic shopping area, the three-storey outlet will tap the neighborhood's artistic demographic.

"This will be a high volume store," Johnson said.

Johnson spoke on the same day some U.S. retailers reported stronger-than-expected November sales, helped by a post- Thanksgiving rush and holiday discounts. But experts anticipate a challenging month ahead amid growing concerns over the health of the economy.

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Apologetic, Facebook Changes Ad Program

2007-12-06T05:13:00.000-08:00

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of the social networking site Facebook, apologized to the site’s users yesterday about the way it introduced a controversial new advertising feature last month.

Facebook also introduced a way for members to avoid the feature, known as Beacon, which tracks the actions of its members when they use other sites around the Internet.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s apology — in the form of a blog post on Facebook — followed weeks of criticism from members, privacy groups and advertisers.

“I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation, and I know we can do better,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.

Facebook has also been meeting with advertising agencies in recent days and discussing their concerns about Beacon, according to one executive who was invited.

Facebook originally presented Beacon to the advertising community as an opt-in program that its members would choose to use. It planned to sell ads alongside the messages sent to people’s friends about their purchases and activities on other sites. Some advertisers like Coca-Cola have expressed surprise that Beacon then required users to take action if they did not want the messages sent out.

“This is a bit of an example of Facebook being, as we refer to it, ‘out over your skis.’ They got a little bit ahead of themselves,” said Elizabeth Ross, president of the digital advertising agency Tribal DDB West, a part of the Omnicom Group.

Ms. Ross said advertisers did not want Facebook to push its users into a system like Beacon against their will.

But that was what happened for a few weeks after Beacon was introduced Nov. 6. Facebook gave users two notices that it planned to broadcast their actions to their friends — one when they were on an external Web site making a purchase and the other when they came back to Facebook.

The notices were small at first, and when users ignored them, Facebook assumed the users had granted permission.

After more than 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition about Beacon that was initiated by the political group MoveOn.org Civic Action, Facebook changed its policy last Thursday so that users who ignored the warnings were considered to have said no. But a Facebook executive said then that the company would not offer users a universal opt-out for Beacon.

“We need to make sure we give them the ability to see what things can do for them,” Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president for product marketing and operations at Facebook, said in an interview last Thursday.

Although Facebook has made the changes that MoveOn.org and others requested, some users said they believed the company had not been forthcoming.

“I feel like my trust in Facebook has been violated,” said Christopher Lynn, 30, a Facebook user who also writes a blog on social media. “Facebook created this space that was a private space, where we share our experiences, and to share this data behind our backs is upsetting.”

Robert French, a communications professor at Auburn University in Alabama, has been lecturing about Beacon recently, and he said his students — nearly all Facebook users — were shocked to learn about Beacon.

Privacy groups are working on a complaint to federal regulators about Facebook’s advertising program. In addition to Beacon, the new program includes profile pages created by advertisers and ads sent to users based on what they write about in their profiles.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said Mr. Zuckerberg should have explained Facebook’s full advertising and data collection program to users.

“The user needs to decide how their information is going to be used, whether it’s going to be used for targeting at all, which advertisers have access to it and whether Facebook has the right to collect and analyze it,” he said. “Facebook is saying it is a safe place for you to share your innermost secrets; what’s not being told to users is that they are selling those secrets.”

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Microsoft looks for new ways to curb piracy in Vista update

2007-12-04T04:08:00.000-08:00

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Monday it would disable the two primary methods used by software pirates to illegally copy Windows Vista software in the next major update of the operating system.

The world's largest software maker loses billions of dollars to software piracy every year. Microsoft said new features built into Vista are reducing piracy levels by half compared with its previous operating system, Windows XP.

Microsoft plans to improve that one step farther still with changes built into Windows Vista Service Pack 1, the first major update to the operating system, which is due out in the first quarter of 2008.

The company plans to close a loophole that let pirates mimic activation used by some computer manufacturers to install Vista. Microsoft also will clamp down on a method of extending a "grace period" time between installation and activation.

According to trade group Business Software Alliance, about 35 percent of the world's consumer software is pirated. Windows, which sits on more than 90 percent of the world's computers, accounts for the bulk of those pirated copies.

Many software pirates sell illegally copied versions on auction sites and some small computer manufacturers install pirated versions of Vista on PCs sold to unknowing victims.

Microsoft said it would also change how it deals with pirated versions of Vista, whose users will now get recurring notifications that their version of software is fraudulent with a link to buy a genuine copy. Currently, Microsoft shuts down features in Vista when it finds a pirated copy.

If a user of pirated software wants to purchase a genuine copy of Windows from Microsoft, they can do so for $89 for the Home Basic version or $119 for the Home Premium version.

Reducing piracy is considered one major way for the $51 billion software maker to spur growth in its dominant software franchises. The company said improvements in reducing piracy helped to spur a 25 percent rise in Windows sales in the September quarter.

Microsoft declined to estimate the financial impact of its new measures. The company had sold 88 million Vista licenses as of the end of September.

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Facebook Drops Online Tracking

2007-11-30T02:33:00.000-08:00

Faced with its second mass protest by members in its short life span, Facebook, the enormously popular social networking Web site, is reining in some aspects of a controversial new advertising program.

Within the last 10 days, more than 50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition objecting to the new program, which sends messages to users’ friends about what they are buying on Web sites like Travelocity.com, TheKnot.com and Fandango. The members want to be able to opt out of the program completely with one click, but Facebook won’t let them.

Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

MoveOn.org Civic Action, the political group that set up the online petition, said the move was a positive one.

“Before, if you ignored their warning, they assumed they had your permission” to share information, said Adam Green, a spokesman for the group. “If Facebook were to implement a policy whereby no private purchases on other Web sites were displayed publicly on Facebook without a user’s explicit permission, that would be a step in the right direction.”

Facebook, which is run by Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who created it while an undergraduate at Harvard, has built a highly successful service that is free to its more than 50 million active members. But now the company is trying to figure out how to translate this popularity into profit. Like so many Internet ventures, it is counting heavily on advertising revenue.

The system Facebook introduced this month, called Beacon, is viewed as an important test of online tracking, a popular advertising tactic that usually takes place behind the scenes, where consumers do not notice it. Companies like Google, AOL and Microsoft routinely track where people are going online and send them ads based on the sites they have visited and the searches they have conducted.

But Facebook is taking a far more transparent and personal approach, sending news alerts to users’ friends about the goods and services they buy and view online.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said she was surprised to find that her purchase of a table on Overstock.com was added to her News Feed, a Facebook feature that broadcasts users’ activities to their friends on the site. She says she did not see an opt-out box.

“Beacon crosses the line to being Big Brother,” she said, “It’s a very, very thin line.”

Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages. The Beacon notices are “based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said when he introduced Beacon in New York on Nov. 6.

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

Mr. Palihapitiya was referring to Facebook’s controversial introduction of the News Feed feature last year. More than 700,000 people protested that feature, and Mr. Zuckerberg publicly apologized for aspects of it. However, Facebook did not remove the feature, and eventually users came to like it, Mr. Palihapitiya said. He said Facebook would not add a universal opt-out to Beacon, as many members have requested.

MoveOn.org started the anti-Beacon petition on Nov. 20, and as of last night more than 50,000 Facebook users had signed it. Other groups fighting Beacon have about 10,000 members in total. Facebook, they say, should not be following them around the Web, especially without their permission.

The complaints may seem paradoxical, given that the so-called Facebook generation is known for its willingness to divulge personal details on the Internet. But even some high school and college-age users of the site, who freely write about their love lives and drunken escapades, are protesting.

“We know we don’t have a right to privacy, but there still should be a certain morality here, a certain level of what is private in our lives,” said Tricia Bushnell, a 25-year-old in Los Angeles, who has used Facebook since her college days at Bucknell. “Just because I belong to Facebook, do I now have to be careful about everything else I do on the Internet?”

Two privacy groups said this week that they were preparing to file privacy complaints about the system with the Federal Trade Commission. Among online merchants, Overstock.com has decided to stop running Facebook’s Beacon program on its site until it becomes an opt-in program. And as the MoveOn.org campaign has grown over the past week, some ad executives have poked fun at Facebook users.

“Isn’t this community getting a little hypocritical?” said Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at Organic, a digital advertising agency. “Now, all of a sudden, they don’t want to share something?”

Facebook users each get a home page where they can volunteer information like their age, hometown, college and religion. People can post photos and write messages on their pages and on their friends’ pages.

Under Beacon, when Facebook members purchase movie tickets on Fandango.com, for example, Facebook sends a notice about what movie they are seeing in the News Feed on all of their friends’ pages. If a user saves a recipe on Epicurious.com or rates travel venues on NYTimes.com, friends are also notified. There is an opt-out box that appears for a few seconds, but users complain that it is hard to find. Mr. Palihapitiya said Facebook is making the boxes larger and holding them on the Web pages longer.

Mr. Green of MoveOn.org said that his group would be tracking the effects of the latest changes before deciding if it would still push for a universal opt-out.

The whole purpose of Beacon is to allow advertisers to run ads next to these purchase messages. A message about someone’s purchase on Travelocity might run alongside an airline or hotel ad, for example. Mr. Zuckerberg has heralded the new ads as being like a “recommendation from a trusted friend.”

But Facebook users say they do not want to endorse products.

“Just because I use a Web site, doesn’t mean I want to tell my friends about it,” said Annie Kadala, a 23-year old student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Maybe I used that Web site because it was cheaper.”

Ms. Kadala found out about Beacon on Thanksgiving day when her News Feed told her that her sister had purchased the Harry Potter “Scene It?” game.

“I said, ‘Susan, did you buy me this game for Christmas?’” Ms. Kadala recalled. “I don’t want to know what people are getting me for Christmas.”

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Second Life For The Disabled, Indeed

2007-11-27T04:51:00.000-08:00

TOKYO (Reuters) - People with severe paralysis could find new opportunities from shopping to doing business or making new friends in the virtual world of Second Life by just thinking about it, if experiments being conducted by a Japanese university bear fruit.

In a recent demonstration, Junichi Ushiba, an associate professor at Keio University and head of the project, showed how electrodes attached to the scalp can pick up the electrical changes associated with brain activity.

The data can be interpreted by a computer, allowing a user to manipulate his or her on-line persona, or avatar, around the streets of Second Life without using a keyboard or mouse.

"When people are paralyzed, of course their lives become restricted," said Ushiba, as a graduate student took a virtual stroll through the historic streets of Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital, without moving a muscle.

"But with this technology we can interpret their intention to move, allowing them to go shopping in Second Life or even set up a business."

San Francisco-based Linden Lab says about half a million people regularly visit Second Life, where commercial transactions can be carried out in Linden dollars, convertible to U.S. dollars.

Ushiba, who spends part of his time working at a medical rehabilitation centre, hopes to have people with paralysis try the system next year.

The project is still in its early days, and the students experimenting with the system must practice for a while and find the best spots on their scalps for the electrodes before they can stroll smoothly around.

"The important thing is to concentrate. You can't really think about anything else," said 23-year-old Yasunari Hashimoto after demonstrating the system.

Loss of focus can result in an inadvertent dive off a virtual cliff or into the sea.

Brain control of computers is already the subject of experiments in other countries, including the U.S. BrainGate system which enables users with an implant to open e-mail and move objects such as wheelchairs.

"We have a lot of members who can no longer move at all," said Yoshiko Umeda, a volunteer nurse with an organization representing some of Japan's 7,500 sufferers from motor neurone disease, a progressive disorder that causes paralysis.

"I think they would very much welcome a system operated by the brain."

Ushiba hopes the random element of Second Life will change the lives of patients immobilized by illness or injury, in a way that clicking buttons to send e-mails cannot.

"In ordinary life you go shopping and you might just happen to see a jacket you like and buy it," he said. "Or the cover of a book might catch your eye. Sometimes you chat with people you just happen to run into," he said. "This kind of chance encounter could enrich people's lives."

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Rogue cell phone dials Iowa 911 — again and again

2007-11-20T02:51:00.000-08:00

WATERLOO, Iowa — A rogue cell phone is not accepting calls, but it sure likes to dial 911 operators in eastern Iowa.

Operators at the Black Hawk County Consolidated Communications Center said that they received about 400 calls from the same cell phone last week and that no one seems to be on the other line.

"That's it right now," said dispatcher Chuck Hosier, as a phone rang in the background. "It will ring in, and it's an open line. Sometimes it rings in and drops off."

Officials can't locate the phone but have figured out that it is an old line not currently associated with a cell phone provider. Such phones, once charged up, can still place 911 calls under Federal Communications Commission rules set in 1994.

The cell phone can't receive calls, and emergency workers haven't been able to track the owner through service records, either.

"With this, we are pretty helpless," said Judy Flores, the center's administrative supervisor.

Officials are suspicious that it could be a prank — but they say it's not funny and potentially dangerous.

Until the source of the calls is found or they stop, dispatchers still have to answer every call just in case someone is on the line with an emergency.

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Misfired 'Nail Gun' Text Message Brings Police To Norwegian's Door

2007-11-16T02:33:00.000-08:00

Leif Harry Ersland wanted to return a nail gun he borrowed, so he sent a text message to the owner saying "the gun is on the cabin steps."

It didn't take long for the police to turn up at his door, demanding to know whether Ersland was interested in weapons or had any enemies, the Haugesunds Avis newspaper reported Wednesday.

It turned out that Ersland had punched the wrong phone number. Instead of the message going to the nail gun's owner, it went to a stranger, who called the police early Tuesday because she was suspicious about a possible gun deal.

Ersland was not home when the police arrived. His cohabitant, Hilde Pedersen, who knew nothing about the text message, told the newspaper she faced a confusing 45 minutes of intense interrogation.

"I was shocked to see them," Pedersen was quoted as saying. "I became even more shocked when I learned what they wanted. ... It was very unpleasant."

She said about a half-hour after the police left, they called her to say that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding about a message gone astray.

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Cyber bullying bedevils Japan

2007-11-12T04:39:00.000-08:00

TOKYO (Reuters) - For many Japanese children, a cell phone is a social lifeline they can't imagine being without. For high school student Makoto, it became an instrument of mental torture that nearly drove him to suicide.

"Even when I stopped going to school and stayed at home, my cell phone kept ringing with harassing e-mails," said Makoto, who became anorexic and rarely emerged from his room for nearly half a year after becoming the target of "cyber bullying".

Makoto, now 19 and working as a hair stylist after graduating from high school, said classmates posted photos of him along with insults on a Web site and e-mailed him at all hours telling him to die. He attempted suicide twice.

"When people tell you your life is not worth living, you start to think that way," said Makoto, who requested that his last name not be used.

"I couldn't believe in human beings anymore."

Schoolyard bullying has long bedeviled Japan and, as in other countries, has taken a high-tech twist in recent years.

Ten percent of high school students said they have been harassed through e-mails, websites or blogs, a recent survey by the Hyogo Prefectual Board of Education showed.

Cyber bullying is a global trend, but the anonymity it provides for perpetrators may have extra significance in Japan, where wariness of direct confrontation is a cultural norm, said Shaheen Shariff, principal investigator for the International Project on Cyber Bullying at McGill University in Canada.

"Something is falling through the cracks, so they need to address what the problem is," she said in a phone interview.

"Are they (children) too controlled, are they under too much pressure to be academically successful, do they have an avenue to express their feelings ... are those taboos?" Shariff said.

BULLYING IN CYBER DARKNESS

Most cyber bullying in Japan, where 96 percent of high school students have their own cell phone, is conducted through mobile phones with Internet and e-mailing capabilities.

Common methods include e-mailing pictures showing victims' genitals to classmates and posting insults on class Web sites.

Experts say high-tech bullying is far harder for parents and teachers to police than physical violence because of the anonymity of cyber space and a lack of technical knowledge.

"Schools often do not have Internet-savvy teachers, and parents cannot control or see what is going on in the cyber world," said Yasukawa of the National Web Counseling Conference.

"No one knows what is going on."

The obscurity of cyber bullying is making the problem of bullying, which schools have long been accused of sweeping under the carpet, even harder to address.

The problem drew public attention in July, when an 18-year-old boy leapt to his death at his high school in Kobe, western Japan, after classmates posted a nude photo of him on a Web site and repeatedly sent him e-mails demanding money.

The school first denied bullying had occurred and only admitted that was the case after some of the teen's classmates were arrested.

"Things that shouldn't have happened are secretly settled and hidden by schools as if they never took place," said Chiharu Utsumi, a representative of the Association for the Bereaved by School Accidents and Events, whose 11-year-old son committed suicide 13 years ago after being beaten by his teacher at school.

Education ministry surveys from 1999 to 2005 reported no suicides related to bullying, but the ministry decided earlier this year to review 16 cases that took place over the six year period.

Some Japanese schools and parents are already using e-mail filtering software and special settings on cell phones and computers that protect children from harassment by blocking messages sent through suspect servers or IP addresses.

But experts agree that the solution to cyber-bullying requires more than the latest technology.

"In terms of technology, e-mail filtering systems are effective," said Motohiro Hasegawa, associate professor of Department of Information and Culture at Kinjo Gakuin University.

"But in the end, the problem is not about technology -- it is about humans."

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Man gets life for lottery ticket scam

2007-11-07T05:10:00.000-08:00

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese lottery ticket seller has been jailed for life for fraud for taking advantage of a system flaw to cash 28 million yuan ($3.76 million) in tickets illegally, state media said Tuesday.

Zhao Liqun discovered the flaw in the Welfare Lottery "3D" system in 2005 that let a person buy tickets with the right numbers within five minutes of their being announced, sources at the Intermediate People's Court in Anshan, northeastern Heilongjiang province, said.

Zhao, 36, who ran three lottery stalls in Anshan, "bought" the announced numbers many times over.

"He asked his neighbors and friends to cash the tickets at the Welfare Lottery Center and to bring back the money," Xinhua quoted the court sources as saying.

The lottery center found the prizes were illegally claimed and police arrested Zhao in January.

The court jailed him for life for fraud and confiscated all his property.

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Meet Your New Cousins, the Flying Lemurs

2007-11-05T02:59:00.000-08:00

A group of creatures resembling large flying squirrels is the closest living relative of primates, the group that includes apes and humans, according to a new genetic study.

The finding, detailed in the Nov. 2 issue of the journal Science, contradicts a study published earlier this year by another team, which concluded that the squirrel-like colugos are more closely related to Scandentia, a group that includes tree shrews, than to primates.

Found in Southeast Asia, colugos are colloquially called "flying lemurs," although they are not lemurs and they don't truly fly. The animals are larger than flying squirrels but have a similar skin fold, called a patagium, which they use for gliding. Coasting from tree to tree at dusk, they look like furry kites.

Unclear relationships

Colugos belong to a classification of mammals known as Dermopterans. Together with primates and Scandentia, they make up the single taxonomic unit, or "clade," known as Euarchonta (meaning "true ancestors").

The exact evolutionary relationships among the three groups are a topic of debate among scientists. There are three possibilities:

-Colugos and primates shared a common ancestor that split from tree shrews

-Tree shrews and colugos are more closely related to each other than to primates

-Primates and tree shrews are sister groups, and colugos are the odd ones out

A study published in a January issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) used morphological comparisons of the three groups to determine that tree shrews and colugos are more closely related to each other than either is to primates.

A different picture

The new study, based on genetic comparisons, paints a different picture. Jan Janecka of Texas A&M University and colleagues compared rare genetic changes, called indels, in the genomes of members of the three groups. Indels are regions of insertion or deletion in areas of the DNA that code for proteins.

The team found that colugos and primates have seven indels in common. Only one indel matched up between primates and tree shrews, and no indels were shared between tree shrews and colugos.

"In short, these molecular data strongly suggest that colugos are the sister group to primates," said study team member Webb Miller of Penn State University.

In a second experiment, the team fed genetic data from five mammalian groups, including Primates, Dermopterans, and Scandentia, into a computer model to calculate when they diverged. The results suggested Primates, Demopterans and Scandentia shared a common ancestor as far back as 87.9 million years ago, when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

According to the model, the three groups separated relatively quickly soon after. At 86.2 million years ago, the ancestors of tree shrews split from that of primates and colugos, and primates and colugos went their separate ways about 79.6 million years ago.

Based on the new findings, the team urges an effort to create a draft of the colugos genome. "Colugos are going to be a much more important species to study now that we know their relationship to primates," Miller said.

For selfish reasons

Mary Silcox, an anthropologist at the University of Winnipeg in Canada who was a co-author on the PNAS study had an open mind about the new findings and the final word on the evolutionary relationship between the three Euarchonta groups.

"Even though it's in conflict with our morphological findings that we've published, I'm not totally closed to the idea that we have the branching pattern among the three Eurochonta groups wrong," Silcox told LiveScience.

She added that a genome of colugos would be "spectacularly wonderful," but that the genome of the most ancient living tree shrew, Ptilocercus lowii, is also needed.

Comparing the full genomes of members from all three groups would allow scientists to chart the evolutionary relationships among them with much more confidence, Silcox said.

Why is knowledge of these relationships important? For one, it will help to answer the question of the origins of our own species, Silcox said. "To some extent, to understand where we came from, we need to put that in a larger context of mammalian evolution," she said.

But Silcox also chalks it up partly to vanity. "I think it's because humans are remarkably self-centered animals," she said. "It's because we're more interested in our evolution than we are the evolution of slime molds that we tend to focus on this stuff."

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Australian laments ear wax eating video

2007-11-01T04:51:00.000-07:00

CANBERRA, Australia - Australia's opposition leader lamented his past behavior on Wednesday, as images of him picking his ear wax in Parliament reached a growing audience via the Internet.

The embarrassing footage was captured by Parliament's official television camera at least six years ago as Kevin Rudd, then a junior Labor Party lawmaker, sat in the House Representatives listening to a colleague question a government minister.

Rudd, who is likely to become Australia's prime minister next month, is seen in the background absent-mindedly probing his left ear before apparently placing the same finger in his mouth.

The footage has found it way on to YouTube and has attracted increasing attention in recent weeks as Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat, leads Prime Minister John Howard in opinion polls ahead of Nov. 24 elections.

Rudd was questioned by the media Wednesday about his behavior after the footage recently featured on U.S. national television on NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

"I'm really pleased about that — how did I go on Jay Leno?" Rudd said, laughing with sarcasm.

"All of us in public and private life I'm sure would wish our behavior to be more ideal," he told reporters, declining to comment further.

Rudd, who was elected Labor leader in December last year, has previously told journalists he was scratching his chin.

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Normal brain functions, such as seeing patterns, make us more likely to believe in the supernatural.

2007-10-30T05:25:00.000-07:00

Bruce Hood usually conducts experiments under much more rigorous conditions than this, but since he had a large audience one recent evening in London, the University of Bristol psychology professor figured he'd seize the opportunity. Holding up an old cardigan, he asked if anyone would be willing to wear it if he paid them ?20 (about $40). Every hand shot up. Then Hood added that the sweater had been worn by a notorious murderer. All but a couple of hands disappeared. "People view evil as something physical, even tangible, and able to infect the sweater" as easily as lice, Hood says. That idea helps explain a number of supernatural beliefs, he argues: "The idea of spirits and souls appearing in this world becomes more plausible if we believe in general that the nonphysical can transfer over to the physical world."

And believe it we do. A Gallup poll found that only 7 percent of Americans do not believe in telepathy, deja vu, ghosts, past lives or other supernatural phenomena, which may have more than a little to do with the soaring popularity of Halloween. Even eminent rationalists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered natural selection (prompting Darwin to speed up his own work), believed in ghosts, haunted houses, levitation and clairvoyance. But "supernatural"—anything that cannot be explained by laws of physics or biology—also encompasses more mundane phenomena. It includes the belief that you can feel someone staring at you from behind, and that if you think about someone he is more likely to phone you (this doesn't work for getting first dates to call you for a second, however). Far from being pathological, the ubiquity of such beliefs is actually a clue to how the normal mind works, cognitive scientists now realize, for belief in the supernatural arises from the same mental processes that underlie everyday reasoning and perception.

Chief among those normal processes is our neurons' habit of filling in the blanks. The brain takes messy, incomplete input and turns it into a meaningful, complete picture. Visualize four Pac-Man-like black shapes arranged so that the wedge removed from each seems to form a corner of a white square. Neurons in the brain's visual regions, whose job is to fire when the eyes see a square's edges, do fire—even though there are no edges to see. The mind also sees patterns in random data, which is why the sky is speckled with bears and big dippers. This drive to perceive patterns—which is very useful in interpreting experimental data as well as understanding people's behavior—can also underlie such supernatural beliefs as seeing Jesus in the scorch marks and flecks of grain on a grilled-cheese sandwich. "If a stain looks like the Virgin Mary," says Hood, "then it is a divine sign and not a coincidence. If the wind in the cave sounds like a voice, then it is a voice."

Patterns can be in time as well as space. Hence such superstitious rituals as wearing the same shirt when you compete in a sports event, or not standing on the white lines of a tennis court, as John McEnroe refused to do. If you depart from the ritual to prove to a skeptic that it really works, you become so tense about the loss of the magic talisman that you're indeed likely to lose. Game, set and match for superstition.

The mind also tends to impute consciousness to inanimate objects (ever yell at a balky computer?). This leads us to believe that natural phenomena are "purposeful, caused by agents with sentient minds," says Hood, whose book "The Supernatural Sense" is due next year. It's only a short step to thinking that " 'things that go bump in the night' are the result of some spirit or agent," not branches brushing against your drainpipe.

The belief that minds are not bound to bodies reflects a dualism that shows up in children as young as 2. "This is universal, seeing minds as separate from bodies," says psychologist Paul Bloom of Yale University. "Kids have no trouble believing stories in which people exchange bodies, for instance. And since supernatural beings like ghosts are without material bodies but with minds, our belief in dualism makes them totally plausible."

And the belief that you can feel someone staring at you from behind? Someone who sees you suddenly pivot is likely to return your stare, leading to the false conclusion that you did detect the gaze. Thanks to "confirmatory bias," people tend to remember every time a hunch like this—or like the idea that the phone rings after you think about someone—is borne out. We forget all those times it isn't.

As scientists probe deeper into the brain for what underlies superstition, they have found a surprising suspect: dopamine, which usually fuels the brain's sense of reward. In one study, two groups of people, either believers in the supernatural or skeptics, looked at quickly displayed images of faces and scrambled faces, real words and nonwords. The goal was to pick out the real ones. Skeptics called more real faces nonfaces, and real words nonwords, than did believers, who happily saw faces and words even in gibberish. But after the skeptics were given L-dopa, a drug that increases dopamine, their skeptical threshold fell, and they ID'd more faces and words as real. That suggests that dopamine inclines the brain to see patterns even in random noise. Boo!

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Former FBI Spycatcher Reveals Poker Techniques

2007-10-21T03:16:00.000-07:00

As an FBI spy catcher, Joseph Navarro could identify traitors through their subtle behavioral tics—something as simple as a squint.

These days, Navarro brings his investigator's eye for detail to the poker table—where a bite of the lip or the tilt of a head can signal a straight flush or a stone bluff. Navarro shares his decoding techniques with players eager for an edge in the high-stakes world of professional poker.

"Poker players lie all the time," Navarro says. "They pretend they are strong when they are weak or weak when they are strong. The truth is they can all be read. You can have a poker face, but I've yet to see someone with a poker body."

In the poker world, the giveaways are called "tells"—gestures that signal a player's confidence or discomfort. Navarro's first career made him uniquely qualified for his current part-time job as an instructor at the World Series of Poker Academy.

While working espionage cases with the FBI for more than a quarter-century, he became a world-renowned expert in nonverbal behavior. He participated in virtually every U.S. spy investigation between 1993 and 2003, including those of notorious moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen.

The 58-year-old Cuban immigrant was eight when he fled Cuba with his family following the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. They settled in Florida, and he became an American citizen at 18.

Navarro retired from the FBI in 2003, although he continues to train FBI and CIA agents on interrogation and habits of spies and terrorists.

Navarro says his skill at deciphering body language in spies is easily applied to poker. Both are games of subterfuge and raw, primitive passion. A poker player, like a spy, telegraphs self-assurance or self-doubt through subconscious body language, he notes.

"When you are feeling good—or have a monster hand—your body will manifest what it feels," he says. "You get happy feet. Your feet begin to bounce up and down like a kid going to Disney World."

And the opposite: negativity comes out through pursed lips, a crinkled nose, squinty eyes. "We squint at things we don't like," Navarro says, referencing Clint Eastwood's taciturn gunslinger from his spaghetti Western phase.

Navarro says he can size up anyone—even professional card sharks—by observing their behavior for mere minutes.

Players often try to conceal their emotions with sunglasses, silence, a hooded sweat shirt. Navarro says the cover-ups don't work, even for professionals like Phil "The Unabomber" Laak—renowned for hiding his visage behind shades and a hoodie.

"The involuntary nonverbal mannerisms dictated by the brain will always betray the strength or weakness of a player's hand," Navarro says.

A card player dealt a royal flush—the best hand in poker—instinctively treats the cards as a treasure. A bad hand is treated as something less than an heirloom, he says. Posture is another clue.

"If your boss asks at a meeting, 'Who is not pulling their weight?', the shoulders will rise on those who are not confident," he says. "It's called 'The Turtle Effect.' You are trying to hide your head inside your shoulders."

On the contrary, a person whose fingertips meet like a church steeple with the thumb pointed up indicates a winning hand.

Navarro teaches players to observe and collect behavioral information from the minute they sit at the card table. When a player is confident, they tend to use their hands more and claim more territory at the table. When they have a good hand, they generally look down at their chips.

Phil Helmuth, considered one of the best Texas Hold 'Em players in history, is among Navarro's students.

"He's taught me a few tricks," said Helmuth, winner of 10 World Series of Poker bracelets. "I took three pages of notes at his seminar."

Women display different gestures than men, but are generally not harder to read, according to Navarro.

For example, women who lack confidence will play with their hair to calm themselves down or will tend to touch their throats. Men touch their necks more aggressively or put their hands on their face.

Navarro says he was only duped once in his spycatching career.

Kelly Warren, a female U.S. Army clerk based in Germany during the Cold War, was selling secrets to the Hungarians in the late '80s. She convinced Navarro that her husband was the sole spy in the family—but only temporarily.

Navarro soon unraveled her lies, leading to a 25-year sentence for espionage.

Navarro's techniques, while effective in reading opponents, can also be used to mislead other players. Deliberately telegraphed signs can convince opponents that a lousy hand is good, or vice versa.

"While you can't control the cards you are dealt," Navarro says, "you can make them win."

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Elephants sense 'danger' clothes

2007-10-19T01:28:00.000-07:00

Elephants can tell whether a human is a friend or foe by their scent and colour of clothing, according to Fife experts.

St Andrews University researchers found that elephants could recognise the degree of danger posed by different groups of individuals.

The study found African elephants reacted with fear when they detected the scent of garments previously worn by men of the Maasai tribe.

Maasai men are known to demonstrate their virility by spearing elephants.

Level of risk

The elephants also responded aggressively to red clothing, which is characteristic of traditional Maasai dress.

However, the elephants showed much milder reaction to clothing previously worn by the Kamba people, agriculturalists who pose little threat.

The psychologists said they had expected to find elephants might be able to distinguish among different human groups according to the level of risk they posed.

They said: "We were not disappointed. In fact, we think that this is the first time that it has been experimentally shown that any animal can categorise a single species of potential predator into subclasses based on such subtle cues."

The researchers, Dr Lucy Bates and Professor Richard Byrne, first presented elephants with clean, red clothing and with red clothing that had been worn for five days by either a Maasai or a Kamba man.

They found that Maasai-scented clothing motivated elephants to travel significantly faster in the first minute after they moved away.

The elephants also travelled further in the first five minutes, and took significantly longer to relax after they stopped running away.

They then investigated whether elephants could also use garment colour as a cue to classify potential threat and found the elephants reacted with aggression towards red but not to white cloth. This suggested that they associated the colour red with the Maasai.

The researchers believe the difference in the elephants' emotional reaction to odour versus colour might relate to the amount of risk they sense in the two situations, encouraged by a particularly keen sense of smell.

"With any scent of Maasai present, fear and escape reactions seem to dominate anything else," said Dr Bates.

Professor Byrne added: "While elephants can undoubtedly be dangerous when they come into conflict with humans, our data show that, given the opportunity, they would far rather run away, even before they encounter the humans in person.

"We see this experiment as just a start to investigating precisely how elephants 'see the world', and it may be that their abilities will turn out to equal or exceed those of our closer relatives, the monkeys and apes," he added.

The study is published online by Current Biology and will appear in the 20 November print issue.

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Student Sets Up His Own Surveillance To Catch Locker Room Thief

2007-10-12T02:34:00.000-07:00

ALTAMONTE SPRINGS, Fla. -- A Lake Brantley High School student is credited with helping Altamonte Springs police solve a series of baffling school burglaries. Police arrested 19-year-old Antonio Brinson on Wednesday after investigators said he was caught on a hidden camera stealing from other students in a locker room. He's suspected of stealing several cell phones, an MP3 player and some cash over a few weeks.

Another student got fed up and set up his own surveillance camera in the locker room to catch the suspected thief in the act.

"We were all happy. One kid said his phone was stolen. I looked in my bag and my phone, MP3 and money were all gone," said Julian Campos, a student victim.

The school district didn't comment on whether the student who used the camera was in any kind of trouble, but some students said they hope not because they think he did the right thing.

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Hungary Hosts Rubik's Cube Championship

2007-10-07T00:26:00.000-07:00

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — After 25 years, the cube is coming home. Hundreds of competitors are meeting for the fourth Rubik's Cube world championship Friday in the Hungarian capital, which hosted the first such event in 1982.

The mechanical puzzle invented by Hungarian Erno Rubik sparked a global craze in the early 1980s. Some 7 million cubes were sold last year.

Competitors from 32 countries will take part in the three-day event, with prizes to be awarded in 17 categories, with experts trying to solve the classic 3x3 cube and its variations while blindfolded, with one hand, or with their feet.

The current world record for solving the 3x3 cube — which has six sides of a different color with nine tiles on each side — is 9.86 seconds by Thibaut Jacquinot of France, set in May at the Spanish Open.

Matyas Kuti, 14, is one of the host country's biggest hopes for a top finish. Kuti first picked up a cube he found at home in February 2006 and began competing a few months later.

Kuti is considered a master of the blindfolded event, in which he has set 11 world records and has 24 first-place competition finishes.

He practices about three hours a day and his favorite cube is souped up with cubes rotating more easily because of filed down rough edges and silicon lubricants applied. Such alterations are legal according to the rules.

"The 5x5 cube and doing it blindfold are my favorite events," Kuti, from Budapest, said. "These are the most complicated versions and it's a great feeling to solve them."

The United States is expected to have the biggest delegation, with 39 competitors.

Prize money totals $28,000, with the top prize of $7,000 going to the fastest 3x3 cube solver.

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Scientist invents computer pillow to stop snoring

2007-10-05T02:49:00.000-07:00

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German scientist has come up with a solution for snoring -- a computerized pillow that shifts the head's sleeping position until the noise stops.

Daryoush Bazargani, professor of computer science at the University of Rostock and the pillow's inventor, was displaying a prototype of his pillow at a health conference in Germany on Wednesday.

"The pillow is attached to a computer, which is the size of a book, rests on a bedside table, and analyses snoring noises," Bazargani told Reuters.

"The computer then reduces or enlarges air compartments within the pillow to facilitate nasal airflow to minimize snoring as the user shifts during sleep," he said.

The ergonomic pillow can also be used for neck massages.

Bazargani said several U.S. firms were interested in manufacturing the pillow.

"I invented it because I snore," he said. "I tried all sorts of products, but nothing worked. I hope people who use it will sleep more peacefully."

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Pa. Man Breaks World Record For Stone-Skipping

2007-10-01T02:38:00.000-07:00

(AP) FRANKLIN, Pa. A Pennsylvania man cast a stone that skipped on water a whopping 51 times, shattering the old world record of 40.

Russell "Rock Bottom" Byars' feat happened July 19, where the Allegheny River meets French Creek in Franklin, about 70 miles north of Pittsburgh. He estimated his stone traveled about 250 feet.

Before declaring him a record-holder, Guinness World Records experts analyzed film of Byars' toss, checking the concentric circles in the water by each skip.

"I actually threw 40 stones that day, but that was the first skip that I threw," Byars told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which confirmed the record with Guinness officials.

The old record, set in 2002, was held by Kurt Steiner, 42, of Emporium.

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Company Pays Surfers Twenty Five Bucks To Come Up With Unusual Domain Names

2007-09-26T03:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.pickydomains.com

Did cybersquatters take all the good names? Or perhaps webmasters lost their creativity? Whatever the answer is, it’s all good for PickyDomains.Com. The idea for the service is brainlessly simple to say the least.

Can’t come up with a catchy domain name? Put a fifty dollar deposit and let others look for available names for you. When you see a name you like, you simply register it and your $50 is split between a person who came up with the name and the service. If you don’t see any good names, you get your money back.

Guessing from the list of already completed orders, domain contributors are very good at picking both abstract domains and descriptive ones, not to mention ubiquitous web 2.0 names. I can easily picture naming agencies charge hundreds, if not thousands for Pictoma.Com, Deprice.Com or Smartopreneur.Com

PickyDomains.Com lets anyone give it a stab at becoming a contributor (you have to register first). However, all nub suggestions have to pass moderator first. Besides the greed factor (hey, getting $25 deposited to your PayPal account for coming up with a creative domain is pretty cool), I love browsing through orders just to see what kind of websites and web services people are coming up with.

Here is a good one – Site That Lists All Happy Hours In NY City. I can see it becoming popular. Here is another unusual one – Name For Heat-Resistant Paint. Or how about Community Site Where People Come To Get Smarter? Hey I have a great idea for that one. Better submit it, before you think of something better.

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Jacksonville Vet Extracts Toy Lizard From Real Lizard

2007-09-20T03:16:00.000-07:00

But Finley's father, Jeff Collins, feared it might be something more ominous and rushed Mushu to an animal hospital, where a veterinarian pulled out a 7-inch toy rubber lizard.

"I've never extracted a lizard from another lizard before," said veterinarian John Rossi.

Rossi had sedated Mushu and pulled on the protrusion.

"The next thing I knew, I was seeing legs and a body and a head. It was very strange to be tugging on this thing," he said.

By the time the rubbery lizard's legs began to appear, Rossi realized what it was.

"We were all laughing," he said. "It passed completely through the entire (gastrointestinal) tract," Rossi said.

Rossi said bearded dragons, a variety of Australian lizards, often swallow such things as small suction cups, screws and dimes.

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YouTube 101 - SoCal College Offers YouTube Class

2007-09-16T00:46:00.000-07:00

CLAREMONT, Calif. — Here's a dream-come-true for Web addicts: college credit for watching YouTube.

Pitzer College this fall began offering what may be the first course about the video-sharing site. About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.

Class lessons also are posted and students are encouraged to post videos. One class member, for instance, posted a 1:36-minute video of himself juggling.

Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor at the liberal arts college, said she was "underwhelmed" by the content on YouTube but set up the course, "Learning from YouTube," to explore the role of the popular site.

Class members control most of the class content and YouTube watchers from around the world are encouraged to comment, Juhasz said.

She hopes the course will raise serious issues about YouTube, such as the role of "corporate-sponsored democratic media expression."

YouTube is "a phenomenon that should be studied," student Darren Grose said. "You can learn a lot about American culture and just Internet culture in general."

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Man Claims Dry Burp Flawed Breath Test

2007-09-13T03:56:00.000-07:00

STRATHAM, N.H. (AP) - A man arrested for allegedly driving drunk is fighting to get his license back, saying his breath test was flawed because he was burping at the time.

Frederick Cronin is appealing a decision by the state Division of Motor Vehicles to suspend his license after his June 15 arrest by state police.

According to court papers, Cronin was brought to the Stratham Police Department for booking after he was arrested.

Stratham Police Officer Christopher Call was asked to give Cronin a breath test. But before the test could be administered, Call was required to observe Cronin for 20 minutes.

During the 20-minute period, Cronin told Call that he had burped. Under administrative rules, police are required to restart the 20-minute observation period if a person "vomits, regurgitates or belches" during that time.

After learning of the burp, Call restarted the observation period, the appeal said. Following the observation, Cronin was given a breath test, which allegedly showed he had a blood alcohol level of 0.12 percent. The level a driver is considered drunk is .08 percent.

Before a required second sample was taken, Cronin told Call that he had burped again. Call then heard Cronin burp, but described it as a "dry burp," the appeal said.

Unsure of what to do because of the burp that occurred before the second sample, Call discussed the problem with Stratham Sgt. David Pierce, who told Call to have Cronin blow into the breath machine a second time and accept the results if they were close to those from the first sample.

The appeal said Call ordered Cronin to blow into the breath tester again, but the 20-minute observation period wasn't restarted.

The results of that second test put Cronins alleged blood alcohol level at 0.13 percent, court papers said.

At a hearing before the state Department of Motor Vehicles, Cronin argued that the rules regarding the administration of a breath test after a driver burps were not followed.

But the hearings examiner ruled that a "dry burp" did not constitute a "belch," and therefore the 20-minute observation period did not need to be restarted again.

The examiner also found that the "gaseous mix that flowed out of (Cronins) mouth had not emanated from (his) stomach and contained nothing but air," the appeal said.

However, Cronins appeal said the examiner never explained how he found this "distillation process" had occurred.

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Leech invasion makes residents see red

2007-09-09T23:29:00.000-07:00

TOKYO (Reuters) - Long confined to the mountains, Japanese leeches are invading residential areas, causing swelling, itching and general discomfort with their blood-thirsty ways.

Yamabiru, or land leeches, have become a problem in 29 of Japan's 47 prefectures, according to the Institute for Environmental Culture, a private research facility in Chiba prefecture, east of Tokyo.

The little suckers are riding into towns and villages, hitching lifts on deer and boar whose numbers have grown due to re-forestation and dwindling rural populations.

Once there, the leeches, which measure in at about 1.5 cms before a meal, take to feasting on warm human flesh.

"Yamabiru will climb into people's socks and stay for about an hour, growing five to 10 times in size. Unlike with water leeches, people don't immediately realize they've been bitten. Only later when they see their blood-soaked feet, do they realize what has happened," said Shigekazu Tani, the institute's director.

"The real problem is that the bleeding won't stop and the affected area swells up and really itches," he added.

The best way to deal with the tiny vampires?

"We can cut down trees and mow long grass to dissuade wild animals from coming too close, and create sunny habitats that are inhospitable to leeches. We can also spread pesticides that kill the leeches," Tani said.

"Or we can just tough it out."

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Goats sacrificed to fix Nepal jet

2007-09-06T01:40:00.000-07:00

Nepal's state-run airline has confirmed that it sacrificed two goats to appease a Hindu god, following technical problems with one of its aircraft.

Nepal Airlines said the animals were slaughtered in front of the plane - a Boeing 757 - at Kathmandu airport.

The offering was made to Akash Bhairab, the Hindu god of sky protection, whose symbol is seen on the company's planes.

The airline said that after Sunday's ceremony the plane successfully completed a flight to Hong Kong.

"The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights," senior airline official Raju KC was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Nepal Airlines has two Boeing aircraft in its fleet.

The persistent faults with one of the planes had led to the postponement of a number of flights in recent weeks.

The company has not said what the problem was, but reports in local media have blamed an electrical fault.

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German man loses top of his head in brain operation

2007-09-01T03:29:00.000-07:00

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German court has awarded 3,000 euros ($4,100) in damages to a man who had to have the top of his skull replaced with plastic because of a faulty hospital fridge.

Doctors removed the top of the man's head and put it in cold storage while they operated on his brain, the court in the western city of Koblenz said Tuesday.

Because the refrigerator was defective, the section of skull was not kept cool enough and could not be reattached. Doctors replaced the bone with a plastic prosthesis.

The man sought compensation of at least 20,000 euros on the grounds that the prosthesis caused him headaches, affected his balance and made him unduly sensitivity to the weather.

Following consultations with experts, the court found that the operation had caused the man's discomfort, not the loss of the top of his skull.

Compensation of 3,000 euros was "appropriate and sufficient," it said.

"The experts consulted by the court concluded the new skull roof was better than the original," a court spokesman said.

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Missing World War II Sub Found After 65 Years

2007-08-29T01:28:00.000-07:00

(AP) ANCHORAGE, Alaska The mangled remains of a World War II submarine were found in the Bering Sea on Wednesday night, more than six decades after the U.S. Navy vessel disappeared with a crew of 70 off the Aleutian Island of Kiska.

The discovery of the USS Grunion culminates a five-year search led by the sons of its commander, Mannert Abele, and may finally shine a light on the mysterious last moments of the doomed vessel.

"Obviously, this is a very big thing," the oldest son, Bruce Abele, said Thursday from his home in Newton, Mass. "I told my wife about it when she was still in bed and she practically went up to the ceiling."

A remotely operated vehicle snapped pictures and captured three hours of video footage of the Grunion on a rocky underwater slope north of the volcanic island, according to John Abele, who was in Kiska Harbor with the search team on Thursday.

The submarine lies 1,000 feet from the surface and had been crushed by water pressue, said Abele. He is director and co-founder of the medical equipment company Boston Scientific Corp. and the youngest of the three brothers.

"The most surprising thing was the damage," said Abele. "It was much more than we or anyone else imagined. Initially it was very hard to recognize as a ship."

The hull had imploded so severely that the interior, including bunks and a dive wheel, are clearly visible, Abele said. No human remains were found.

The search team hired by the Abeles, Deep Sea Systems International, said no identifying markings or lettering could be seen, however, the location and appearance of the vessel indicate it is the missing sub.

"There's a 95 percent chance that this is the Grunion and a less than five percent chance that it's not," said Christopher J. Nicholson, general manager of the company based in Cataumet, Mass. "The fact that they actually found this in an expanse of ocean is really pretty spectacular."

The Grunion had a propeller guard, which was rare in subs of the day, Abele said. The vessel discovered yesterday also had the fence, which prevented docking lines from getting caught in propeller.

The Grunion patrolled Alaska's Aleutian Islands during the early months of World War II. Her last official radio message to the submarine base at Dutch Harbor came on July 30, 1942 and described heavy enemy activity at Kiska Harbor.

Earlier that month, the Grunion had sunk two Japanese submarine chasers and heavily damaged a third near Kiska, one of two islands in the far west Aleutians captured by the Japanese.

Until a few years ago, the clues to the Grunion's disappearance were too fragmented to justify a search.

But after receiving more information from a model ship builder in Japan, the Abeles launched an initial expedition to Kiska in August 2006. Sonar images of a sub-shaped silhouette prompted a second journey this month.

As news of the search spread, several relatives of the Grunion's crew banded together to locate others with ties to the lost men. To date, the relatives of 69 men are following the progress of the search, said Mary Bentz of Bethesda, Md., whose uncle died on the Grunion.

The relatives of one more man, Byron Allen Traviss of Detroit, remain to be found.

Bentz said the news is a relief after decades of not knowing what happened. Her father's youngest brother, Carmine Anthony Parziale, of Weedville, Penn., was in his early 20s when he served as a torpedoman third class on Grunion.

"I know when my dad would talk about him, his eyes would well up with tears," said Bentz. "I was relieved to know that this is finally over, that now we can say, two and three generations later, that we know what happened."

A forensic engineer and other experts will use the footage to piece together the Grunion's final hours and figure out why it sank. The search crew of 17 plans to spend several more days looking for sunken Japanese ships in the area.

"Actually seeing the burial site was touching and in a way rewarding," John Abele said. "It provides a closing and hopefully an answer to the unknown."

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Scientists find way to trigger an out-of-body experience in volunteers

2007-08-24T02:44:00.000-07:00

Experts have found a way to trigger an out-of-body experience in volunteers.

The experiments, described in the Science journal, offer a scientific explanation for a phenomenon experienced by one in 10 people.

Two teams used virtual reality goggles to con the brain into thinking the body was located elsewhere.

The visual illusion plus the feel of their real bodies being touched made volunteers sense that they had moved outside of their physical bodies.

The researchers say their findings could have practical applications, such as helping take video games to the next level of virtuality so the players feel as if they are actually inside the game.

Clinically, surgeons might also be able to perform operations on patients thousands of miles away by controlling a robotic virtual self.

Teleported

For some, out-of-body experiences or OBEs occurs spontaneously, while for others it is linked to dangerous circumstances, a near-death experience, a dream-like state or use of alcohol or drugs.

One theory is that it is down to how people perceive their own body - those unhappy or less in touch with their body are more likely to have an OBE.

But the two teams, from University College London, UK, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, believe there is a neurological explanation.

Their work suggests a disconnection between the brain circuits that process visual and touch sensory information may thus be responsible for some OBEs.

In the Swiss experiments, the researchers asked volunteers to stand in front of a camera while wearing video-display goggles.

Through these goggles, the volunteers could see a camera view of their own back - a three-dimensional "virtual own body" that appeared to be standing in front of them.

When the researchers stroked the back of the volunteer with a pen, the volunteer could see their virtual back being stroked either simultaneously or with a time lag.

The volunteers reported that the sensation seemed to be caused by the pen on their virtual back, rather than their real back, making them feel as if the virtual body was their own rather than a hologram.

Volunteers

Even when the camera was switched to film the back of a mannequin being stroked rather than their own back, the volunteers still reported feeling as if the virtual mannequin body was their own.

And when the researchers switched off the goggles, guided the volunteers back a few paces, and then asked them to walk back to where they had been standing, the volunteers overshot the target, returning nearer to the position of their "virtual self".

Dr Henrik Ehrsson, who led the UCL research, used a similar set-up in his tests and found volunteers had a physiological response - increased skin sweating - when they felt their virtual self was being threatened - appearing to be hit with a hammer.

Dr Ehrsson said: "This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience. In other words, we feel that our self is located where the eyes are."

Dr Susan Blackmore, psychologist and visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England, said: "This has at last brought OBEs into the lab and tested one of the main theories of how they occur.

"Scientists have long suspected that the clue to these extraordinary, and sometimes life-changing, experiences lies in disrupting our normal illusion of being a self behind our eyes, and replacing it with a new viewpoint from above or behind."

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Fetus Finds 100 Friends On Facebook

2007-08-16T02:46:00.000-07:00

IT already has its own Facebook page and more than 100 people want to be its friend, but Bubba Waring, described by its mother as "the world's most famous fetus", hasn't actually been born yet.

Sydney couple Claire Gillis and Luke Waring, who are expecting their first child in three months, initially turned to the social networking site to keep their family and friends updated on the pregnancy.

But instead of creating a profile under her own name, Ms Gillis said she thought it would be better to do it from her unborn child's perspective.

"We have friends and family all over the world, so we're using it for them, to post updates on ultrasounds, scans and what it has been doing all week," she said. "So that's how it started."

At present, 25 people are listed as the baby's "friends", but publicity surrounding the profile has prompted others to come forward and apply to be part of Bubba Waring's (as yet unstarted) life.

Ms Gillis said she and her husband had been amazed by the reaction. "I'm considering whether I should just open it up to the public because I'm just receiving the most ridiculous number of emails and friend requests," she said.

"We're not going to find out its gender, so it'll be a surprise to everybody when the baby is born."

But the lack of information hasn't stopped some people from taking bets on the unborn child's vital details. "I'm running a bit of a poll on the Facebook page and one of the questions is, 'Am I a boy or a girl?' and the resounding response so far is that it's a boy," Ms Gillis said.

But regardless of whether Bubba Waring keeps his or her Facebook page after its birth, its loyal public will be given a final update.

"Once he or she is born, we'll post updates of what the sex is and what the name is and all those kinds of details," Ms Gillis said.

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YouTube Video Helps Catch Thief

2007-08-13T03:11:00.000-07:00

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A thief was convicted and fined after being spotted on a video posted on the Web site YouTube.

The man was taped slowly circling the store, stealing a laptop computer, slipping the computer into his overcoat and stepping out of the store in the South Island town of Greymouth, local media reported Friday.

The whole performance was posted on YouTube -- set to "The Pink Panther" music track -- and attracted 500,000 hits from around the globe.

One viewer recognized the man and alerted police. Dawson Anthony Bliss, 50, was convicted of theft in Greymouth District Court on Thursday after pleading guilty.

Judge Gary MacAskill fined Bliss $1,485 and ordered him to pay $1,478 in reparation.

Greymouth on South Island's west coast is 234 miles south of the capital, Wellington.

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Glowing furniture reveals the weight of dinner guests

2007-08-10T04:03:00.000-07:00

An interactive table and chairs that can change colour has been developed by Japanese researchers.

On display at the Siggraph show, the Fuwapica furniture uses sensors embedded in the table-top to work out the colour of items placed upon it.

The colour of the stools then change to match the colour of whatever has been placed on the sensitive table-top.

Sensors in the stools also work out the weight of anyone sat on them - heavier people are treated to darker shades.

Pulsing colours

The circular table acts as the central control point for the four stools. Sensors sit beneath a glass plate on the top of the table and scan any object placed on it.

The sensors bounce red, green and blue light off the objects in frequencies that humans cannot see and records which hues are reflected.

An Apple Mac buried in the table then sends wireless messages to the four stools, which project light through their translucent shells to match, as closely as possible, the colour of the object on the table top.

The colours are also made to pulse lighter and darker at about the same tempo of human breathing in a bid to make the stools seem more life-like.

Placing many objects on the table-top makes the system mix and merge colours to match the shades seen in the collection of artefacts.

The designers suggest that people can change the colour of the chairs to match their mood.

Dreamed up by Shinya Matsuyama and colleagues from the Studio Mongoose design company in Japan, the Fuwapica furniture draws on the country's ancient notions that gods inhabit every manmade artefact, be it chopsticks, dishes or tables.

The designers say that instead of furniture being inert and silent, it should be given a chance to interact with the people that use it.

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Bloggers Want To Form A Union

2007-08-07T03:42:00.000-07:00

Miners, steel workers and auto workers have them. Why not bloggers?

Bloggers say they work hard, even though their work is not intensely physical. So some left-leaning bloggers are thinking about unionizing, hoping to get health insurance, collective bargaining and even professional standards out of it.

One blogger said the work is very intense. He said: "You're constantly scanning for news. Your arm and neck and shoulder are wearing out because you're constantly using a mouse."

And the National Writers Union, part of the UAW, is trying to develop strategies to reach bloggers and encourage them to join.

There's decidedly less support for a union movement among conservative bloggers.

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Court Orders Man to Complete eBay Deal

2007-08-04T03:40:00.000-07:00

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - An Australian court ordered a man to hand over a vintage plane worth about $215,000 after he tried to back out of an eBay auction, a newspaper reported Friday.

The New South Wales state Supreme Court ordered Vin Thomas to complete the deal after he changed his mind about selling the 1946 World War II Wirraway plane he had placed on the Internet auction site last year, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Peter Smythe, a Australian warplane enthusiast, was the only person to bid on the item, matching the $128,640 reserve price just moments before the auction ended in August last year.

But Thomas had already agreed to sell the plane to someone else for $85,800 more than Smythe's offer, and backed out of the sale, the newspaper said.

Smythe took Thomas to court, hoping a judge would force him to follow through with the deal.

Judge Nigel Rein agreed, saying the eBay auction formed "a binding contract between the plaintiff and the defendant and ... should be specifically enforced."

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Geek Deaths

2007-08-02T23:59:00.000-07:00

Seems tech has a contract out for geeks.

Let this be a warning to all of you: Don't touch the inside of your PC when you are wet. According to Shanghai Daily, a young man, simply identified as "Wu," was shocked to death by his PC.

Wu took the case off the outside of his PC to prevent it from overheating. For some unexplained reason, he was not running the air conditioner in his home, so he wasn't wearing that much clothing. At some point, his sweaty leg came in contact with his PC's innards and Wu was dealt the deadly jolt -- 380 volts right from his PC's power supply.

Let's not forget that gadgets are electric, after all, and these kinds of deaths can happen just like that, so follow the precautions you'd take with any other electricity-powered device (like don't touch it if you're wet!).

But electrocution is not the only hazard that can come with a gadget. Take a look at some of the other tech-related deaths we have covered in the past few months (surprisingly, there are a lot more than just these).

We hope each of the following examples will serve as some kind of warning for you:

* Cell Phone Battery Explodes, Kills Worker: This one happened in China, where a factory worker's cell phone in his chest pocket exploded, sending shards into his chest.
* Kid Drowns in Lake After Cell Phone Sinks: This poor kid went diving after his cell phone in a lake. He never came back up.
* Man Drowns After Phone Drops in Sewer: This one isn't good for the claustrophobes: This Michigan man went after his dropped cell phone in a sewer, got stuck face-down, and drowned with his feet sticking up street level.

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Exclamation Point Costs Texter $1000

2007-08-01T03:28:00.000-07:00

MINOT, N.D. (AP) - Oh, no! Don't forget the exclamation point! It could cost you $1,000! Kevin Taylor, 30, of Minneapolis, lost out on a $1,000 first prize in a text messaging contest at the North Dakota State Fair because he forgot the punctuation mark at the end of a phrase that he and his sudden-death competitor had to enter.

So he settled for $200.

Beth Brevik, 32, of Minot, ended up with the big prize at Saturday's contest, tapping out the phrase: "I hope I win the grand prize of $1,000 so I can buy a new phone. Whoo!"

"I was very lucky," she said.

Brevik and Taylor finished ahead of 38 competitors, many of them teenagers. Organizers said the contest was patterned after a similar event in New York, where a 13-year-old girl won $50,000.

Phrases were posted on a screen that contestants text-messaged to the judges, who verified the answers for accuracy. The contest was sponsored by a cell phone company.

Brevik said she thought she lost when Taylor put his phone down in the final round. Seconds later, Taylor realized his mistake and exclaimed, "Oh, no!"

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Scientists map elephant evolution

2007-07-30T02:32:00.000-07:00

Scientists say they have calculated the date at which the African and the Asian elephant went their separate ways.

The two elephant species diverged from a common ancestor some 7.6 million years ago, experts working in the US, Germany and Switzerland say.

They came to their conclusion after comparing a genetic analysis of the two species with material derived from the extinct woolly mammoth and mastodon.

The African elephant is much bigger than its Asian counterpart.

It is known for its large, floppy ears, and both sexes have great ivory tusks - unlike the Asian species, in which typically only the males have large external tusks.

The now extinct mastodon was very similar in appearance to the woolly mammoth - with lots of hair and big tusks.

Genetically, however, it was very different and is only a distant relative of the elephants.

Its genetic profile had not previously been mapped, but now thanks to the analysis of material extracted from a fossilised tooth found on the banks of an Alaskan river, scientists have the first genetic portrait of the creature.

By comparing the mastodon's genetic make-up with existing genome sequences for modern elephants and the woolly mammoth, they have built up a family tree for the elephants.

The tree has the African elephant diverging from both the Asian elephant and the mammoth about 7.6 million years ago.

Then, at 6.7 million years ago, the Asian elephant and the mammoth also go their separate ways.

"The cool thing about the mastodon is that we know pretty exactly from the fossil record when it diverged from the elephant and the mammoth," said Dr Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and one of the lead researchers.

"So using that time point and the genetic data, we could date when the African elephant, Asian elephant and mammoth diverged from each other," Dr Hofreiter explained.

"That took place in Africa in the same place where humans, chimps and gorillas diverged."

The fact that it is now judged that the elephants went their separate ways in the same place and at about the same time we humans diverged from our ape brethren may of course be a coincidence.

Or, as Dr Hofreiter suggests, there may be a common environmental or climatic event which set both elephants and humans on their eventual evolutionary course.

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Bus Driver Fired for 38,000 Text Messages

2007-07-27T04:35:00.000-07:00

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - A Polish bus driver has been fired for sending 38,000 text messages on his company cell phone in a losing effort to win contest jackpot, a spokesman said Thursday.

Leszek Wojcik, a bus driver in the northwestern Polish city of Slupsk, ran up a tab of some 94,000 zlotys ($34,000) with his text messages while trying to win a 100,000-zloty ($36,000) SMS contest that ended June 30, Slupsk city transport spokesman Hubert Boba told The Associated Press.

Boba said a city bus drivers' monthly company phone bill is supposed to be limited to 15 zlotys ($5).

Wojcik sent an average of 1,200 SMS text messages a day, each costing 2.40 zlotys ($0.86), on his work cell phone.

Wojcik told TVN24 television he wanted to buy a second car with his possible winnings.

"Now I'm without work," he said.

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Lawn Care Company Offers Bikini-Dressed Mowers In Memphis, Tenn.

2007-07-24T02:19:00.000-07:00

(AP) One lawn care company is showing a little skin to boost business.

The women of Tiger Time Lawn Care offer to mow customers' lawns dressed in bikinis _ a service that attracts more attention to the ladies than the lawns.

"Oh yeah, they honk and yell. They can do everything you can imagine," said employee Blair Beckman, 21.

Beckman said the extra attention is expected, but she looks on the bright side.

"You get the attention but you also get a tan, which I need," Beckman said.

Owner Lee Cathey said the bikini service makes mowing the lawn a lot more interesting, although the fee is slightly higher.

"The yards definitely get more attention when there's a bikini on the lawn," Cathey said. Some customers sit in lawn chairs and have a beer while watching, he said.

The three-month-old company is looking for a way to expand the service through the end of summer.

"In the fall we'll go pick up leaves in the bikinis if need be," Cathey said.

Cathey said there hasn't been any interest in a male version of the bikini lawn cut.

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Swedish Grandma Gets Fastest Internet In The World

2007-07-21T02:32:00.000-07:00

(AP) STOCKHOLM, Sweden She is a latecomer to the information superhighway, but 75-year-old Sigbritt Lothberg is now cruising the Internet with a dizzying speed. Lothberg's 40 gigabits-per-second fiber-optic connection in Karlstad is believed to be the fastest residential uplink in the world, Karlstad city officials said.

In less than 2 seconds, Lothberg can download a full-length movie on her home computer -- many thousand times faster than most residential connections, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, head of the Karlstad city network unit.

Jonsson and Lothberg's son, Peter, worked together to install the connection.

The speed is reached using a new modulation technique that allows the sending of data between two routers placed up to 1,240 miles apart, without any transponders in between, Jonsson said.

"We wanted to show that that there are no limitations to Internet speed," he said.

Peter Lothberg, who is a networking expert, said he wanted to demonstrate the new technology while providing a computer link for his mother.

"She's a brand-new Internet user," Lothberg said by phone from California, where he lives. "She didn't even have a computer before."

His mother isn't exactly making the most of her high-speed connection. She only uses it to read Web-based newspapers.

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