links for 2009-03-31
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(tags: Congo-Kinshasa)
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(tags: Almost_Live)
Archive for March, 2009
links for 2009-03-29
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(tags: Star_Wars)
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(tags: Columbia)
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(tags: Internet_Phenomena)
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What do baby food, golf balls and wind turbines have in common? At first glance, the answer may seem to be “very little”—until you realize they’ve all benefited from technology backed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). With media attention focused on the agency’s rogue astronauts, controversy surrounding the agency’s position on climate change, recent space shuttle missions and the spacecraft Messenger’s recent flyby of Mercury, the contribution of NASA technology to tackling real-world problems on Earth may be the agency’s best untold story for cleantech entrepreneurs.(tags: Space_Exploration)
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(tags: Internet_Policy)
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(tags: andalucía)
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(tags: Almost_Live)
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(tags: Almost_Live)
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(tags: Arkansas)
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As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there are some pretty universal state symbol categories: the state bird, the state flag, the state flower, even the state gemstones. But since those declarations are left up to the individual state, the categories can be as obscure as any state will allow them to be (check out the official state neckwear category). Here are some of the stranger ones - and if your state has something particularly interesting that I missed, share it in the comments.(tags: States)
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(tags: Urban_Studies)
links for 2009-03-28
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The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.(tags: 2008_Banking_Crisis)
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(tags: Bahrain)
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(tags: Innovation)
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(tags: Dubai)
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It’s a prospect that can make the steeliest CEO sweat — the raised hand, the oath, the bank of flashing cameras, the lawmakers who want their five minutes on the nightly news. Even if a witness before a congressional hearing doesn’t endure five hours of questions, as Edward Liddy of American International Group (AIG) sat through last week, facing a hostile panel is never fun. A wrong answer could add to a witness’s legal jeopardy. A shifty response can send stock prices tumbling. A poor performance can ruin reputations — as slugger and accused steroid user Mark McGwire can attest. But there are also opportunities. A strong witness can defuse a budding scandal and dissipate public anger — and perhaps even provide justification for one of those executive bonuses talked about in the news. A CEO who has been battered by the press could be given hours to explain his or her side of the story. In the courtroom, defendants have attorneys to help them prepare and sit by their side.
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Lobbying FAIL.(tags: 2008_Banking_Crisis)
links for 2009-03-27
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(tags: Madagascar)
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(tags: Portland_Oregon)
links for 2009-03-25
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(tags: Entrepreneurship_Studies)
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(tags: Philosophy)
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(tags: Macroeconomics 2009_Economic_Stimulus)
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(tags: Almost_Live)
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(tags: Almost_Live)
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African Nation or New Age Musician? Famous Crime Duo or Retail Store? Nautical Term or Naughty Teenage Game?(tags: Almost_Live)
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(tags: Almost_Live)
links for 2009-03-24
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At a time when newspapers, magazines and TV news continue to lose readers and viewers, at least one part of the traditional media has continued to grow robustly: National Public Radio. The audience for NPR's daily news programs, including "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," reached a record last year, driven by widespread interest in the presidential election, and the general decline of radio news elsewhere. Washington-based NPR will release new figures to its stations today showing that the cumulative audience for its daily news programs hit 20.9 million a week, a 9 percent increase over the previous year. The weekly audience for all the programming fed by Washington-based NPR — including talk shows and music — also reached a record last year, with 23.6 million people tuning in each week, an 8.7 percent increase over 2007. While almost every news organization saw its audience spike during the political campaign last year, NPR's surge continues…(tags: NPR)
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Held from November 6 to 8, 2008, this ground–breaking symposium was organized to address the role of urban design in the face of one of the most profound and important challenges facing global society: the need to re–imagine and rethink how cities are designed and organized in a future without the plentiful and abundant oil upon which prosperous urban economies have been built. The event marked the 50th Anniversary of the 1958 University of Pennsylvania/Rockefeller Foundation "Conference on Urban Design Criticism," whose participants included Jane Jacobs, Louis Kahn, Kevin Lynch, Ian McHarg, Lewis Mumford, and I.M. Pei. That historic conference helped shape the new field of urban design in the 20th Century. Now, we hope you will participate in this critical exploration of new directions for 21st Century urban design.(tags: Urban_Studies)
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(tags: Internet_Phenomena)
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(tags: Texas)
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Democracies are fragile. No matter how long a regime has been democratic, it is always confronted with the possibility of becoming dysfunctional, of becoming less democratic, and possibly breaking down. Some scholars believe that polarisation is the single most important cause of the failure of democracy, because if there is too much disagreement the political system cannot possibly work. Others argue that without polarisation, parties fail to provide the voters with viable alternatives and, by doing so, undermine the quality of democracy. Democracy is ‘unthinkable save in terms of parties’ (Rosenblum 2008) when parties adequately perform their representative function. But democracy runs into troubles when parties provide either excessive or negligible policy alternatives. On one hand, when the main parties are under-representative, they can create the conditions for the emergence and/or the success of anti-system parties such as the National Front in France…(tags: Parties)
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(tags: Afghanistan)
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(tags: North_Carolina)
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(tags: Williams)
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(tags: Houston)
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(tags: Coffee)
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(tags: Basketball)
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(tags: North_Dakota)
links for 2009-03-23
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(tags: Political_Economy)
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(tags: Donors)
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(tags: Skiing:Washington)
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(tags: Jobs)
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(tags: 2009_Economic_Stimulus)
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Barack Obama has an opportunity to establish a new relationship with Russia that will make the world a safer place. With ties between the two countries being the most strained they've been in decades, the U.S. president seems to recognize there must be changes in his country's approach to Russia.
The Russians themselves seem uncertain about the direction of U.S. policy. Since Obama was elected, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev vowed to place missiles on the border of the European Union in response to any United States missile defense radar in Poland and Czechoslovakia, then decided to pull them back. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has blamed the United States for the global financial crisis and also expressed optimism about the new U.S. president. Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov welcomed a conciliatory foreign policy speech from Vice President Joe Biden at the same time that his country, by pressuring Kyrgyzstan to kick out a U.S. military base…
(tags: Foreign_Policy:Russia) -
(tags: Nicaragua)
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Tim Geithner boarded the 6 a.m. US Airways shuttle to Washington last Wednesday at La Guardia, slid his rail-thin frame into seat 5C, then stared into the middle distance. Geithner is invariably described as boyish, but that morning he looked every one of his 47 years—and then some. He wore a dapper blue suit, a spread-collar shirt, and dark circles under his eyes. For days, Geithner had been consumed in the unfolding AIG fiasco. He’d been running nonstop, laboring to contain the fallout, to explain how this bonus-related abomination had occurred, what he knew, when he knew it, why he seemed so impotent. But Geithner was too smart to harbor any illusions about the efficacy of those efforts. He knew that what awaited him in Washington was going to be ugly. When the plane touched down, he gathered his things and walked silently toward the jetway. He had the look of a man about to enter a burning building in a suit soaked with gasoline.(tags: Obama)
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The global downturn has hit Eastern Europe with particular vengeance. Countries that profited more than many others from globalization and were previously capitalism's rising stars are now seeing demand for exports collapse, along with their currencies. They are bracing for a hard landing.(tags: East_Europe)
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(tags: Refugees)
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In 1980, the landmark series Cosmos premiered on public television. Since then, it is estimated that more than a billion people around the planet have seen it. Cosmos chronicles the evolution of the planet and efforts to find our place in the universe. Each of the 13 episodes focuses on a specific aspect of the nature of life, consciousness, the universe and time. Topics include the origin of life on Earth (and perhaps elsewhere), the nature of consciousness, and the birth and death of stars. When it first aired, the series catapulted creator and host Carl Sagan to the status of pop culture icon and opened countless minds to the power of science and the possibility of life on other worlds.
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(tags: Blogging)
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(tags: Internet)
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(tags: Internet)
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(tags: Marketing)
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This article reports on a three-year-long international survey of public relations practitioners examining the impact blogs and other social media are having on public relations practice. Findings show these new media are dramatically changing public relations. Results indicate blogs and social media have enhanced what happens in public relations and that social media and traditional mainstream media complement each other. The study also finds the emergence of blogs and social media have changed the way their organizations communicate, especially to external audiences. Findings suggest social media complement traditional news media, and that blogs and social media influence coverage in traditional news media. The study reports blogs and
social media have made communications more instantaneous by encouraging organizations to respond more quickly to criticism.(tags: Marketing) -
(tags: Internet)
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(tags: Internet)
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(tags: Marketing)
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(tags: Blogging)
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Social media represents a broad change in how people communicate with one another. This is exciting for businesses as it presents new channels and methods of reaching consumers. As such, early adopters have encountered both successes and failures in developing strategies that incorporate this new paradigm. smashLAB advises groups to remain strategic and pragmatic in employing social media.(tags: Social_Networking)
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(tags: Internet_Phenomena)
links for 2009-03-21
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(tags: Uzbekistan)
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(tags: American_History)
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(tags: Saudi_Arabia Iran)
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(tags: Higher_Education)
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President Obama used it to get elected. Dell will recruit new hires with it. Microsoft's new operating system borrows from it. No question, Facebook has friends in high places. Can CEO Mark Zuckerberg make those connections pay off?(tags: Social_Networking)
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(tags: Philadelphia)
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For a while I have been thinking about a way to take some of the contrarian thinking that made me try The American Lawyer and Court TV way-back-when and apply it to a new business model to save the New York Times and journalism itself. There are two reasons why, beyond my love for the profession: First, about eight years ago my wife and I endowed The Yale Journalism Initiative. The program is intended to get better people to go into journalism, train them, give them a leg-up credential without establishing a "journalism" major, and then find them careers. It now features seminars, workshops, supported internships, and even a full time career counselor. I also teach one of the seminars. (Plus Floyd Abrams, Adam Liptak and I now also teach at Yale Law.) The implicit and now-traditional part of the deal is that if you do all this and become a Yale Journalism Scholar, I will also get you a job…(tags: Journalism)
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Designed primarily for articles which address theological and philosophical issues from a Christian perspective, and for articles from any perspective which deal critically with the theological and philosophical credentials of the Christian faith. The journal welcomes submissions in all areas of theology and philosophy, from those who do as well as those who do not share its Christian commitment.(tags: Christianity)
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(tags: Foreign_Policy)
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To a visitor, Blantyre, the largest city in the tiny, narrow African nation of Malawi, seems to embody every stereotype of African poverty. All along the sides of the road, women toting babies tied on their back with brightly-coloured chitenge cloths jostle for space with sickly-looking vendors carrying battered trays of avocados and bananas and beggars calling out “hungry, boss, hungry, boss” and asking for 50-kwacha notes, worth less than 40 American cents. Barefoot children play with jerry-rigged toys in the street – empty cans of weed killer attached to makeshift wire frames to make improvised toy cars. On Sundays, the roaring sermons of preachers from one-room wooden churches carry across the city’s hills in the misty, humid air. Their parishioners have much to pray for: Malawi has been ravaged by HIV/Aids, and Malawians today have a life expectancy of only 48 years. Among the crowds on Blantyre’s streets, one sees precious few older people.(tags: Malawi)
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(tags: Iceland)
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Thank you for visiting the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) website! The Cold War International History Project disseminates new information and perspectives on the history of the Cold War, in particular new findings from previously inaccessible sources on "the other side" — the former Communist world.(tags: Cold_War)
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(tags: Guatemala)
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(tags: Donors)
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Birds are a priceless part of America’s heritage. They are beautiful, they are economically important—and they reflect the health of our environment. This State of the Birds report reveals troubling declines of bird populations during the past 40 years—a warning signal of the failing health of our ecosystems. At the same time, we see heartening evidence that strategic land management and conservation action can reverse declines of birds. This report calls attention to the collective efforts needed to protect nature’s resources for the benefit of people and wildlife.(tags: Biology)