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Friday, August 31, 2012

BIG BROTHER: NSA: STELLAR WIND



By Jim Morris Aug 30, 2012




PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

National Security Agency/ “Stellar Wind”
As reported in Wired Magazine, the National Security Agency is building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah. When completed, its mission will be to sift through the billions of calls, email, Google searches, and personal data trails like travel itinerates, book purchases and other digital “pocket litter.” The surveillance program is codenamed “Stellar Wind.” As Amy Goodman said, “The NSA created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and
unscramble codes.”

Wired’s James Banford added, even though the CIA is more known, the NSA is actually three times the size, more secret than the CIA, and costs far more. “The NSA is really the most powerful intelligence agency, not only in the U.S., but in the world today.”

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Curious about Curiosity: a quick look at NASA’s $2.5 billion Mars rover


The $2.5 billion Mars rover Curiosity landed on the Red Planet Mars on Aug.5, 2012 and is expected to spend
at least two years exploring its Gale Crater landing site.




Electronic ‘Smart Fingers’ Will Allow Doctors to Operate
Via Virtual Touch

Someday soon, hospital patients won’t be hooked up to wires, large equipments and monitors, instead, electronic patches will be temporarily tattooed onto their bodies.


This Month in History: August 1977

It was on August 3, 1977, Tandy Corporation teamed up with Radio Shack to release the TRS-80, one of the first personal computers available to consumer markets.












Wednesday, August 29, 2012

The Man in the Moon



The Man in the Moon
By LYDIA NETZER
Published: August 27, 2012

Norfolk, Va.
Enlarge This Image
Mike McQuade



Related

After Trip of 352 Million Miles, Cheers for 23 Feet on Mars(August 23, 2012)

Times Topic: Mars

Editorial: A Deeper Search for Secrets on Mars (August 23, 2012)

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.


MOST technological advances are actually just improvements. One thing builds on the next: from shoddy to serviceable, from helpful to amazing. First you had a carriage, then a car, and then an airplane; now you have a jet. You improve on what is there. Technological advances are like that.

Except for the one that involved landing on the Moon. When a human went and stood on the Moon and looked back at the Earth, that was a different kind of breakthrough. Nothing tangible changed when Neil Armstrong’s foot dug into the lunar dust and his eyes turned back at us. We didn’t get faster wheels or smaller machines or more effective medicine. But we changed, fundamentally. What had been unknown, was known. What had been unseen was seen. And our human horizon popped out 200,000 miles. Forever, we would see the Earth differently, because we had seen it from someplace truly foreign.

This is why Mars is important. When we get a human to Mars — in the next few decades, NASA has predicted — our horizon will expand 1,000 times farther, and it will never go back.

Watching the first images from the rover, Curiosity, which landed on Mars early this month, I was reminded of a short story by Ray Bradbury called “Mars Is Heaven!” In it, Mars is populated by aliens who fool visiting Earthlings into thinking they’re in a familiar environment before murdering them. It’s about how stupid nostalgia is, how it tricks us into wanting things that were never that great in the first place. What strikes me about the story is that, just over 60 years ago, someone could seriously write about aliens on Mars.

Can you imagine what it was like then? Mars was an impossible frontier; we wouldn’t even have decent pictures of the planet until almost 20 years after the story was published. Now it reads like a fairy tale in which the moon is made of cheese, or the sun is a horse-drawn chariot bearing a god, or the stars move in crystal spheres around the sky.

When humanity was in its infancy, we thought the universe revolved around us. Then, with Copernicus, we aged into heliocentrism, became aware we were one of a family of planets inside the walls of our house, the solar system. Nearby stars gather like a town, rotating through the galaxy, our country. Clusters are like continents. We realized in stages that we were very insignificant. And then, almost like grown-ups, we pulled our boots on and began to try to leave a significant mark anyway.

We don’t get anywhere by staying home from Mars. By pushing our little mine carts around the earth and making speedier mine carts, by connecting long pipes to communicate with one another and then creating better pipes to shout down, louder ways to shout. All of our squabbles with other humans and all of our possessions here on earth, the things we make faster, easier, smaller, really mean very little. How could they, when the universe is so big? Significance is in science — not the science that leads to better mine carts and more efficient shouting, but the science that leads to more ideas.

Remember Plato’s allegory of the cave. In the cave, the people look at shadows moving on the wall. They watch the shadows move, and they think that’s living. What if they could go outside and see the sun? That’s us, moving from the Earth to the Moon. That’s Neil Armstrong, who died at the age of 82 over the weekend, standing on the Moon, and looking back at Earth.

The thing about the cave is, it’s not just one cave. It’s more caves, and more, all nested within one another. The Moon was our first cave; Mars will be next. And then there will be another cave, and another.

When people scoff at sending humans to Mars, and say that pictures of wheel marks on a red desert are not worth the trouble when there are so many things here at home that we could be spending money on, it makes me claustrophobic. It’s as if we’re trying, out of guilt or shame, to crawl back into the cave and watch the shadows on the wall. We’re trying to stay children in our parents’ house, knowing that the road leads to town, and then to another town. We’re saying, “Look, we made a really great toilet that flushes itself! Remember that printing press? That was pretty neat. We even made pyramids — those things are huge! Can’t we just be happy with making a great toilet even greater? Do we really have to go to Mars?”

But Mars is waiting. It spins now outside our human reach. We must realize that the work of growing up is not something we can cut when the budget gets tight. It is mission critical, for the intellectual life of the species, for the future of humans, not to stagnate, not to wither, but to stretch, and reach, and always to expand.


Lydia Netzer is the author of the novel “Shine Shine Shine.”

Monday, August 27, 2012


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Biocompatible Transistors Wired Into Living Human Tissue

Biocompatible Transistors Wired Into Living Human Tissue
By Rebecca BoylePosted 08.27.2012 at 11:58 am7 Comments


Cyborg Scaffold This is a 3-D reconstructed confocal fluorescence micrograph of a tissue scaffold.Charles M. Lieber and Daniel S. Kohane

A new material developed at Harvard and MIT adds a distinctly cybernetic element to the science of tissue engineering. The 3-D mesh of transistors and cells, which can support tissue growth while monitoring its health and progress, could even be a step toward prosthetic devices that connect directly to the nervous system.

Tissue scaffolds have been used successfully for some time to coax cells to grow, and they can even be used to grow artificial blood vessels. Previous research has tried to incorporate electronic sensors into these scaffolds, but they have been limited to two-dimensional flat planes, with cells growing on top of transistors or electrodes.



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TAGSTechnology, Rebecca Boyle, artificial cells,cyborg, nanowires, scaffolding, tissue engineeringThis time, scientists led by MIT professor Robert Langer and Harvard chemistry professor Charles Lieber set out to build a 3-D scaffold that more closely resembles real tissue. The team wanted to build sensors that would let them monitor how the tissue responds to drugs in real time.



The scaffold is made from epoxy embedded with silicon nanowires, which can carry electrical signals to and from the cells. The mesh was folded or rolled into a structure resembling either tissue or vasculature. The nanowires can detect voltages lower than one-thousandth of a watt, according to MIT News -- that’s the level of electricity that might be seen in a cell. The mesh was porous enough for the team to seed it with cells and coax them to grow. The system thereby supports cell growth while simultaneously monitoring it.

In their study, the authors used the scaffold to grow cardiac, neural and muscle tissue. They monitored heart tissue cell’s response to a stimulant called noradrenalin, which increases heart rate. Langer, who has published several groundbreaking studies on artificial tissue, nanowires and heart cells, said this could be a step toward engineered muscle: “It brings us one step closer to someday creating a tissue-engineered heart, and it shows how novel nanomaterials can play a role in this field,” he said.

Lieber said the system will allow scientists to work with tissue without disturbing it. "Ultimately, this is about merging tissue with electronics in a way that it becomes difficult to determine where the tissue ends and the electronics begin,” he said in a statement.

The study appears this week in Nature Materials.

[MIT]

Previous Article: 3D Printing Is A Game Changer: [Sponsored Post]


Next Article: Artificial Intelligence Predicts and Combats Crop-Destroying Fruit Flies


POWER GRAB - FCC eyes tax on Internet service










FCC eyes tax on Internet service
By Brendan Sasso - 08/26/12 06:00 AM ET



The Federal Communications Commission is eyeing a proposal to tax broadband Internet service.

The move would funnel money to the Connect America Fund, a subsidy the agency created last year to expand Internet access.

The FCC issued a request for comments on the proposal in April. Dozens of companies and trade associations have weighed in, but the issue has largely flown under the public's radar.

"If members of Congress understood that the FCC is contemplating a broadband tax, they'd sit up and take notice," said Derek Turner, research director for Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that opposes the tax.

Numerous companies, including AT&T, Sprint and even Google have expressed support for the idea.

Consumers already pay a fee on their landline and cellular phone bills to support the FCC's Universal Service Fund. The fund was created to ensure that everyone in the country has access to telephone service, even if they live in remote areas.

Last year, the FCC overhauled a $4.5 billion portion of the Universal Service Fund and converted it into a broadband Internet subsidy, called the Connect America Fund. The new fund aims to subsidize the construction of high-speed Internet networks to the estimated 19 million Americans who currently lack access.

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Julius Genachowski, the FCC's chairman, has made expanding broadband access his top priority. He argues that a high-speed Internet connection is critical for succeeding in the 21st century economy and that expanding Internet access is the country's next great infrastructure challenge.

But the money for the new Internet subsidy is still coming from the fees on phone bills.

And in recent years, with more people sending emails instead of making long-distance phone calls, the money flowing into the program has begun to dry up. The Universal Service fee has had to grow to a larger and larger portion of phone bills to compensate.

The FCC floated a number of ideas for reforming the fund's contribution system. In addition to the broadband fee, the commission also sought comments on taxing text messages, as well as levying a flat fee on each phone line, instead of the current system, which is based on a portion of the revenue from interstate phone calls.

The commission only sought input on the ideas and did not indicate whether it planned to move ahead with any of them, including the broadband fee.

When the FCC released its proposal, Genachowski issued a statement saying the current contribution system is outdated and full of loopholes.

"Today we propose three goals for contribution reform: efficiency, fairness, and sustainability," Genachowski said. "And we underscore that any reforms to the contribution system must safeguard core Commission objectives, including the promotion of broadband innovation, investment, and adoption."

In its filing, Google argued that the evidence "strongly supports expanding the [Universal Service Fund] contribution base to include broadband Internet access services."

According to Google, taxing broadband service is preferable to taxing the kinds of online services it offers, like email or Google Voice.

"Saddling these offerings with new, direct USF contribution obligations is likely to restrict innovative options for all communications consumers and cause immediate and lasting harm to the users, pioneers, and innovators of Internet-based services," Google argued.

But Turner argued that imposing a fee on broadband access, even if it is only a dollar or two, would discourage many people from buying the service—the exact opposite outcome of what the FCC is trying to achieve.

"For folks who are thinking about adopting broadband, who have much lower incomes or don't value broadband as much—that extra dollar on the margins will cause millions of people... to not adopt," Turner said.

The FCC could run into legal problems with the Internet Tax Freedom Act, a 1998 law that bans the government from taxing Internet access. But the FCC has long argued that Universal Service is a fee that the providers choose to pass on to consumers and not a tax.

Turner said it is unlikely that the FCC will make any controversial moves before November's election.

"I don't anticipate that the chairman would move to adopt a drastic overhaul ahead of the election," he said.

Researchers Find Mysterious New AIDS-Like Disease


Researchers Find Mysterious New AIDS-Like Disease
August 25, 2012 7:40 AM
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Dr. Jose Antonio Leon takes a blood sample for a quick HIV test, during an activity sponsored by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) to celebrate the World Condom Day, in Mexico City, on Feb. 11, 2011. (credit: ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images)

Filed UnderHealth, News

Related Tagsaids, disease, hiv, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases


ATLANTA (AP) — Researchers have identified a mysterious new disease that has left scores of people in Asia and some in the United States with AIDS-like symptoms even though they are not infected with HIV.

The patients’ immune systems become damaged, leaving them unable to fend off germs as healthy people do. What triggers this isn’t known, but the disease does not seem to be contagious.

This is another kind of acquired immune deficiency that is not inherited and occurs in adults, but doesn’t spread the way AIDS does through a virus, said Dr. Sarah Browne, a scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

She helped lead the study with researchers in Thailand and Taiwan where most of the cases have been found since 2004. Their report is in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

“This is absolutely fascinating. I’ve seen probably at least three patients in the last 10 years or so” who might have had this, said Dr. Dennis Maki, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

It’s still possible that an infection of some sort could trigger the disease, even though the disease itself doesn’t seem to spread person-to-person, he said.

The disease develops around age 50 on average but does not run in families, which makes it unlikely that a single gene is responsible, Browne said. Some patients have died of overwhelming infections, including some Asians now living in the U.S., although Browne could not estimate how many.

Kim Nguyen, 62, a seamstress from Vietnam who has lived in Tennessee since 1975, was gravely ill when she sought help for a persistent fever, infections throughout her bones and other bizarre symptoms in 2009. She had been sick off and on for several years and had visited Vietnam in 1995 and again in early 2009.

“She was wasting away from this systemic infection” that at first seemed like tuberculosis but wasn’t, said Dr. Carlton Hays Jr., a family physician at the Jackson Clinic in Jackson, Tenn. “She’s a small woman to begin with, but when I first saw her, her weight was 91 pounds, and she lost down to 69 pounds.”


Nguyen (pronounced “when”) was referred to specialists at the National Institutes of Health who had been tracking similar cases. She spent nearly a year at an NIH hospital in Bethesda, Md., and is there now for monitoring and further treatment.

“I feel great now,” she said Wednesday. But when she was sick, “I felt dizzy, headaches, almost fell down,” she said. “I could not eat anything.”

AIDS is a specific disease, and it stands for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. That means the immune system becomes impaired during someone’s lifetime, rather than from inherited gene defects like the “bubble babies” who are born unable to fight off germs.

The virus that causes AIDS — HIV — destroys T-cells, key soldiers of the immune system that fight germs. The new disease doesn’t affect those cells, but causes a different kind of damage. Browne’s study of more than 200 people in Taiwan and Thailand found that most of those with the disease make substances called autoantibodies that block interferon-gamma, a chemical signal that helps the body clear infections.

Blocking that signal leaves people like those with AIDS — vulnerable to viruses, fungal infections and parasites, but especially micobacteria, a group of germs similar to tuberculosis that can cause severe lung damage. Researchers are calling this new disease an “adult-onset” immunodeficiency syndrome because it develops later in life and they don’t know why or how.

“Fundamentally, we do not know what’s causing them to make these antibodies,” Browne said.

Antibiotics aren’t always effective, so doctors have tried a variety of other approaches, including a cancer drug that helps suppress production of antibodies. The disease quiets in some patients once the infections are tamed, but the faulty immune system is likely a chronic condition, researchers believe.

The fact that nearly all the patients so far have been Asian or Asian-born people living elsewhere suggests that genetic factors and something in the environment such as an infection may trigger the disease, researchers conclude.

The first cases turned up in 2004 and Browne’s study enrolled about 100 people in six months.

“We know there are many others out there,” including many cases mistaken as tuberculosis in some countries, she said.

(© Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

BIG BROTHER - Is eye scan technology the future of airport security?


Is eye scan technology the future of airport security?



A high-tech company hopes to produce iris-scan technology for airport security. (Aoptix Technologies Inc.)

By Hugo Martin

August 26, 2012, 10:00 a.m.

Will the airport of the future be able to verify the identity of passengers with a quick eye scan?

Aoptix Technologies Inc., a Campbell-based high-tech company, has developed iris scan technology the company hopes can be used by the Transportation Security Administration to verify passenger identification in a matter of seconds.

To market, sell and develop such technology, Aoptix announced last week it had acquired $42 million in additional funding from investors, bringing the total amount it has raised to $123 million since it launched in 2000.

Aoptix’s scanning technology is already used to identify passengers coming in and out of the international departure lounge at London’s Gatwick Airport and for border control in Qatar. It has not been used in the U.S., said Aoptix spokeswoman Amanda North.

The advantage of the Aoptix technology, she said, is that the scanning device can confirm the identification of a passenger from up to six feet away in about two seconds.

The company is in talk with the TSA to bring the technology in the U.S., according to North.

“A lot of airports have seen this as an advantage and I think the U.S. is looking at this as well,” she said.

TSA spokesman Nico Melendez said he could not confirm whether his agency has met with Aoptix officials but said the TSA is interested in using biometric technology at the nation’s airports.

ALSO:

TSA full-body scanners at airports pose little risk, study finds

TSA to expand PreCheck program to speed up airport security lines

New technology may reduce TSA pat-down searches in U.S. airports

BIG BROTHER - Scientists Successfully ‘Hack’ Brain To Obtain Private Data


Scientists Successfully ‘Hack’ Brain To Obtain Private Data
By Peter V. Milo
August 25, 2012 1:56 AM
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An actual human brain displayed inside a glass box, as part of an interactive exhbition (Photo Credit: MAURICIO LIMA / AFP / Getty Images)

Filed UnderNews

Related TagsBerkeley, Emotiv, hacking,Human Brain Hacked,Oxford, P300 Signal,scientists, Technology, The Human Brain


BERKELEY, Calif. (CBS Seattle) – It sounds like something out of the movie “Johnny Mnemonic,” but scientists have successfully been able to “hack” a brain with a device that’s easily available on the open market.

Researchers from the University of California and University of Oxford in Geneva figured out a way to pluck sensitive information from a person’s head, such as PIN numbers and bank information.

The scientists took an off-the-shelf Emotiv brain-computer interface, a device that costs around $299, which allows users to interact with their computers by thought.

The scientists then sat their subjects in front of a computer screen and showed them images of banks, people, and PIN numbers. They then tracked the readings coming off of the brain, specifically the P300 signal.

The P300 signal is typically given off when a person recognizes something meaningful, such as someone or something they interact with on a regular basis.


Scientists that conducted the experiment found they could reduce the randomness of the images by 15 to 40 percent, giving them a better chance of guessing the correct answer.

Another interesting facet about the experiments is how the P300 signal could be read for lie detection.

In the paper that the scientists released, they state that “the P300 can be used as a discriminative feature in detecting whether or not the relevant information is stored in the subject’s memory.

“For this reason, a GKT based on the P300 has a promising use within interrogation protocols that enable detection of potential criminal details held by the suspect,” the researchers said.

However, scientists say this way of lie detection is “vulnerable to specific countermeasures,” but not as many compared to a traditional lie detector.

This could only be the beginning of a new form of fraud. Scientists say that a person with their guard lowered could be “easily engaged into ‘mind games’ that camouflage the interrogation of the user and make them more cooperative.”

Also, much like other household electronics, “the ever increasing quality of devices, success rates of attacks will likely improve.”

Friday, August 24, 2012

10 Rules for a Wealthier Life



10 Rules for a Wealthier Life


Getting ahead in your career is an easily attainable goal if you live by MoneyWatch's no-nonsense principles.

What's the Secret?

Frugal Habits of the Super Rich
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Back to School Questions Answered


School is just around the corner. Common Sense Media helps parents prepare for the big day.

Tips and Tricks



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Mom Acts Bizarrely During Live Interview


This young chef is being interviewed about her new dish, but her mom is the one getting all the attention.

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Cruise, Holmes Divorce Details Emerge


Find out how much of Tom's $250 million fortune Katie received in their divorce settlement.

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The next China?


The next China?
Posted by David Harris on August 24, 2012 at 1:01pm
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As has been well-documented both in Cargo Facts and in many other publications, manufacturing costs in China have risen rapidly over the last few years, to the point that many companies have relocated some or all of their outsourced manufacturing to other countries, or are actively considering doing so.



One such company is Taiwan-based Foxconn, the world’s largest manufacturer of electronic components, which is planning to invest between US$5 billion and $10 billion to build a massive manufacturing facility near Jakarta, Indonesia, where wages are only about one-third of Chinese wages. The factory site will be in the Modern Cikande Industrial Estate, adjacent to Jakarta’s Halim Perdanakusuma International Airport (HLP), and while initial production will be largely targeted at the local market, export production is expected to ramp up in the second phase of the project (slated to begin in mid-2013).



This is relevant to the airfreight industry on two fronts. First, simply because it is Foxconn. The company's recent move into Chongqing, for example, has helped put that inland Chinese city on the air freight map in a big way, and the same has happened in other cites such as Wuhan. Foxconn is the largest private-sector employer in China and also the country’s largest exporter, and much of what it exports moves by air. (For the record, it also has factories in Brazil, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, India, Japan, Malaysia and Mexico).



The second issue concerns the shifting balance in the movment of freight between the main decks of dedicated freighters and the bellies of widebody passenger aircraft. The increasing ability of some airlines to connect the world in one stop with their passenger fleets has made life more difficult for operators of freighter aircraft, but when an airfreight-dependent industry like electronics manufacturing suddenly expands its presence in a new location, freighter aircraft are indispensable. So in a couple of years you can expect to see 747-400Fs and -8Fs, 777Fs, and A330-200Fs appearing at HLP in substantial numbers.



Today's blog is expanded from the current issue of Cargo Facts Update. Those of you who do not already subscribe to the the monthly printed Cargo Facts newsletter, and its companion the weekly emailed Cargo Facts Update, can click here for more information.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

How to Break Bad News to Employees



How to Break Bad News to Employees

BY NADIA GOODMAN| 9 hours ago|0



image credit:NBC

No matter how many times a business leader has to fire an employee or deny a bonus, having tough conversations doesn't get any easier. However, you can increase your confidence and maintain strong relationships by learning to lead the conversation respectfully and productively.

“You want to convey the information in a way that the person can hear, learn from and act upon,” says Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist and founder of Dattner Consulting. “Not in a way that’s going to make them shut down.”

Related: Richard Branson on When Workers Rebel Against a New Manager

Ultimately, you want to show respect and sensitivity to their circumstances and feelings. “If you make them feel like a valued, autonomous agent, you are much more likely to have a willing participant who will make an effort to solve a problem, rather than someone who will be your enemy,” Dattner says.

Next time you have to have a tough conversation with one of your employees, try these steps to help you lead the conversation effectively.

1. Identify your objectives in advance. Before you start the conversation, think about what you hope to accomplish. “The most important thing is what are your objectives?” Dattner says. “What do you want to achieve?” Know the tone you want to set, the points you want to address, and the outcome you expect. If the conversation seems to be going awry, return to your objectives and be firm in them.

Related: Five Problem Employees and What You Can Do About Them

2. Allow a balance of power. When you’re bringing up a tough issue, first allow the other person to explain the rationale for their behavior. “Give them some power in the conversation,” Dattner says. If you show that you’re willing to listen, they’ll be less likely to respond defensively. “You don’t want people to feel threatened or backed into a corner,” Dattner says.

3. Focus on a specific incident. Commenting on someone’s general patterns can feel like a personal attack, so be specific about when and where the concerning behaviors occurred. “The more specific you can be, the less accusatory you’ll seem,” Dattner says. For example, if you feel that someone’s behavior is lazy, avoid the general observation and focus on one specific, recent moment that warranted improvement.

4. Phrase your concerns as observations. When bringing up a sensitive topic, acknowledge that your perspective is subjective. “Present any issues as your perceptions, not as absolutes,” Dattner says. Framing problem behavior as an observation leaves less room for argument. Just be careful that you only offer room for negotiation if you are actually willing to consider the other person’s input. If the topic is not negotiable, such as firing or demotion, be firm and direct without leaving room for debate.

Related: Can You Be a Tough Boss Without Being a Jerk?

5. Put the situation in context. If you’re addressing a problem such as a missed sales goal, talk about the circumstances that created that outcome. “Rather than suggesting they didn’t hit the numbers due to laziness or lack of talent, bring up the mitigating factors,” Dattner says. “Perhaps it was a tough economy or they didn’t have enough support.” Not only will you be more likely to avoid the same problem in the future, your employee will have greater motivation to improve. Essentially, you’re holding them accountable without attributing blame.

6. Create a learning opportunity. Once you’ve explained the issue, focus the conversation on how to learn from the experience and move forward. “Try to let (the issue) be part of a process, rather than a done deal,” Dattner says. Even if you’re firing someone, you can help them learn from their mistakes. Dattner suggests that you offer specific advice about what someone might have done differently so they can take that knowledge with them into their next job.

7. Validate their feelings. Even if your point of view is non-negotiable, you want to acknowledge how the other person might feel. “You can still validate their feelings even if you disagree with them,” Dattner says. Let them know that you recognize and accept their feelings, and that you respect them. Ultimately, you want the other person to leave the conversation with dignity, and their self-esteem in tact.


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Saturday, August 11, 2012

U.S. military officers are told to plan to fight Americans


EDITORIAL: The Civil War of 2016
U.S. military officers are told to plan to fight Americans
By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

-Tuesday, August 7, 2012



STORY TOPICS

War_Conflict
Politics
Kevin Benson
Army
Jennifer Weber

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Imagine Tea Party extremists seizing control of a South Carolina town and the Army being sent in to crush the rebellion. This farcical vision is now part of the discussion in professional military circles.

At issue is an article in the respected Small Wars Journal titled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A ‘Vision’ of the Future.” It was written by retired Army Col. Kevin Benson of the Army's University ofForeign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., andJennifer Weber, a Civil War expert at the University of Kansas. It posits an “extremist militia motivated by the goals of the ‘tea party’ movement” seizing control of Darlington, S.C., in 2016, “occupying City Hall, disbanding the city council and placing the mayor under house arrest.” The rebels set up checkpoints on Interstate 95 and Interstate 20 looking for illegal aliens. It’s a cartoonish and needlessly provocative scenario.

The article is a choppy patchwork of doctrinal jargon and liberal nightmare. The authors make a quasi-legal case for military action and then apply the Army’s Operating Concept 2016-2028 to the situation. They write bloodlessly that “once it is put into play, Americans will expect the military to execute without pause and as professionally as if it were acting overseas.” They claim that “the Army cannot disappoint the American people, especially in such a moment,” not pausing to consider that using such efficient, deadly force against U.S. citizens would create a monumental political backlash and severely erode government legitimacy.

The vision is hard to take seriously. As retired ArmyBrig. Gen. Russell D. Howard, a former professor at West Point, observed earlier in his career, “I am a colonel, colonels write a lot of crazy stuff, but no one listens to colonels, so I don’t see the problem.” Twenty years ago, then-Air Force Lt. Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr. created a stir with an article in Parameters titled “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012.” It carried a disclaimer that the coup scenario was “purely a literary device intended to dramatize my concern over certain contemporary developments affecting the armed forces, and is emphatically not a prediction.”

The scenario presented in Small Wars Journal isn’t a literary device but an operational lay-down intended to present the rationale and mechanisms for Americans to fight Americans. Col. Benson and Ms. Weber contend, “Army officers are professionally obligated to consider the conduct of operations on U.S. soil.” This is a dark, pessimistic and wrongheaded view of what military leaders should spend their time studying.

A professor at the Joint Forces Staff College was relieved of duty in June for uttering the heresy that the United States is at war with Islam. The Obama administration contended the professor had to be relieved because what he was teaching was not U.S. policy. Because there is no disclaimer attached to the Small Wars piece, it is fair to ask, at least inCol. Benson’s case, whether his views reflect official policy regarding the use of U.S. military force against American citizens.

The Washington Times

Friday, August 10, 2012

Marketing Is Dead


HBR Blog Network

Marketing Is Dead

by Bill Lee | 3:00 PM August 9, 2012

Traditional marketing — including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications — is dead. Many people in traditional marketing roles and organizations may not realize they're operating within a dead paradigm. But they are. The evidence is clear.

First, buyers are no longer paying much attention. Several studies have confirmed that in the "buyer's decision journey," traditional marketing communications just aren't relevant. Buyers arechecking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews.

Second, CEOs have lost all patience. In a devastating 2011 study of 600 CEOs and decision makers by the London-based Fournaise Marketing Group, 73% of them said that CMOs lack business credibility and the ability to generate sufficient business growth, 72% are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it will generate increased business, and 77% have had it with all the talk about brand equity that can't be linked to actual firm equity or any other recognized financial metric.

Third, in today's increasingly social media-infused environment, traditional marketing and sales not only doesn't work so well, it doesn't make sense. Think about it: an organization hires people — employees, agencies, consultants, partners — who don't come from the buyer's world and whose interests aren't necessarily aligned with his, and expects them to persuade the buyer to spend his hard-earned money on something. Huh? When you try to extend traditional marketing logic into the world of social media, it simply doesn't work. Just ask Facebook, which finds itself mired in anongoing debate about whether marketing on Facebook is effective.

In fact, this last is a bit of a red herring, because traditional marketing isn't really working anywhere.

There's a lot of speculation about what will replace this broken model — a sense that we're only getting a few glimpses of the future of marketing on the margins. Actually, we already know in great detail what the new model of marketing will look like. It's already in place in a number of organizations. Here are its critical pieces:

Restore community marketing. Used properly, social media is accelerating a trend in which buyers can increasingly approximate the experience of buying in their local, physical communities. For instance, when you contemplate a major purchase, such as a new roof, a flat screen TV, or a good surgeon, you're not likely to go looking for a salesperson to talk to, or to read through a bunch of corporate website content. Instead, you'll probably ask neighbors or friends — your peer network — what or whom they're using.

Companies should position their social media efforts to replicate as much as possible this community-oriented buying experience. In turn, social media firms, such as Facebook, should become expert at enabling this. They can do this by expanding the buyer's network of peers who can provide trustworthy information and advice based on their own experience with the product or service.

For example, a new firm, Zuberance, makes it easy and enjoyable for a firm's loyal customers to advocate for the firm on their social media platform of choice. At the moment one of these customers identifies himself as a "promoter" on a survey, they immediately see a form inviting them to write a review or recommendation on any of several social media sites. Once they do, the Zuberance platform populates it to the designated sites, and the promoter's network instantly knows about his experience with the firm.

Find your customer influencers. Many firms spend lots of resources pursuing outside influencers who've gained following on the Web and through social media. A better approach is to find and cultivate customer influencers and give them something great to talk about. This requires a new concept of customer value that goes way beyond customer lifetime value (CLV), which is based only on purchases. There are many other measures of a customer's potential value, beyond the money they pay you. For example, how large and strategic to your firm is the customer's network? How respected is she?

One of Microsoft's "MVP" (Most Valuable Professional) customers is known as Mr. Excel to his followers. On some days, his website gets more visits than Microsoft's Excel page — representing an audience of obvious importance to Microsoft, which supports Mr. Excel's efforts with "insider knowledge" and previews of new releases. In return, Mr. Excel and other MVPs like him are helping Microsoft penetrate new markets affordably.

Help them build social capital. Practitioners of this new, community-oriented marketing are also rethinking their customer value proposition for such MVP (or "Customer Champion" or "Rockstar") customer advocates and influencers. Traditional marketing often tries to encourage customer advocacy with cash rewards, discounts or other untoward inducements. The new marketing helps its advocates and influencers create social capital: it helps them build their affiliation networks, increase their reputation and gives them access to new knowledge — all of which your customer influencers crave.

National Instruments used an especially creative approach with its customer influencers, who were mid-level IT managers at the companies they did business with. NI engaged with them by providing powerful research and financial proof points they could take to senior management, showing that NI solutions were creating strategic benefits. That got NI into the C-suite. It also increased the reputation of the mid-level advocates, who were seen as strategic thinkers bringing new ideas to senior management.

Get your customer advocates involved in the solution you provide. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this comes from the non-profit world. Some years ago, with the number of teen smokers nation-wide rising to alarming levels, the State of Florida thought anew about its decades-long effort to reduce the problem. What could be more difficult than convincing teen smokers to quit — a problem that Malcolm Gladwell had said couldn't be solved. Using the techniques for building a community of peer influence, Florida solved it. They sought influential teen "customers" such as student leaders, athletes, and "cool kids," who weren't smoking or who wanted to quit — and instead of pushing a message at them, they asked for the students' help and input.

Approached in this new way, some 600 teens attended a summit on teen smoking, where they told officials why anti-smoking efforts in the past hadn't worked — dire warnings about the health consequences of smoking, or describing the habit as "being gross," left them unimpressed. On the spot, the teens brainstormed a new approach: they were outraged by documents showing that tobacco company executives were specifically targeting teens to replace older customers who'd died (often from lung cancer). And so the teens formed a group called SWAT (Students Working Against Tobacco) who organized train tours and workshops, sold T-shirts and other appealing activities to take their message into local communities. The result: despite a vicious counterattack by Big Tobacco lobbying firms, teen smoking in Florida dropped by nearly half between 1998 and 2007 — by far the biggest success in anti-teen-smoking in history.

Put another way, Florida won half of the "non-buyers" of its anti-teen-smoking "product" away from its much bigger, much better funded competitor. They did so by tapping the best source of buyer motivation: peer influence.

So can you. Traditional marketing may be dead, but the new possibilities of peer influence-based, community-oriented marketing, hold much greater promise for creating sustained growth through authentic customer relationships.

More blog posts by Bill Lee
More on: Customers, Marketing, Social media

Friday, August 03, 2012

How to Copyright or Coin a Phrase


How to Copyright or Coin a Phrase
By LaoA, eHow Contributor



Copyrighting enables you to ensure that something you created is protected under the law. Many works of art are created on a daily basis in a wide variety of areas such as music, art, theater, and literature. Individuals or companies are often able to obtain copyrights in many areas, but you are unable to copyright a phrase you have coined via the United States Copyright Office. However, it may be possible to "copyright" a phrase legally via the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Using the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) will allow you to find out which phrases are currently registered via the USPTO. But keep in mind that every trademarked phrase in existence may not be included in the database.

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Instructions

1


Find out if the phase you have coined is present in the records of the TESS. Go to the website tess2.uspto.gov to search for your chosen phrase.
2


If the phrase you coined is not already in the TESS database, contact the USPTO by telephone at 800-786-9199. Ask the USPTO to send you an application in the mail so you can register your phrase. If you are not able to call, you also have the option of applying online at uspto.gov/teas/eTEASpageA.htm.


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Pay the required fees. Be prepared to pay $325 or more, as of 2010. Keep in mind that you cannot get this fee back once it is paid, so make sure you are certain about what you are doing.
4


Ensure that no other party can oppose the phrase that you have coined. Submitting the phrase for opposition will make sure that no one else can register the phrase you have already registered. Protecting your phrase in this manner will help you to guard against any person or business who attempts to use a phrase that is too similar to your phrase. An opposition takes place when one party attempts to stop another business or person from registering a certain phrase they have coined. If a person or company feels that their reputation is being tarnished by the registration of a phrase, they can file an opposition in order to be protected under their legal rights. Though there is no fee involved to file an opposition, you should consult an attorney for advice to assist you if you are ever faced with this situation.
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It's a good idea to contact a lawyer who is an expert in trademark law to assist you through the entire process.
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Read more: How to Copyright or Coin a Phrase | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_6226439_copyright-coin-phrase.html#ixzz22Ujn6p00