Notes For My Daughter

Summer Job vs Real World Job

2009-12-13T20:14:00.000-08:00

Once you find purpose and a passion, you will never have just a "job."

College Fina; Exams & Stress

2009-12-09T07:33:00.000-08:00

You may not like it, but you need stress to grow.

Your greatest growth doesn't occur when things are easy, your greatest growth occurs in times of stress.

Stress expands your capabilities - it stretches your being.

But constant stress is not good for you. You have to learn to step back out of stress. You can accomplish this by taking a nap, by working out, by watching the Simpsons, by going out for hot chocolate.

Once you escape stress and step back, only then can you realize how far you have come.

And, when you re-enter that activity that causes you stress, it will be easier to recognize and handle.

When You Do Content Writing - It Should Be Deisired - Like This...

2009-12-02T10:36:00.000-08:00

How to Add Some Fun to Corporate Protocol
By: Dan Heath & Chip HeathTue Dec 1, 2009 at 1:00 PM
How one team transformed a training binder into must-see TV

WORLD'S SLEAZIE

Publish Post

ST BOSS BearingPoint's ethics videos deftly mimic The Office's mockumentary style, even starring a Michael Scott-esque leader.

Russ Berland's first assignment at BearingPoint was a doozy. He was asked to redesign the company's ethics-and-compliance training program. If simply reading the phrase "compliance training" sapped a little of your will to live, perhaps you can empathize with Berland.

Most companies -- including yours, probably -- have an ethics program, and often the "program" looks uncannily like a three-ring binder. It may be sitting on your bookshelf right now, between What Color Is Your Parachute? and the 2003 Metro Area phone book. It's filled with mimeographed, knuckle-rapping prose, just like the code of conduct Berland inherited, which, he said, appeared to have been repurposed from a law firm.

Yet compliance training was critical at BearingPoint, a management and technology consulting firm, because the company's employees often spent more time on client sites than at home. So Berland, the chief compliance officer, had to influence the behavior of employees who were scattered across the country, operating in organizational cultures very different from BearingPoint's. (BearingPoint filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, due to an excessive debt burden unrelated to an ethics issue.)

Berland and his colleagues began to interview some of the company's associates, asking them about real-world "gray areas": What situations make you feel squishy? What have you seen happen in the field that gave you pause? Soon, they'd uncovered stories of ethical quandaries and anxious situations and strained relationships. It was exactly the sort of drama that was absent from the three-ring binder.

Then came their epiphany: Let's bring this drama to life. They hatched the idea to film a fictional series, modeled on The Office, that would highlight the activities of a single IT consulting engagement team. The team would work for a fictional company called Aggrieva, which was designed to be the evil doppelgänger of BearingPoint. (Motto: "Aggrieva says yes when everyone else says no.")

Berland hired filmmaker Marc Havener to direct the series, and they shot an entire season of 10 short episodes in a weekend. The episodes deal with touchy areas such as bosses hitting on subordinates, teams misrepresenting their expertise, and managers trying to pass along inappropriate expenses to the client. In other words, comedy gold.

Here's a scene where Kevin, the lovably oily boss, has proposed throwing a grandiose surprise party for Ricardo, a client, as a way to curry favor. Vanessa, a levelheaded analyst on Kevin's team, objects:

VANESSA: Sir, how are we going to pay for this?
KEVIN: We'll just work it into the bill somewhere.
VANESSA: We can't bill a client for a birthday party.
KEVIN: [Exasperated] Okay, you know what? Fine. I tried. You know what, Vanessa? I want you to look Ricardo in the face and tell him that we don't care enough to throw a party for him.
VANESSA: Wasn't this party supposed to be a surprise? Why do I have to tell Ricardo that the party is off if he never even knew about it in the first place?
KEVIN: Well, now it's "Surprise! There's no party!" Tell him that.
The episodes were an immediate sensation. The emails poured in: "This is the best training I've ever had." "I think that episode was based on my team." "I'm cackling like a madman," and so forth. Soon, the characters and situations became part of the company's vocabulary. Many employees admitted to Berland that they had "worked for a Kevin."

New episodes debuted each Monday, but employees were so ravenous for the next episode that they started tracking them down on the company's staging server where the videos were posted on the preceding Friday. Thousands of employees watched the videos before they were released.

Note: When your company's employees are madly searching for your compliance videos, you've done something right.

The series also changed the tenor of the internal conversation about compliance. The company had always operated an ethics hotline, and traditionally it had been used largely to make allegations. After the episodes, though, more people called the hotline to discuss issues. The episodes gave people permission to talk about tough topics, to see that these situations weren't private, shameful secrets. They were, in fact, recurring situations. "It gave people a feeling of comfort that 'Oh, Maria went through that, too,' " Berland said. " 'It's not just me.' " Better still, they were situations that had been successfully navigated by other colleagues in the past.

Every business has these "untouchable" issues. They make us uncomfortable, and we usually deal with our discomfort by retreating behind legalistic language. But if we really take these incidents seriously -- if we're committed to putting an end to sexual harassment or improper billing or dishonest communication -- then we need to show a little bravery. Our three-ring binders won't change a thing. But a little humor and humanity might.

Dan Heath and Chip Heath are the best-selling authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Their next book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, will be released in February 2010

The Value Of Getting Pissed

2009-11-12T09:58:00.000-08:00

You didn't make all league and you thought you should have... so did I, and I think your stats verify it. Sometimes when you play on a .500 team, you don't get the recognition you should.

But now you are pissed.

You don't like it.

Everyone gets pissed. Just fact.

What everyone doesn't do - is do something about it.

Here is what about 90% of people do:

* Some cry

* Some quit

* Some agree

* Some go away

* Some accept that they can't get better

* Some do nothing

but, for the remaining 10%, what they do is use that as fuel to understand why and then set about to improve themselves, their play, their teammates.

You are in that 10% group. Typically people in this group operate on their own true compass. They run outside the pack, they do what they want, they really aren't impacted by trends or petty issues, in fact, they ignore them.

But, when they believe they are right, they rise up, dedicated to get better, to make those outside their compass range, see and appreciate their efforts, work and talent in a different light.

When someone tells you that "You can't," or "You aren't good enough," you get pissy and frustrated, you even get a bit defeatist for a while, then, after you stew and simmer, you fight back. You work out, you focus, you find this internal drive that burns and you are out to prove them wrong.

You have done this before, you will do this again.

It will make you a better player.

It will make you mentally tougher.

So, stay pissed :)

Kenz apply to your internet sites

2009-10-22T10:19:00.000-07:00

The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

By Daniel Roth October 19, 2009
3:00 pm
Wired Nov 2009

Illustration: Stephen Doyle

Christian Muñoz-Donoso is going to make this job pay, he’s got to move quickly. He has a list of 10 videos to shoot on this warm June morning, for which he’ll earn just $200. To get anything close to his usual rate, he’ll have to do it all in two hours. As he sets up his three video cameras on the rocky shore of a man-made lake in Huntington, Massachusetts, he thinks about the way things used to be. He once spent two weeks in a bird blind in his native Chile to capture striking footage of a rarely seen Andean condor. But those jobs are almost as endangered as that bird. Now he trades finesse for speed.

Today’s topic is kayaking. Muñoz-Donoso has enlisted a local instructor to meet him and to bring along four of his boats. Every five minutes, Muñoz-Donoso’s assistant shouts a new subject — “Kayak basics!” “Paddling tips!” — and the expert, sitting in one of his rigs in the bourbon-colored water, riffs off the top of his head. Muñoz-Donoso gets most of his shots in one take. But conditions are working against him. Shifting winds and changing light require him to adjust his setup. The instructor keeps switching kayaks and gear. Finally, the entire shoot has to be put on hold as three bearded fishermen loudly and slowly drag their boats into the lake, directly into the frame. Muñoz-Donoso hoped to finish his shoot by 11, but it’s already 12:45 when he crams his equipment into the back of his SUV and speeds back to his office, 20 mile away.

He climbs a flight of stairs to his studio above a strip mall, unloads his gear, and keeps up his breakneck pace. As he opens his files in Final Cut Pro, he winces. “Normally I’d eliminate the wind or the kid screaming in the background,” he says. “But in this case we don’t do any of that.” He points out that the focus is off: The rippling water is sharp while the kayaking instructor is slightly blurred. But the company he’s working for won’t care, he says, so why should he — especially for $20 a clip? Within a few hours, he has uploaded his work to Demand Media, his employer for the day. It isn’t Scorsese, but it’s fast, cheap, and good enough.

Thousands of other filmmakers and writers around the country are operating with the same loose standards, racing to produce the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishes every day. The company’s ambitions are so enormous as to be almost surreal: to predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results. To get there, Demand is using an army of Muñoz- Donosos to feverishly crank out articles and videos. They shoot slapdash instructional videos with titles like “How To Draw a Greek Helmet” and “Dog Whistle Training Techniques.” They write guides about lunch meat safety and nonprofit administration. They pump out an endless stream of bulleted lists and tutorials about the most esoteric of subjects.

How to Give the People What They Want

Demand Media has created a virtual factory that pumps out 4,000 videoclips and articles a day. It starts with an algorithm.

The algorithm is fed inputs from three sources: Search terms (popular terms from more than 100 sources comprising 2 billion searches a day), The ad market (a snapshot of which keywords are sought after and how much they are fetching), and The competition (what’s online already and where a term ranks in search results).

Plenty of other companies — About.com, Mahalo, Answers.com — have tried to corner the market in arcane online advice. But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and single-mindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.

The process is automatic, random, and endless, a Stirling engine fueled by the world’s unceasing desire to know how to grow avocado trees from pits or how to throw an Atlanta Braves-themed birthday party. It is a database of human needs, and if you haven’t stumbled on a Demand video or article yet, you soon will. By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Demand is already one of the largest suppliers of content to YouTube, where its 170,000 videos make up more than twice the content of CBS, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera English, Universal Music Group, CollegeHumor, and Soulja Boy combined. Demand also posts its material to its network of 45 B-list sites — ranging from eHow and Livestrong.com to the little-known doggy-photo site TheDailyPuppy.com — that manage to pull in more traffic than ESPN, NBC Universal, and Time Warner’s online properties (excluding AOL) put together. To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.

The result is a factory stamping out moneymaking content. “I call them the Henry Ford of online video,” says Jordan Hoffner, director of content partnerships at YouTube. Media companies like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AOL, and USA Today have either hired Demand or studied its innovations. This year, the privately held Demand is expected to bring in about $200 million in revenue; its most recent round of financing by blue-chip investors valued the company at $1 billion.

In this industrial model of content creation, Muñoz-Donoso is working the conveyor belt — being paid very little for cranking out an endless supply of material. He admits that the results are not particularly rewarding, but work is work, and Demand’s is steady and pays on time. Plus, he says, “this is the future.” He has shot more than 40,000 videos for Demand, filming yo-yo whizzes, pole dancers, and fly fishermen. But ask him to pick a favorite and he’s stumped. “I can’t really remember most of them,” he says.

In an era overwhelmed by FlickrYouTubeWikipedia-BloggerFacebookTwitter-borne logorrhea, it’s hard to argue that the world needs another massive online content company. But what Demand has realized is that the Internet gets only half of the simplest economic formula right: It has the supply part down but ignores demand. Give a million monkeys a million WordPress accounts and you still might never get a seven-point tutorial on how to keep wasps away from a swimming pool. Yet that’s what people want to know. Ask Byron Reese.

Video on Demand

Demand Media wants to answer any question anybody has about anything. That means covering the obscure and the very obscure.

The Best-tasting Vodka

One bartender’s opinion: “Belvedere for me comes from a long line of vodkas in Poland. Poland has always known how to do vodka.” Case closed!

Demand video: vodka.

Reese is a tall Texan who serves as Demand’s chief innovation officer and who created the idea-spawning algorithm that lies at the heart of Demand’s process. To determine what articles to assign, his formula analyzes three chunks of information. First, to find out what terms users are searching for, it parses bulk data purchased from search engines, ISPs, and Internet marketing firms (as well as Demand’s own traffic logs). Then the algorithm crunches keyword rates to calculate how much advertisers will pay to appear on pages that include those terms. (A portion of Demand’s revenue comes from Google, which allows businesses to bid on phrases that they would like to advertise against.) Third, the formula checks to see how many Web pages already include those terms. It doesn’t make sense to commission an article that will be buried on the fifth page of Google results. Finally, the algorithm, like a drunken prophet, starts spitting out phrase after phrase: “butterfly cake,” “shin splints,” “Harley-Davidson belt buckles.”

But that’s just the start. Armed with those key words, another algorithm, called the Knowledge Engine, dives back into the data to figure out exactly what people want to know about the term. If the original algorithm divines “2009 Chevy Corvette” as a profitable title, the Knowledge Engine will return with “cost of 2009 Corvette”; for “shin splint” it might come back with “equine treatment shin splints.” The second algorithm also looks at how well past titles with similar words have performed in terms of ad revenue. Demand has learned, for instance, that “best” and “how to” bring in traffic or high clickthrough rates, while “history of” is ad poison. At the end of the process, the company has a topic and a dollar amount — the term’s “lifetime value,” or LTV — that Demand expects to generate from any resulting content.

Video on Demand

Demand Media wants to answer any question anybody has about anything. That means covering the obscure and the very obscure.

How to Heel-Flip on a Skateboard

More than just providing tips, the skateboarding expert also digs into the history of the trick. “The heel flip,” he explains, “is rooted in the ollie.”

Demand video: heel-flip.

The focus on LTV keeps Demand away from any kind of breaking news coverage or investigative work, neither of which tends to hold its value. It does, however, produce the kind of evergreen stories typically seen in newspaper features sections. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently commissioned Demand to produce some travel articles that ran online and in print.

The algorithm’s endless ramblings — a collection of cacophonous phrases and esoteric subjects — seem haphazard and chaotic. But Reese knows there is logic at work. When asked for the most valuable topic in Demand’s arsenal, he replies instantly: “‘Where can I donate a car in Dallas?’ One, you have a certain number of people searching for it. Two, the bid term ‘donate a car’ is in the double-digit dollars, like $15 or $20 per click. People have a propensity — 17 percent — to click on an ad when they see the word car. There’s very little competition. And the article will retain its value for a long time.” So why Dallas? He has no idea: “Dallas just happens to be the location where we know people are searching for how to donate a car.”

That’s not to say there isn’t any room for humans in Demand’s process. They just aren’t worth very much. First, a crowdsourced team of freelance “title proofers” turn the algorithm’s often awkward or nonsensical phrases into something people will understand: “How to make a church-pew breakfast nook,” for example, becomes “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew.” Approved headlines get fed into a password-protected section of Demand’s Web site called Demand Studios, where any Demand freelancer can see what jobs are available. It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot. Writers can typically select 10 articles at a time; videographers can hoard 40.

Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal. Demand also offers revenue sharing on some articles, though it can take months to reach even $15 in such payments. Other freelancers sign up for the chance to copyedit ($2.50 an article), fact-check ($1 an article), approve the quality of a film (25 to 50 cents a video), transcribe ($1 to $2 per video), or offer up their expertise to be quoted or filmed (free). Title proofers get 8 cents a headline. Coming soon: photographers and photo editors. So far, the company has paid out more than $17 million to Demand Studios workers; if the enterprise reaches Rosenblatt’s goal of producing 1 million pieces of content a month, the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.

Before Reese came up with his formula, Demand Media operated in the traditional way. Contributors suggested articles or videos they wanted to create. Editors, trained in the ways of search engine optimization, would approve or deny each while also coming up with their own ideas. The process worked fine. But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.

The humans also couldn’t produce ideas at the scale of the algorithm. On a recent day, Demand Studios had nearly 62,000 freelance assignments ready to be filled; coming up with that many ideas takes more than a white board and a conference room jammed with editors. And to Demand, scale is essential. One outside search engine marketer estimates that Demand earns a mere 15 to 60 cents per ad clicked. It takes millions of clicks to build a real business out of that.

Volume is also crucial to Demand’s top distribution partner, Google. The search engine has struggled to make money from the 19 billion videos on YouTube, only about 10 percent of which carry ads. Advertisers don’t want to pay to appear next to videos that hijack copyrighted material or that contain swear words, but YouTube doesn’t have the personnel to comb through every user-generated clip. Last year, though, YouTube executives noticed that Demand was uploading hundreds of videos every day — pre-scrubbed by Demand’s own editors, explicitly designed to appeal to advertisers, and cheap enough to benefit from Google’s revenue-sharing business model. YouTube executives approached Demand, asked the company to join its revenue-sharing program, and encouraged it to produce as many videos as possible.

Since then, the two companies have grown even closer. When YouTube’s sales team bemoaned the tiny supply of Spanish-language videos for it to run advertisements against, YouTube’s Hoffner called up Demand. Within weeks, Demand Studios started issuing Spanish-language assignments. Soon it had uploaded a few hundred clips to YouTube — everything from how to be “un buen DJ” to how to fix a bathroom towel bar. “I know we do deals with the ESPNs and ABCs of the world, but Demand is incredibly important to us,” says Hoffner (who is married to wired’s executive director of communications). “They fill up a lot of content across the site.”

And they do it by taking what used to be a deeply human and intuitive endeavor and turning it into a purely mathematical and rational one. This, Reese says, is the ultimate promise of his algorithm: “You can take something that is thought of as a creative process and turn it into a manufacturing process.”

Richard Rosenblatt was born and raised in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley and has rarely ventured far from Hollywood’s orbit in spirit or in geography. He is 40 and wiry, with carefully tousled brown hair, a bright-white, ever-present smile, and a long, pinched nose. One day this spring, Rosenblatt was in the foyer of Demand’s Santa Monica, California, headquarters, casually chatting with Brooke Burke — the bikini model, former TV host, and Dancing With the Stars winner — and her fiancè9, a Baywatch actor. Rosenblatt is also friends with cyclist (and Demand investor) Lance Armstrong, a fact that he mentions frequently. (”I’m supposed to go to France Wednesday with Lance, but I just can’t,” he confided, sighing. “It’s a lot of travel.”) He is particularly fond of the exhortation “Go big or go home,” a phrase that he includes in his email signature and has commemorated in the naming of Demand’s Go Big conference room. Numerous executives told me that when they first met Rosenblatt, they were immediately repulsed: He was too slick and seemed to be missing the geek edge. “Then in five minutes you’re like, ‘Holy cow, this guy has it all to back it up,’” says Quincy Smith, CEO of CBS Interactive.

Demand is just the latest of Rosenblatt’s run of startups, nearly all of which hewed to his “go big” mantra. After graduating from USC law school in 1994, he saw that companies were growing curious about the Internet, so he set up a company that offered a $3,000 Web-design seminar that came with a custom-built Web site. The startup, which was later called iMall, went public at $18 a share, shot up to $112, then plummeted when the Federal Trade Commission investigated the firm’s claim that its clients’ sites were earning $11,000 a month. They weren’t, it turned out. Rosenblatt was forced to kill the seminar division, losing 95 percent of his company’s $16 million in annual revenue. He quickly refocused on iMall’s other business of providing an ecommerce platform for small and medium-sized companies and sold the company in 1999 to Excite@Home for $565 million in stock. Rosenblatt bought a Ferrari. Excite@Home soon went bust.

In 2000, Rosenblatt took over the ailing drkoop.com, an online site tied to C. Everett Koop. Where others saw just another ad- dependent disease-information site, Rosenblatt saw a chance to turn the bearded former surgeon general into a brand, the next “Martha Stewart or Walt Disney — but for health,” as he told BusinessWeek at the time. He created a line of Dr. Koop Men’s Prostate Formula pills. The company went under.

Perhaps weary of going big, Rosenblatt went home, where he derived some comfort from the millions he had earned. He bought and sold a domain registrar company. He started a site called Superdudes, where users could create superhero-like avatars. He invested in a nightclub in San Diego.

But with the birth of Web 2.0, big was back. In 2004 a group of investors tapped Rosenblatt to run eUniverse (later renamed Intermix Media), a struggling Internet conglomerate that happened to own MySpace. Soon after Rosenblatt started, New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer charged Intermix with bundling adware and spyware with its free games and screensavers. Rosenblatt settled almost immediately, handing over $7.5 million — the entire cash holdings of Intermix. “It was the worst, most miserable time in my life,” he says. Still, he could be consoled by the fact that his company had survived and still had MySpace, which was exploding into the Internet’s dominant social media site. AOL, Viacom, and News Corp. were all sniffing around, and Rosenblatt began to play them off each other. Not long after settling with Spitzer, he sold Intermix to News Corp. for $650 million, of which he earned $23 million. Then he left the company.

Video on Demand

Demand Media wants to answer any question anybody has about anything. That means covering the obscure and the very obscure.

How to Pack for a Trip to Spain

Fans of this European tour guide’s earlier “How to Pack for a Trip to Rome” will note that she’s now pushing strappy high heels over conservative pumps.

Demand video: packing for Spain.

Although Rosenblatt had been at MySpace for only 18 months, he had seen enough to come up with a theory: The social network was doing it wrong. It had built a supersite, aggregating millions of users and encouraging them to root around. But they had difficulty finding information about specific subjects. “I kept thinking about gardening,” he says. “People wanted to talk about gardening, but they didn’t want to do it on MySpace.” Instead they went to Google, which was its own kind of aggregator, collecting everyone who searched for specific terms and directing them to appropriate sites. If he could collect enough tiny sites and sell Google ads against them, he could potentially build a more successful business than he could with one supersite.

On the strength of this plan, Rosenblatt raised $355 million from funders like Goldman Sachs, Oak Investment Partners, and legendary investor Gordon Crawford. Then he went looking for acquisitions. He bought eNom, one of the largest domain registrars, and Pluck, a company that handles commenting and social networks for Web sites, along with dozens of amateur-content sites that could catch lowly keyword ads. Among them: eHow, Trails.com, GolfLink.com, and Cracked .com. Rosenblatt now had three revenue sources: domain sales; services; and video, banner, and Google ads.

Demand Media was born. But it wasn’t until 2007, when the company bought ExpertVillage.com, Byron Reese’s how-to site (reportedly for roughly $20 million), that it began to realize its potential. Reese and Rosenblatt soon began working on an idea that Reese had long struggled with: Millions of visitors were coming to ExpertVillage and generating reams of data, but his editors didn’t do anything with it. What if they used that information to determine what content to create?

Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database — the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.

Not everybody agrees with him. Howcast, one of Demand’s largest competitors, also produces explainer videos and how-tos. Unlike Demand, the company employs a staff of editors and writers and gets freelance voice-over pros. Filmmakers can earn a couple thousand dollars shooting the videos, and the difference is noticeable. (Howcast’s “How to Make Friends at a New School” includes such useful tidbits as “sit in the middle of the classroom to surround yourself with as many potential new friends as possible.” Demand-owned eHow’s “How to Be Popular in School” video, in contrast, offers such vague guidance as “be nice to everybody.”) “We believe that quality holds long-term value,” Howcast CEO Jason Liebman says. He emphasizes that his team comes up with titles the old-fashioned way: deciding what people want to learn based on their own instincts, what holidays and events are coming up, and from general research. Yet Howcast pulls a tiny — and getting tinier — fraction of the traffic that eHow does, and Liebman hesitantly acknowledges that he’s working on an algorithm to compete with Demand.

Liebman isn’t the only one ready to mimic Demand’s approach. CBS Interactive — which owns CNET, UrbanBaby, GameSpot, and other sites — also deploys an algorithm that helps guide what its sites cover. AOL is working on one as well. Smaller sites like Helium and Associated Content are trying to bring their own flood of freelancer-written work to the Net, using many of the same contributors as Demand.

The fact is, the Demand way may be inescapable. A senior executive at a major media company likened Demand’s algorithmic-based content-creation factory to what he saw in the advertising industry in the past decade. Experience, relationships, and gut checks started losing out to raw data. “To customers, advertising may not look that different, but the systems to deliver the right ads to the right consumer at the right time have changed dramatically,” he says. “The content systems are going through the early, early stages of that right now.”

Still, Rosenblatt says he is trying to place a new emphasis on quality. “There’s a constant debate internally,” he says. “This might sound crazy, but I’d rather spend more and put more quality into the process. Long term, we’ll make more money by increasing quality.”

But when he gets into the details, it’s clear that he’s not moving far from his Henry Ford model. “We’re not talking about $1,000 videos, so a couple dollars here or there can make a serious difference. For instance, pay an extra dollar for fact-checking.”

How can anyone survive on that? Good question. Google it. If the answer isn’t out there, it soon will be.

Senior writer Daniel Roth (daniel_roth@wired.com) wrote about Netflix’s streaming video service in issue

The power of naps

2009-03-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

The power of naps -Siesta's mental and physical benefits praised at UCSD event

By Matthew T. Hall Union-Tribune STAFF WRITER
2:00 a.m. March 10, 2009

University of California San Diego student Khrysten Taylor took advantage of yesterday's nap-in at the Price Center that highlighted the physical and mental benefits of napping

Weren't naps just the greatest thing about kindergarten?

The carpet. The curled body. The closed eye. Perfection.

Now it's nigh impossible to nap – or even dream of it – during the hustle and bustle, the hurry and worry, of work, family, exercise and economic collapse. Even children are lucky to rest their heads on their desks for 20 minutes, and may be encouraged to have quiet reading instead.
Relief arrived yesterday, handing the nation a better excuse than its collective fatigue to take a nap.

Yesterday was National Napping Day, the brainchild of Boston University professor William Anthony and his wife, Camille. They began the observance on the first full day of daylight-saving time 10 years ago because naps boost productivity – and cost less than a cup of coffee.
Sleep researchers argue that naps put coffee to shame because (a) they're free and (b) studies show they improve typing, memory recall and certain other job skills better than caffeine.
For yesterday's event, University of California San Diego psychiatrist and sleep expert Sara Mednick, author of “Take a Nap! Change Your Life,” addressed 200 people inside a campus ballroom for the school's first nap-in.

“There's such a stigma around napping,” she said. “You need to have a little bit more of a take-back-the-nap kind of attitude.”

Later, she added, “Could you imagine a world where it's, 'Wow, look how hard they're working? They're napping!' ”

Her scientific spiel was entertaining enough that it didn't put the kids to sleep, though that's probably not something she'd complain about.

More than 200 people signed up to hear Mednick's speech to kick off UCSD's venture into sanctioned napping. But only eight people stretched out on mats in a dark and relatively quiet ballroom at the Price Center. A ninth laid facedown over four chairs for his shut-eye.
Alexia Cervantes, 41, a UCSD Recreation Department director, bought into the excuse to sleep on the job.

“I'm new to napping, but I'm feeling inspired after listening to Sara's talk,” she said. “My husband's a great napper, and I'm always getting on his case about it, but maybe now I'm thinking he had it right all along.”

University administrator Liora Kian Gutierrez enjoyed Mednick's talk and bought a book for her to sign. Still, she doesn't think she'll ever be able to squeeze a nap into her workday.
“You just want to produce, produce, produce, and so you think, 'Oh you can't take a nap,' ” she said. “There are many times where I'm just exhausted, mentally exhausted, but I would never think of doing it.”

The UCSD and national events were very pro-nap, but the research is not unanimous.
One study, publicized yesterday by BBC News, suggested that naps may make a person more inclined to develop Type 2 diabetes. Another suggested naps may increase the mortality rate of women over the age of 69 who take them daily.

Still, the UCSD event emphasized a link between naps, health and safety.
Of sleep, which essentially occupies a third of human life, Mednick said, “It's been called the greatest embarrassment of neuroscience because it's the most obvious thing that we do, and we've no idea why we're doing it.”

As the nappers went their separate ways and Mednick gave her last interview, a half-dozen students rode a shuttle bus to a parking lot across campus. One student rested her head against the back of the driver's seat and drowsed during a bumpy ride, her right hand somehow managing not to spill a cup of coffee between her legs.

Walking to her car from the bus, she declined to be interviewed, saying, “I have to be somewhere in 10 minutes. It's the reason why I'm so tired.”

At least she got in a nap.

Simple To Do List: Easy Task & Time Management

2009-02-24T06:28:00.000-08:00

Hey Kenzer,

One way to help you manage tasks, homework and generally not forget stuff is pretty simple... write it down.

Each morning take a 3x5 card and write on the card things you need to do that day - a to do list
* post office
* start geology paper
* call SDA
* update computer
etc.

Be sure to also add fun things to this list like
* hot chocolate
* work out
* call home

Sometimes you will find, that if you are at your computer, you can accomplish a few of your tasks immediately, rather than write them down, ie "update computer."

And then paper clip it to the outside of your calendar book, so you can easily see it. Many people just write it in their calendar, which works, IF your calendar is always open on your desk. But if your calendar is mostly in your backpack, you want to see your to do list every time you take out your books.

This 3x5 card method does a few things:
1) it makes you aware of what you have to do so during the day, one of the tasks might pop into your head when you have some time between class and track, ie call SDA
2) it gets you in the habit of planning your day - all successful people do it, most people just show up for the day and hope things get done, successful people are proactive - and a by product of this is actually having more time, and less crisis management
3) when the next day rolls around there will probably be things on today's list that didn't get done, so you will have to write that same item on the following days list. Which can be annoying, making you more likely to do the task, rather than keep adding it every day. Or, which can be just as effective, you decide not to roll-over that task and it removes something that was just busy work from your day.

When you are done you can toss the card, or save them as some sort of trophy accomplishment, or as a historical resource so if you have to find something you did, you can.

In short, the minute that you spend doing this every day planning the task list, will be more than offset by the minutes you save - hours, if you miss a deadline and go into crisis management :0

How Free Content Works

2008-12-02T13:12:00.000-08:00

Clive Thompson on How T-Shirts Keep Online Content Free
By Clive Thompson 11.24.08

In 2003, Burnie Burns got together with three friends and created Red vs. Blue—an animated comedy series set in the world of first-person shooter Halo. Nerds loved it, and within months nearly a million people were downloading each week's free show.

Burns & Co. decided they wanted to quit their jobs and work on the series full-time. So they figured out a way to do it: T-shirts.

Burns appropriated the comedy's wittiest one-liners and set up an online store to sell shirts and caps. Within months, he was filling hundreds of orders a week, generating enough revenue to pay everyone a salary. "The shirts," he says, "turned us from a hobby into a business."

Burns is not alone. Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I've begun to call "the T-shirt economy"—paying for bits by selling atoms. Charging for content online is hard, often impossible. Even 10 cents for a download of something like Red vs. Blue might drive away the fans. So instead of fighting this dynamic, today's smart artists are simply adapting to it.

Their algorithm is simple: First, don't limit your audience by insisting they pay to see your work. Instead, let your content roam freely online, so it generates as large an audience as possible. Then cash in on your fans' desire to sport merchandise that declares their allegiance to you.

We're talking about a surprisingly big market. According to Impressions, a clothing industry trade publication, Americans spend around $40 billion a year on decorated apparel. At CafePress, a Web site that lets anyone customize and sell merchandise, users sold more than $100 million in goods in 2007—pocketing $20 million in profits—and overall sales are growing an average of 60 percent a year.

As you might expect, the T-shirt economy is a long tail phenomenon, with comparatively few people making a full-time living while millions earn only a few hundred or thousand bucks a year. On the high revenue end, you've got companies like BustedTees—an offshoot of the funny-video portal CollegeHumor—which, with a staff of eight, expects to clear a 20 percent profit on sales of 350,000-plus shirts for 2008. In the middle are outfits like RightWingStuff, which hawks T-shirts mocking the left. And on the far end of the tail are people like David Friedman, a New York photographer who cooks up three or four witty ideas a year—like his series of T-shirts adorned with fictional corporate logos that are blurrily "pixelated," as if on reality TV—and makes just enough money to cover his hosting fees, plus a bit of pocket change.

Bands have relied on merch sales for years. But today's instant-customization technology has supercharged the T-shirt economy by dropping the cost of entry to zero. With a Zazzle or CafePress store, you don't need to put down any capital; the very first sale is profitable. This allows artists to speculate with dozens of designs until they hit on one that catches their fans' attention. "When you drive the risk to zero, you really open the floodgates," says Fred Durham, cofounder of CafePress.

Of course, it's a little ironic that artists who've harnessed the digital world to distribute their work have to rely on semi-disposable clothing to finance it. And the business model doesn't work for everyone. Jonathan Coulton, a musician who sells merchandise online, says he can make more money by simply forging an emotional bond with his fans so they'll pay cash for his MP3s. Fair enough: Charging for bits is way more profitable than charging for atoms. But not many consumers are willing to pay for podcasts, videocasts, or blog content—and that's where the T-shirt economy helps out.

Creators of this media don't need to make big bucks or bleed you dry. They're just looking to put their shirt on your back.

MBA Team Building Exercises

2008-09-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

For executives going back to school, case studies and roundtable discussions are only part of the curriculum. There are also treasure hunts, Nascar-style challenges and other unusual programs. Here's a sample of the offbeat offerings.

IMPROVISATION
WHERE: Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, UCLA's Anderson School of Management, Columbia University's Graduate School of Business.

WHAT: A variety of improvisation techniques supplement traditional classroom lectures and case studies. The exercises were created at Fuqua by Bob Kulhan, senior partner of Business Improvisations LLC, with Prof. Craig Fox from the Anderson School of Management.

In a "one-word story" exercise, students stand in a circle and each adds a word to a progressing tale to build a narrative. "Close the dictionary, close the thesaurus," says Mr. Kulhan, an adjunct professor at Fuqua. "Relax enough to let your natural intelligence rise to the surface."

WHAT THEY LEARN: Depending on the program and the school, participants learn leadership, team-building skills, innovation and creativity.

THE PIT-CREW CHALLENGE
WHERE: Duke's Fuqua School, Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

WHAT: Student teams must change tires on a Nascar-style race car. Once they're done, each team strategizes on how to lower their time for a second run. At the end, a professional Nascar pit crew shows how it's done.

WHAT THEY LEARN: Students experience the pros and cons of collaboration, and see how communicating effectively eases the process. Executives also learn to innovate under pressure and see the value of learning by doing.

Courtesy of Robert A. Parker & Associates
Students in an executive program at Duke University
ORCHESTRA AND JAZZ
WHERE: University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

WHAT: A visiting music professor discusses the systematic structure of the orchestra and the creativity of a jazz ensemble. Participants are taught how to use a baton to conduct or lead an orchestra and spend time learning meter, time signature and differences among notes.

WHAT THEY LEARN: To discern how individual parts affect the whole, whether it's one instrument or a group. Participants examine when incremental attention is needed (an orchestra) and when flexibility is preferable (like a jazz ensemble).

COOKING AS A TEAM
WHERE: Columbia Business School.

WHAT: The 60 participants -- who aren't told the full extent of the evening's activities in advance -- are taken to Columbia's large kitchen in Lerner Hall to prepare dinner with Columbia's executive chef, John Santiago. Teams of eight or nine participants work at different stations to bone fish, prepare lamb chops, cut and peel vegetables, whip up dessert, and mix mojitos and cosmopolitans. At the end they gather to eat the final product.

WHAT THEY LEARN: The significance of collaborative work. And as a fringe benefit, participants take away cooking techniques and a book of the evening's recipes.

TREASURE HUNT
WHERE: University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School.

WHAT: Students form several groups to find a treasure. Each team must decipher clues written on puzzle pieces leading them from one location to the next to ultimately piece together a puzzle and get a key to the treasure. But as the teams earn their keys, they realize all the groups must join together to solve an even larger puzzle.

WHAT THEY LEARN: The value of joining forces. The hunt isn't about solving the puzzle first, because no one team can finish without the help of the other teams.

Courtesy of University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School
Students in an executive M.B.A. program at University of North Carolina
HORSE FARM VISIT
WHERE: University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler School.

WHAT: Participants work with the horses, first by grooming them to form a rapport and gain their trust. Groups of three or four executives then work collectively or individually with one horse for about four hours to persuade it to perform specific activities, such as walking in a particular formation.

WHAT THEY LEARN: To consider how their behavior affects the horse's response. Students who are aggressive and impatient don't fare as well as those who use gentler approaches.

POETRY
WHERE: University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

WHAT: Executives at Wharton's advanced management program spend an afternoon with Prof. Al Filreis, faculty director of the Kelly Writers House, learning modern American poetry in an exercise aimed at improving communications skills. They do reading and writing exercises and a group critique. Executives read a poem word by word to make sure everyone is comfortable with the meaning and then discuss how to transfer the lessons learned from poetry to communication in the workplace.

WHAT THEY LEARN: A sense of voice, form, tone, rhythm, prosody, theme and metaphor. Participants use these techniques to understand how their leadership is perceived across their organizations and also how to communicate better.

T. BOONE PICKENS: My Plan to Escape the Grip of Foreign Oil

2008-07-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

It is scary when an oilman rails against oil...

By T. BOONE PICKENS
July 9, 2008; Page A15

One of the benefits of being around a long time is that you get to know a lot about certain things. I'm 80 years old and I've been an oilman for almost 60 years. I've drilled more dry holes and also found more oil than just about anyone in the industry. With all my experience, I've never been as worried about our energy security as I am now. Like many of us, I ignored what was happening. Now our country faces what I believe is the most serious situation since World War II.

The problem, of course, is our growing dependence on foreign oil – it's extreme, it's dangerous, and it threatens the future of our nation.

Martin Kozlowski
Let me share a few facts: Each year we import more and more oil. In 1973, the year of the infamous oil embargo, the United States imported about 24% of our oil. In 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War, this had climbed to 42%. Today, we import almost 70% of our oil.

This is a staggering number, particularly for a country that consumes oil the way we do. The U.S. uses nearly a quarter of the world's oil, with just 4% of the population and 3% of the world's reserves. This year, we will spend almost $700 billion on imported oil, which is more than four times the annual cost of our current war in Iraq.

In fact, if we don't do anything about this problem, over the next 10 years we will spend around $10 trillion importing foreign oil. That is $10 trillion leaving the U.S. and going to foreign nations, making it what I certainly believe will be the single largest transfer of wealth in human history.

Why do I believe that our dependence on foreign oil is such a danger to our country? Put simply, our economic engine is now 70% dependent on the energy resources of other countries, their good judgment, and most importantly, their good will toward us. Foreign oil is at the intersection of America's three most important issues: the economy, the environment and our national security. We need an energy plan that maps out how we're going to work our way out of this mess. I think I have such a plan.

Consider this: The world produces about 85 million barrels of oil a day, but global demand now tops 86 million barrels a day. And despite three years of record price increases, world oil production has declined every year since 2005. Meanwhile, the demand for oil will only increase as growing economies in countries like India and China gear up for enhanced oil consumption.

Add to this the fact that in many countries, including China, the government has a great deal of influence over its energy industry, allowing these countries to set strategic direction easily and pay whatever price is needed to secure oil. The U.S. has no similar policy, because we thankfully don't have state-controlled energy companies. But that doesn't mean we can't set goals and develop an energy policy that will overcome our addiction to foreign oil. I have a clear goal in mind with my plan. I want to reduce America's foreign oil imports by more than one-third in the next five to 10 years.

How will we do it? We'll start with wind power. Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean. Did you know that the midsection of this country, that stretch of land that starts in West Texas and reaches all the way up to the border with Canada, is called the "Saudi Arabia of the Wind"? It gets that name because we have the greatest wind reserves in the world. In 2008, the Department of Energy issued a study that stated that the U.S. has the capacity to generate 20% of its electricity supply from wind by 2030. I think we can do this or even more, but we must do it quicker.

My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. Today, natural gas accounts for about 22% of our electricity generation in the U.S. We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel. That would displace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. Natural gas is the only domestic energy of size that can be used to replace oil used for transportation, and it is abundant in the U.S. It is cheap and it is clean. With eight million natural-gas-powered vehicles on the road world-wide, the technology already exists to rapidly build out fleets of trucks, buses and even cars using natural gas as a fuel. Of these eight million vehicles, the U.S. has a paltry 150,000 right now. We can and should do so much more to build our fleet of natural-gas-powered vehicles.

I believe this plan will be the perfect bridge to the future, affording us the time to develop new technologies and a new perspective on our energy use. In addition to the plan I have proposed, I also want to see us explore all avenues and every energy alternative, from more R&D into batteries and fuel cells to development of solar, ethanol and biomass to more conservation. Drilling in the outer continental shelf should be considered as well, as we need to look at all options, recognizing that there is no silver bullet.

I believe my plan can be accomplished within 10 years if this country takes decisive and bold steps immediately. This plan dramatically reduces our dependence on foreign oil and lowers the cost of transportation. It invests in the heartland, creating thousands of new jobs. It substantially reduces America's carbon footprint and uses existing, proven technology. It will be accomplished solely through private investment with no new consumer or corporate taxes or government regulation. It will build a bridge to the future, giving us the time to develop new technologies.

The future begins as soon as Congress and the president act. The government must mandate the formation of wind and solar transmission corridors, and renew the subsidies for economic and alternative energy development in areas where the wind and sun are abundant. I am also calling for a monthly progress report on the reduction in foreign oil imports, as well as a monthly progress report on the state of development of natural gas vehicles in this country.

We have a golden opportunity in this election year to form bipartisan support for this plan. We have the grit and fortitude to shoulder the responsibility of change when our country's future is at stake, as Americans have proven repeatedly throughout this nation's history.

We need action. Now.

Mr. Pickens is CEO of BP Capital.

America Is Still Pretty Smart - Here Is One Way We Are Beating Foreign Oil...

2008-06-14T16:35:00.001-07:00

JCVI.org

Venter: 'I envision maybe a million micro-refineries'

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY

A Bug to Save the Planet

Genome pioneer Craig Venter wants to make a bacterium that will eat CO₂and produce fuel.

By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

Jun 16, 2008 Issue

No one would accuse Craig Venter of harboring humble ambitions. In 2000 he decoded the human genome faster than anyone else—and he did it more cheaply than a well-funded government team. More recently he's set a new goal for himself: to replace the petrochemical industry. In a Maryland lab, he's manipulating chromosomes in the hopes of creating an energy bug—a bacterium that will ingest CO2, sunlight and water, and spew out liquid fuel that can be pumped into American SUVs. NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria spoke to Venter about the brave new world of biologically based fuels. Excerpts:

Zakaria: How are you going to create the fuel of the future?
Venter: We think multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline.

What would a "refinery" that uses microorganisms to create fuel look like?
They're just large, bacteria-processing fermenters. People are familiar with this: that's how wine and beer are made. We're using similar processes, but ones that are designed to produce much more complex molecules than ethanol, and therefore fuels that will be much higher in energy content, and will work well with the existing energy infrastructure.

Would you have the same problem we have with corn ethanol, which is that you use large amounts of cropland?
We consider ethanol the first-generation fuel. We have second- and third-generation fuels that are much more advanced fuels, but they also come from plant sugars. We [are working on] a fourth-generation fuel, where the starting material is not sugar, but carbon dioxide.

People want to bury that CO2 in the ground or pump it into oil wells or coal beds. We want to use that CO2 and the carbon in it to make new fuels.

How close are you to creating an organism that can produce fuels in this way?
We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We're definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.

And your biologically produced fuels will work in today's cars and energy systems without modifying them?
Basically everything we're making will work in the existing infrastructure.

Even with ethanol you need to make some adjustments for cars to be able to run on them.
We don't know for sure, but we think our fuels won't require even the adjustment that ethanol does. One of the problems with ethanol, as you'll know if you've ever made a cocktail, is that it mixes very well with water. That's not a good property for fuel—all the water in ethanol turns into steam, which can damage engines. We've designed fuels that have very little water in them, so I think that will solve that problem.

You've said that a fuel-generating synthetic bacterium would be "a trillion-dollar bug." Is this a silver bullet that will replace the petrochemical industry?
The fuel-and-oil industry is a multi trillion-dollar industry, so I think there is room for dozens to a hundred solutions, each of which could create trillion-dollar industries. The same oil that gets burned as fuel is also the entire basis for the petrochemical industries, so our clothing, our plastics and our pharmaceuticals all come from oil and its derivatives. There are multiple billion- or trillion-dollar industries out there that new inventions will help spawn.

Once you've proved the science behind this, how will you be able to produce and distribute it on a massive scale?
Right now oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion. I envision maybe a million micro-refineries. Companies, cities and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel. This would eliminate a lot of the distribution problems and associated pollution.

Do you want the federal government to be doing something that it's not doing these days?
Well, these days it's not doing much. If anything, what it's done in the past is create a disincentive for new technologies and new ideas—for example, by mandating that so much ethanol is made and that it has to come from corn sugar. Those are really negative incentives for people trying to get new things out there.

How would your technology affect the developing world?
Developing nations don't have a large dedicated infrastructure [for traditional fuel], so they might be able to just take these new technologies and implement them quite quickly.

But they would have to put in place an extensive system of microrefineries, right?
That's much cheaper. They can be built where the crop is produced. Brazil has done it well. They produce ethanol right at the site of the sugar production, so they don't have huge transportation costs, and they recycle a lot of the waste to help fertilize the next crop. I think there will be unique solutions for each country and each region. Places with lots of sunlight and near the ocean could be great sites for our fourth-generation fuels, where all we need is sunlight, seawater and carbon dioxide to create fuels. There are literally hundreds of different possible solutions out there that could be uniquely adapted to each country and each region based on what works for their economy.

The climate is such a complex system that it seems impossible to know what will happen when we start changing it. How can you know what impact biologically produced fuels will have?
Well, we know what's happening from adding CO2 to the atmosphere. We're playing a very dangerous game by adding more and more CO2—it's like playing Russian roulette with the planet. So reducing the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere is very clearly a positive thing. If humanity can match that challenge, it would be a very important step towards our long-term survival.

© 2008

User Generated Ideas For Business - The Customer is the Company

2008-05-25T15:11:00.000-07:00

The Customer is the Company
Threadless churns out dozens of new--with no advertising, no professional designers, no sales force and no retial distribution. And it's never produced a flop.
From: Inc. Magazine, June 2008 | By: Max Chafkin

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jake Nickell stepped to the front of a small classroom on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and looked around. It was an autumn morning in 2005, and before him sat a dozen executives from some of the country's largest companies -- General Mills, Pitney Bowes, Clorox, and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) -- and a contingent of innovation researchers from MIT's Sloan School of Management and other business schools. The meeting had been organized by Eric von Hippel, an MIT bigwig and the foremost authority on something called user innovation. Von Hippel had heard about Nickell from a graduate student and had invited him to Cambridge to share his story with the group.

Nickell was somewhat befuddled by all the attention. He was not familiar with the term user innovation -- or, for that matter, the term Eric von Hippel. Business at Nickell's company, Threadless, had been growing quickly -- annual sales were on track to hit $5 million, and he had lately started getting curious calls from venture capitalists and large retailers. But Threadless didn't quite seem like MIT material. At 25, Nickell hadn't even graduated from college.

Von Hippel, a Harvard graduate, entrepreneur, and former McKinsey consultant who was 40 years Nickell's senior, called the room to attention and began lavishing praise on Threadless; he called the company a "perfect example" of a new way of thinking about innovation. Von Hippel's theory, which he had introduced in the late 1970s, was that most product innovations do not come out of corporate research and development labs but from the people who use the products. Nickell shot a confused glance at Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Threadless's chief creative officer, and Jacob DeHart, his chief technology officer. The meeting had barely begun, and they had already learned something.

Nickell started talking about his company. Threadless, he explained, ran design competitions on an online social network. Members of the network submitted their ideas for T-shirts -- hundreds each week -- and then voted on which ones they liked best. Hundreds of thousands of people were using the site as a kind of community center, where they blogged, chatted about designs, socialized with their fellow enthusiasts -- and bought a ton of shirts at $15 each. Revenue was growing 500 percent a year, despite the fact that the company had never advertised, employed no professional designers, used no modeling agency or fashion photographers, had no sales force, and enjoyed no retail distribution. As result, costs were low, margins were above 30 percent, and -- because community members told them precisely which shirts to make -- every product eventually sold out. Nickell's company had never produced a flop.

The audience members listened, rapt. For years they had suspected that this kind of business model was possible -- even inevitable. They had seen the beginnings of it in the open-source-software movement, and they had been trying to make it happen in small ways within their own companies. But somehow, this T-shirt guy had gone whole hog. He had built an entire business around the idea that an online community could drive innovation. "We were blown away," says von Hippel.

Nickell does not seem like the kind of guy whose presence would blow anyone away. He's 5 feet 10 inches but seems smaller, with a frame that barely fills out the medium-size T-shirts he wears like some kind of uniform. His fine features, unkempt hair, and scraggly red beard make him look almost elfin. His mannerisms, including a whisper-quiet voice and a tendency to punctuate his sentences with a faint giggle, do little to dispel this impression.

But Nickell is at the vanguard of a new innovation model that is quietly reshaping a host of industries. Whether it's called user innovation, crowdsourcing, or open source, it means drastically rethinking your relationship with your customers. "Threadless completely blurs that line of who is a producer and who is a consumer," says Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "The customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting. All that has been distributed."

This idea goes against a basic principle that has been taught in business schools since the invention of mass production: Employees make stuff, and customers buy it. But this notion seems anachronistic in a marketplace of ever-narrowing niches and nearly unlimited consumer choices. Meanwhile, a generation of so-called Web 2.0 companies has succeeded by encouraging customers to contribute to, and in some cases create, the product being sold. Not only do we have instantaneous access to countless television programs though video websites, but anyone with a YouTube account and a digital camera can create a show of his or her own. Professionally edited, dead-tree newspapers are besieged by digital news sites that are produced and edited by their readers. The 240-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica finds itself eclipsed -- at least in terms of readership -- by Wikipedia.com, which pays its writers nothing and requires that they possess no expertise at all.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In a superficial way, Threadless resembles these Web 2.0 firms. It is an online business, built around a social network, in which users collaborate with one another. The difference is that Threadless is not a software or media company. It designs, manufactures, and sells actual stuff. "They're the beginning of a new wave," says von Hippel, the author, most recently, of Democratizing Innovation. Von Hippel envisions a future in which most companies essentially abandon market research and product design and instead rely on communities of users to figure out which products to sell. Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media and the guy who coined the term Web 2.0, goes even further. "As manufacturing technology gets richer, this model will be much more widely applied," he says. Already, the prices of rapid prototyping gadgets like three-dimensional printers and laser cutters are plummeting, a fact that O'Reilly believes will allow for open-source electronics, furniture, and toys. "How far off," he asked in a 2006 essay posted to his blog, "is a future in which the creative economy overflows the thin boundary that separates 'information' from 'stuff'?"

Nickell had no such vision as he put the finishing touches on a T-shirt design in late 2000. It was for the New Media Underground festival, an informal gathering of Web designers in London. He had no intention of attending the event, but he cared about it deeply. At the time, Nickell was 20 years old, living in a tiny Chicago apartment. He spent his days on the sales floor at CompUSA; at night, he was a talented if unenthusiastic part-time student at the Illinois Institute of Art. Though his girlfriend visited him each weekend, he had few close friends.

When he wasn't working or studying, Nickell was tinkering with Web design, a hobby he indulged in on Dreamless.org, an Internet forum for illustrators and programmers. He would spend hours at a time cruising the forum, talking with his online friends and engaging in a pastime called Photoshop tennis. In it, designers pass digital photographs back and forth and challenge one another to manipulate the images in the most outrageous way possible.

Nickell's design for the New Media Underground festival -- three lines of gray text that mimicked the layout of the Dreamless website -- was an entry for a contest that the festival's organizers were holding online. The design was simple and not quite pretty. But it was strikingly clever -- a physical representation of their digital community. The Dreamless members agreed. Nickell won the contest.

In concrete terms, this accomplishment meant exactly nothing: He got no money or even a copy of his winning shirt. But the experience was exhilarating. Dreamless members spent a lot of time batting ideas back and forth, but their creations rarely made it out of the digital realm. Suddenly, Nickell had an idea: What if the best designs were printed on T-shirts and sold in the real world? He suggested as much to Jacob DeHart, one of a handful of friends he had met on Dreamless. DeHart, a student at Purdue University, loved the idea, and each pitched in $500 -- enough to pay a lawyer to set up the business and print the first round of shirts.

Nickell and DeHart held their first contest in November 2000. They asked the designers on Dreamless to submit their best work and to pick their favorites. The grand prize: two free shirts and the promise that any proceeds would be reinvested in future contests. They called the competition Threadless, a play on thread -- either a clothing item or a discussion topic on an online forum. In all, they printed two dozen copies of five shirts out of slightly fewer than 100 submissions with in-joke titles like "Evil Mother F---ing Web Design" and "Dead Sexy Designer." The shirts went on sale in January 2001 for $12 each and sold out quickly. In the months that followed, Nickell and DeHart ran regular competitions using an automated rating system that allowed users to score designs on a scale from 1 to 5, but it never occurred to them that they had a real company. "It was just a hobby, a way for people to get their artwork out," Nickell says. By 2002, the hobby had surpassed $100,000 worth of T-shirts and attracted more than 10,000 community members, mostly artists in their teens and 20s. Even so, Nickell, DeHart, and Kalmikoff -- who joined the company that year -- spent much of their time doing freelance Web design to pay the bills.

Shortly after founding the company, Nickell and DeHart began awarding small cash prizes to the artists whose T-shirts were selected. Initially the prizes were $100 per winning design, but they gradually climbed to $2,500, plus reprint fees. But the appeal of Threadless to artists has never had much to do with getting paid. "It wasn't so much the money," says artist Glenn Jones, who won $150 in a contest in 2004, at age 29. "It was how cool it was to get your shirts printed." Young illustrators had few outlets in which to display their art, and within a few years of the launch, Threadless had acquired a sort of American Idol cachet. It was where unknown designers went to make their names.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In addition to attracting a lot of talent, the contest format encouraged artists to tell their less artistic friends about the site. Designers labor mightily on their submissions; they spend weeks tinkering with their work and soliciting advice from other members. Then they post links to their submissions on their websites, blogs, and MySpace pages, asking their friends to click, vote, and, the artists hope, buy. (Threadless helps with this, sending the artists digital submission kits that include HTML code and graphics to help them create professional-looking advertisements for their designs.) "Threadless was a huge word-of-mouth thing," says Tom Burns, a 30-year-old freelance designer in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who discovered Threadless through a mention on a design forum in late 2004. When he submitted his first design, he told all his friends and posted links on every design forum he frequented. "I spread the word as much as I could," says Burns, who eventually won for a design called Spaghetti Western.

Threadless users are not required to join the social network or vote in order to buy shirts, but many users have offered their opinions on thousands of designs. There's something enjoyable and empowering about playing critic in a never-ending gallery of pop art. "Participation on Threadless is not just about voting for designs you really want to buy," says Frank Piller, a management professor at Germany's Aachen University and a researcher at MIT. "It's an exploration of new designs, and it's fun." For a 2006 paper he published in the Sloan Management Review, Piller surveyed Threadless customers and found that only 5 percent were buying shirts without first voting on designs. "Almost no one was simply consuming," he says. "They were all participating."

This rabid engagement propelled the company through four years of phenomenal growth, beginning around 2004. The user base grew tenfold, from 70,000 members at the end of 2004 to more than 700,000 today. Sales in 2006 hit $18 million -- with profits of roughly $6 million. In 2007, growth continued at more than 200 percent, with similar margins. Though Nickell refuses to disclose the exact revenue number -- perhaps because he now counts Insight Venture Partners, a New York venture capital firm, as a minority shareholder -- it seems fair to assume that Threadless sold more than $30 million in T-shirts last year.

Ask Nickell what he makes of his company's whirlwind success, and he will respond rather sheepishly. "I think of it as common sense," he says. "Why wouldn't you want to make the products that people want you to make?" Indeed, the idea that the users of products are often best equipped to innovate is something many entrepreneurs know intuitively. And it is supported by a growing body of research. A study published last year in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal suggested that the vast majority of companies are founded by "user-entrepreneurs" -- people who went into business to improve a product they used. Meanwhile, studies by von Hippel and others show that in industries as diverse as scientific instruments and snowboard equipment, more than half the innovations generally come from users, not from research labs.

Some major corporations are beginning to experiment with these ideas. Pitney Bowes is building an online social network for direct marketers who use its mail machines, and Ford now allows drivers of its Focus sedan to add third-party hardware and software to their vehicles' navigation and entertainment systems. But most companies still prefer what von Hippel calls the "find-a-need-and-fill-it" paradigm -- which involves market research, focus groups, testing, reworking, and retesting. Not only is this method extremely costly, but it fails to capitalize on a company's most dedicated customers -- who often are already improving existing products to fit their needs. Think of the hacker who tweaks his iPhone to allow it to run Skype, the mountain biker who builds an improved chain guard, the teenage girl who cuts the collar off her Gap (NYSE:GPS) T-shirt.

Some companies actually punish these people by cracking down on unauthorized innovations. Apple has famously "bricked" -- that is, electronically disabled -- iPhones that have been enhanced by their owners. Other companies pay lip service to user innovation but have trouble following through on the concept. "Companies are very good at creating platforms for external input, but they're very bad at using this input," says Piller, who has studied BMW's use of an innovation portal, a website that invites consumers to submit ideas. "BMW gets a thousand good ideas each year," he says. "Maybe they use one every two years." In other words, no matter how much technology goes into prettying up the suggestion box, the suggestions tend to get dumped in the trash at the end of the week.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Threadless is an exception to this. "You could say that what Threadless does is trivial, but it's not," says Harvard's Lakhani. In fact, the very triviality of Threadless's product -- something as low tech and as commoditized as a T-shirt -- proves that vibrant online communities can drive all sorts of nontechnical businesses. This should be encouraging news to entrepreneurs. Customer communities have become exceedingly inexpensive to build and manage; blogging software and social network platforms, for example, are now available for free from a handful of start-ups. "We thought that open source could only work in software, and now it's being successfully applied to a product as mundane as a T-shirt," Lakhani says.

Threadless's headquarters is in a former printing plant on Chicago's Ravenswood Avenue. The 25,000-square-foot office is open to customers, a dozen of whom stop by every day to pick up shirts in person. They sometimes stick around for hours and hang out in a space that resembles a college dorm room constructed on an impossibly large scale. There are video game consoles, go-carts, a giant television, beanbag chairs, action figures, a singing-buck trophy, a Ping-Pong table, and a full-size Airstream trailer that the company uses as a studio in which to produce podcasts.

These diversions and many others are captured in a host of videos published at Threadless's website. There's the one of Nickell smashing a television with a homemade potato gun, the Halloween video with employees throwing pumpkins off the roof, and the one that depicts Threadless employees in a fierce pillow fight. Many videos depict employees dancing, often in ridiculous costumes. In short, the impression is of a teenage paradise -- a company that has nothing but fun.

But take a closer look, and the company is suspiciously companylike. The go-carts generally stay parked, the buck stays mute, and the Ping-Pong table serves as a gathering place for impromptu meetings. "When I started, we spent half the day playing," says Lance Curran, a bearded 29-year-old wearing a beanie, jeans, and a flannel shirt. "That doesn't happen anymore." This is not to say Curran doesn't like his job. On the contrary, he nearly glows when he talks about his rise from a temporary warehouse worker in 2005 to the warehouse manager in charge of a staff of 18 today. When Curran arrived, the average time from an order to shipment was a full month during peak season. Today, it's one day, thanks to a system by which the warehouse is regularly reorganized based on what is selling well. Hot products are placed near the packaging area, which means that packers, who will often walk three miles in the course of a shift, don't have to travel as far to get shirts. "Visitors come in here with degrees, and they can't believe how this place has evolved without any outside help," says Curran.

Like Curran, most of Threadless's employees come with no obvious qualifications for their jobs. The oldest staff member is 33, and many are under 25. The employees do, however, arrive with a deep and abiding love of Threadless, having joined the community long before they entered the work force. Joe Van Wetering, a 21-year-old illustrator who works in the production department, was a frequent visitor to Threadless's offices as a teenager before taking a job in the warehouse in 2006. Ross Zietz had won seven competitions while studying art at Louisiana State University before he took a job as the company's janitor in 2004. He has since been promoted to art director, charged with helping the winning designers get their entries ready for printing. In fact, 75 percent of the company's 50 employees were community members before they were hired.

Nickell makes hiring decisions based primarily on one metric: trust. "It's pretty much the only thing we talk about when we interview," he says. The goal is to find people who can work independently. "It takes a while for people to get adjusted to this place," he says, adding that those who do not display an ability to figure things out on their own are quickly dispatched. (The first and only person over the age of 40 to work at Threadless, the CFO, left after only 60 days on the job in early 2007.)

Trustworthiness is especially important at Threadless because the company's most important asset -- its vast online community -- is managed collectively. Threadless employs no moderators, and no single person or group is charged with keeping the community happy. Nor, technologically speaking, is the social network itself especially advanced. It lacks many of the features found on MySpace or Facebook. There are no virtual friends, no messaging features, and no status messages. Users' profiles are made up of their blog postings and their submissions.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But what Threadless lacks in flashy features, it makes up for in steadfast dedication to staying close to its customers. Both Nickell and Kalmikoff spend much of their time cruising Threadless.com -- posting comments on blogs, inspecting designs, and tweaking the website. They publish their instant-message addresses and regularly query the public about changes to design or contest policies. "If someone changes something on Facebook, there's no expectation that some random 14-year-old from the middle of Idaho is going to be able to get in touch with Mark Zuckerberg," Kalmikoff says. "On Threadless, if people see something they don't like and want to talk to Jake, they get Jake."

Employees have long served as the models for the company's shirts; this puts community members on a first-name basis with them. "Ross makes one hot Dylan," reads a recent comment from one of Zietz's admirers in response to a Bob Dylan-inspired pose he struck. (Users are also invited to upload photos of themselves wearing Threadless shirts. For each photo submitted, the company doles out a credit worth $1.50.) Meanwhile, each employee is encouraged to talk regularly with users. For instance, when Curran is planning on cleaning out the warehouse, he alerts the customers on his Threadless blog. The posts typically generate dozens of requests. "Keep an eye out for the XL Corporate Zombie," reads one from a customer eager to score a lost copy of a sold-out design.

In 2005, Nickell got a call from a buyer at the retailer Urban Outfitters (NASDAQ:URBN) about carrying Threadless's shirts in the company's 150 stores. Around the same time, Target (NYSE:TGT) sent him a several-hundred-page contract for a "test" involving tens of thousands of shirts in a handful of stores and on Target.com. Nickell reluctantly declined both offers, fearing a backlash from a community that often uses "Urban Outfitters" as a synonym for uncool. "We would do a deal with Target or Urban Outfitters," Nickell insists. "The only stipulation we need is to have some kind of presence in the store where people are able to easily learn about where the designs come from. You go to Target or Urban, and it's just shirts on a wall. You have no idea where they came from or who designed them," he says. He would like to see a computer kiosk that allows shoppers to score designs and read about artists, but when he pitched the concept to Urban Outfitters -- which approached Threadless again in 2007 -- the clothing giant demurred. "As long as the story isn't lost, we're OK," he says. Urban Outfitters and Target declined to comment, citing company policy.

Still, Nickell is not averse to pushing his model in new directions. In late 2006, he sold a minority stake to Insight Venture Partners for an undisclosed amount. He informed the community with a release titled "Holy Crap, Big News!" With Insight's cash and expertise, Nickell began work on a Threadless retail store and started looking into the possibility of opening a European warehouse to speed international shipments. He also broke with DeHart, who had lost interest in expanding Threadless and wanted to start something new. (DeHart declined to comment for this story. He maintains his ownership stake in Threadless and a board seat but no longer works at the company.)

Last September, Threadless opened a two-story store in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood. Nickell spared no expense in designing the space, which is appointed with zinc panels, hardwood accents, and 20 flat-screen television monitors. But the most striking thing about the store is how few products are on sale. The upper floor is dedicated exclusively to art, and 20 or so T-shirt designs are sold on the lower level. This layout makes the space feel worlds away from American Apparel (AMEX:APP) stores, which are usually crammed floor to ceiling with all things cotton. Nickell imagined the store as a marketing channel -- a physical embodiment of Threadless.com that would help attract attention to the website, give artists a chance to see their work sold in a real-life setting, and serve as a venue for events such as concerts and art exhibits. He figured it would lose money.

Six months later, the store is profitable, and Nickell is already planning a children's shop in Chicago and a second store in Boulder, Colorado. Eventually, he hopes to open stores in midsize cities such as Austin, Seattle, and Minneapolis. The expansion, which has been greeted positively by much of the Threadless community, is not without its detractors. "Please promise me that this will be the ONLY store you will be opening," wrote a member several days before last year's grand opening party. "Next thing you know, everyone on every other block will be wearing the same shirt." And LovesThreadless.com, one of several independently run fan sites, greeted retail expansion coolly. "Congratulations, guys, but keep it real," wrote the site's creator, Chris Cardinal, a 22-year-old Phoenix-based Web developer.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Such tension, Nickell says, is inevitable in community-based businesses. "Even before now, we've been losing our core people and gaining new core people," he says. "It's kind of like a band in its infancy: As soon as a lot of people start listening to the band, the core fans go away." Nickell points out that the look of Threadless's T-shirts -- what other clothing companies might call the brand -- has changed drastically as his audience has evolved from a small collection of geeky Web designers to include tens of thousands of teenagers from middle America. Webmaster jokes have been replaced by cultural references; wordplay has given way to painterly richness. The Threadless brand is not the shirts but the community experience. As Nickell puts it, "Our brand is a fun boys' and girls' club."

Now, Nickell is set to let his club loose on other businesses. In addition to expanding to children's clothing and retail, Threadless will begin selling prints and posters online. And later this year, the company will add a range of products, including handbags, wallets, and dinnerware, under the brand Naked & Angry. Each item will be adorned with patterns submitted by users, with a new product launched each month. "I think Naked & Angry, if handled properly, has the potential to be way bigger than Threadless, because we have the flexibility to do everything," says Kalmikoff, who envisions moving into high-end clothing as well as housewares. Jeff Lieberman, managing director of Insight Venture Partners and a board member, is even more bullish. "To say it's just a T-shirt company is absurd," he says. "I look at it as a community company that happens to use T-shirts as a canvas."

That a quirky T-shirt company can elicit such glowing statements from a private equity professional who invests mostly in an industry called software-enabled services is something of an accomplishment in itself. Indeed, nearly everyone who touches Threadless seems to come away feeling a little cooler. The executives and academics who met Nickell and Kalmikoff three years ago at MIT still speak glowingly of the kids from Chicago who bailed out on a group dinner at Legal Seafoods in order to attend a customer meet-up in a Cambridge bar. "They're a bunch of guys in T-shirts, but they're incredibly thoughtful," says Jim Euchner, vice president of growth strategy and innovation at Pitney Bowes. Euchner marvels at the way Threadless has built a defensible business based not on proprietary information or technology but on an extremely loyal group of customers. "It's just a different way to think about business," he says.

The way Eric von Hippel sees it, Threadless has tapped into a fundamental economic shift, a movement away from passive consumerism. One day in the not-too-distant future, he says, citizen inventors using computer design programs and three-dimensional printers will exchange physical prototypes in much the same way Nickell and cohorts played Photoshop tennis.

Eventually, Threadless-like communities could form around industries as diverse as semiconductors, auto parts, and toys. "Threadless is one of the first firms to systematically mine a community for designs, but everything is moving in this direction," says von Hippel. He foresees research labs and product-design divisions at manufacturing companies being outstripped by an "innovation commons" made up of tinkerers, hackers, and other devout customers freely sharing their ideas. The companies that win will be the ones that listen.

This may or may not come to pass, but the lesson of Threadless is more basic. Its success demonstrates what happens when you allow your company to become what your customers want it to be, when you make something as basic and quaint as "trust" a core competency. Threadless succeeds by asking more than any modern retail company has ever asked of its customers -- to design the products, to serve as the sales force, to become the employees. Nickell has pioneered a new kind of innovation. It doesn't require huge research budgets or creative brilliance -- just a willingness to keep looking outward.

Max Chafkin is an Inc. staff writer.

How Everything You Learned in High School History Comes Together in Globalization

2008-05-20T17:28:00.000-07:00

The Rise of the Rest
It's true China is booming, Russia is growing more assertive, terrorism is a threat. But if America is losing the ability to dictate to this new world, it has not lost the ability to lead.

Fareed Zakaria
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 2:24 PM ET May 3, 2008

Americans are glum at the moment. No, I mean really glum. In April, a new poll revealed that 81 percent of the American people believe that the country is on the "wrong track." In the 25 years that pollsters have asked this question, last month's response was by far the most negative. Other polls, asking similar questions, found levels of gloom that were even more alarming, often at 30- and 40-year highs. There are reasons to be pessimistic—a financial panic and looming recession, a seemingly endless war in Iraq, and the ongoing threat of terrorism. But the facts on the ground—unemployment numbers, foreclosure rates, deaths from terror attacks—are simply not dire enough to explain the present atmosphere of malaise.

American anxiety springs from something much deeper, a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world. In almost every industry, in every aspect of life, it feels like the patterns of the past are being scrambled. "Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus," wrote Aristophanes 2,400 years ago. And—for the first time in living memory—the United States does not seem to be leading the charge. Americans see that a new world is coming into being, but fear it is one being shaped in distant lands and by foreign people.

Look around. The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

These factoids reflect a seismic shift in power and attitudes. It is one that I sense when I travel around the world. In America, we are still debating the nature and extent of anti-Americanism. One side says that the problem is real and worrying and that we must woo the world back. The other says this is the inevitable price of power and that many of these countries are envious—and vaguely French—so we can safely ignore their griping. But while we argue over why they hate us, "they" have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe. The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

I. The End of Pax Americana
During the 1980s, when I would visit India—where I grew up—most Indians were fascinated by the United States. Their interest, I have to confess, was not in the important power players in Washington or the great intellectuals in Cambridge.

People would often ask me about … Donald Trump. He was the very symbol of the United States—brassy, rich, and modern. He symbolized the feeling that if you wanted to find the biggest and largest anything, you had to look to America. Today, outside of entertainment figures, there is no comparable interest in American personalities. If you wonder why, read India's newspapers or watch its television. There are dozens of Indian businessmen who are now wealthier than the Donald. Indians are obsessed by their own vulgar real estate billionaires. And that newfound interest in their own story is being replicated across much of the world.

How much? Well, consider this fact. In 2006 and 2007, 124 countries grew their economies at over 4 percent a year. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa. Over the last two decades, lands outside the industrialized West have been growing at rates that were once unthinkable. While there have been booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward. Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term "emerging markets," has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world's next great multinationals. His list includes four companies each from Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India, two from China, and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa. This is something much broader than the much-ballyhooed rise of China or even Asia. It is the rise of the rest—the rest of the world.

We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. It also led to the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the Western world. The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the 19th century, was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For the last 20 years, America's superpower status in every realm has been largely unchallenged—something that's never happened before in history, at least since the Roman Empire dominated the known world 2,000 years ago. During this Pax Americana, the global economy has accelerated dramatically. And that expansion is the driver behind the third great power shift of the modern age—the rise of the rest.

At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar world. But along every other dimension—industrial, financial, social, cultural—the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. In terms of war and peace, economics and business, ideas and art, this will produce a landscape that is quite different from the one we have lived in until now—one defined and directed from many places and by many peoples.

The post-American world is naturally an unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should not be. This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else. It is the result of a series of positive trends that have been progressing over the last 20 years, trends that have created an international climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

I know. That's not the world that people perceive. We are told that we live in dark, dangerous times. Terrorism, rogue states, nuclear proliferation, financial panics, recession, outsourcing, and illegal immigrants all loom large in the national discourse. Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia are all threats in some way or another. But just how violent is today's world, really?

A team of scholars at the University of Maryland has been tracking deaths caused by organized violence. Their data show that wars of all kinds have been declining since the mid-1980s and that we are now at the lowest levels of global violence since the 1950s. Deaths from terrorism are reported to have risen in recent years. But on closer examination, 80 percent of those casualties come from Afghanistan and Iraq, which are really war zones with ongoing insurgencies—and the overall numbers remain small. Looking at the evidence, Harvard's polymath professor Steven Pinker has ventured to speculate that we are probably living "in the most peaceful time of our species' existence."

Why does it not feel that way? Why do we think we live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding. The last 20 years have produced an information revolution that brings us news and, most crucially, images from around the world all the time. The immediacy of the images and the intensity of the 24-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hype. Every weather disturbance is the "storm of the decade." Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS. Because the information revolution is so new, we—reporters, writers, readers, viewers—are all just now figuring out how to put everything in context.

We didn't watch daily footage of the two million people who died in Indochina in the 1970s, or the million who perished in the sands of the Iran-Iraq war ten years later. We saw little of the civil war in the Congo in the 1990s, where millions died. But today any bomb that goes off, any rocket that is fired, any death that results, is documented by someone, somewhere and ricochets instantly across the world. Add to this terrorist attacks, which are random and brutal. "That could have been me," you think. Actually, your chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are tiny—for an American, smaller than drowning in your bathtub. But it doesn't feel like that.

The threats we face are real. Islamic jihadists are a nasty bunch—they do want to attack civilians everywhere. But it is increasingly clear that militants and suicide bombers make up a tiny portion of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. They can do real damage, especially if they get their hands on nuclear weapons. But the combined efforts of the world's governments have effectively put them on the run and continue to track them and their money. Jihad persists, but the jihadists have had to scatter, work in small local cells, and use simple and undetectable weapons. They have not been able to hit big, symbolic targets, especially ones involving Americans. So they blow up bombs in cafés, marketplaces, and subway stations. The problem is that in doing so, they kill locals and alienate ordinary Muslims. Look at the polls. Support for violence of any kind has dropped dramatically over the last five years in all Muslim countries.

Militant groups have reconstituted in certain areas where they exploit a particular local issue or have support from a local ethnic group or sect, most worryingly in Pakistan and Afghanistan where Islamic radicalism has become associated with Pashtun identity politics. But as a result, these groups are becoming more local and less global. Al Qaeda in Iraq, for example, has turned into a group that is more anti-Shiite than anti-American. The bottom line is this: since 9/11, Al Qaeda Central, the gang run by Osama bin Laden, has not been able to launch a single major terror attack in the West or any Arab country—its original targets. They used to do terrorism, now they make videotapes. Of course one day they will get lucky again, but that they have been stymied for almost seven years points out that in this battle between governments and terror groups, the former need not despair.

Some point to the dangers posed by countries like Iran. These rogue states present real problems, but look at them in context. The American economy is 68 times the size of Iran's. Its military budget is 110 times that of the mullahs. Were Iran to attain a nuclear capacity, it would complicate the geopolitics of the Middle East. But none of the problems we face compare with the dangers posed by a rising Germany in the first half of the 20th century or an expansionist Soviet Union in the second half. Those were great global powers bent on world domination. If this is 1938, as some neoconservatives tell us, then Iran is Romania, not Germany.

Others paint a dark picture of a world in which dictators are on the march. China and Russia and assorted other oil potentates are surging. We must draw the battle lines now, they warn, and engage in a great Manichean struggle that will define the next century. Some of John McCain's rhetoric has suggested that he adheres to this dire, dyspeptic view. But before we all sign on for a new Cold War, let's take a deep breath and gain some perspective. Today's rising great powers are relatively benign by historical measure. In the past, when countries grew rich they've wanted to become great military powers, overturn the existing order, and create their own empires or spheres of influence. But since the rise of Japan and Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, none have done this, choosing instead to get rich within the existing international order. China and India are clearly moving in this direction. Even Russia, the most aggressive and revanchist great power today, has done little that compares with past aggressors. The fact that for the first time in history, the United States can contest Russian influence in Ukraine—a country 4,800 miles away from Washington that Russia has dominated or ruled for 350 years—tells us something about the balance of power between the West and Russia.

Compare Russia and China with where they were 35 years ago. At the time both (particularly Russia) were great power threats, actively conspiring against the United States, arming guerrilla movement across the globe, funding insurgencies and civil wars, blocking every American plan in the United Nations. Now they are more integrated into the global economy and society than at any point in at least 100 years. They occupy an uncomfortable gray zone, neither friends nor foes, cooperating with the United States and the West on some issues, obstructing others. But how large is their potential for trouble? Russia's military spending is $35 billion, or 1/20th of the Pentagon's. China has about 20 nuclear missiles that can reach the United States. We have 830 missiles, most with multiple warheads, that can reach China. Who should be worried about whom? Other rising autocracies like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are close U.S. allies that shelter under America's military protection, buy its weapons, invest in its companies, and follow many of its diktats. With Iran's ambitions growing in the region, these countries are likely to become even closer allies, unless America gratuitously alienates them.

II. The Good News
In July 2006, I spoke with a senior member of the Israeli government, a few days after Israel's war with Hezbollah had ended. He was genuinely worried about his country's physical security. Hezbollah's rockets had reached farther into Israel than people had believed possible. The military response had clearly been ineffectual: Hezbollah launched as many rockets on the last day of the war as on the first. Then I asked him about the economy—the area in which he worked. His response was striking. "That's puzzled all of us," he said. "The stock market was higher on the last day of the war than on the first! The same with the shekel." The government was spooked, but the market wasn't.

Or consider the Iraq War, which has produced deep, lasting chaos and dysfunction in that country. Over two million refugees have crowded into neighboring lands. That would seem to be the kind of political crisis guaranteed to spill over. But as I've traveled in the Middle East over the last few years, I've been struck by how little Iraq's troubles have destabilized the region. Everywhere you go, people angrily denounce American foreign policy. But most Middle Eastern countries are booming. Iraq's neighbors—Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia—are enjoying unprecedented prosperity. The Gulf states are busy modernizing their economies and societies, asking the Louvre, New York University, and Cornell Medical School to set up remote branches in the desert. There's little evidence of chaos, instability, and rampant Islamic fundamentalism.

The underlying reality across the globe is of enormous vitality. For the first time ever, most countries around the world are practicing sensible economics. Consider inflation. Over the past 20 years hyperinflation, a problem that used to bedevil large swaths of the world from Turkey to Brazil to Indonesia, has largely vanished, tamed by successful fiscal and monetary policies. The results are clear and stunning. The share of people living on $1 a day has plummeted from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent in 2004 and is estimated to drop to 12 percent by 2015. Poverty is falling in countries that house 80 percent of the world's population. There remains real poverty in the world—most worryingly in 50 basket-case countries that contain 1 billion people—but the overall trend has never been more encouraging. The global economy has more than doubled in size over the last 15 years and is now approaching $54 trillion! Global trade has grown by 133 percent in the same period. The expansion of the global economic pie has been so large, with so many countries participating, that it has become the dominating force of the current era. Wars, terrorism, and civil strife cause disruptions temporarily but eventually they are overwhelmed by the waves of globalization. These circumstances may not last, but it is worth understanding what the world has looked like for the past few decades.

III. A New Nationalism
Of course, global growth is also responsible for some of the biggest problems in the world right now. It has produced tons of money—what businesspeople call liquidity—that moves around the world. The combination of low inflation and lots of cash has meant low interest rates, which in turn have made people act greedily and/or stupidly. So we have witnessed over the last two decades a series of bubbles—in East Asian countries, technology stocks, housing, subprime mortgages, and emerging market equities. Growth also explains one of the signature events of our times—soaring commodity prices. $100 oil is just the tip of the barrel. Almost all commodities are at 200-year highs. Food, only a few decades ago in danger of price collapse, is now in the midst of a scary rise. None of this is due to dramatic fall-offs in supply. It is demand, growing global demand, that is fueling these prices. The effect of more and more people eating, drinking, washing, driving, and consuming will have seismic effects on the global system. These may be high-quality problems, but they are deep problems nonetheless.

The most immediate effect of global growth is the appearance of new economic powerhouses on the scene. It is an accident of history that for the last several centuries, the richest countries in the world have all been very small in terms of population. Denmark has 5.5 million people, the Netherlands has 16.6 million. The United States is the biggest of the bunch and has dominated the advanced industrial world. But the real giants—China, India, Brazil—have been sleeping, unable or unwilling to join the world of functioning economies. Now they are on the move and naturally, given their size, they will have a large footprint on the map of the future. Even if people in these countries remain relatively poor, as nations their total wealth will be massive. Or to put it another way, any number, no matter how small, when multiplied by 2.5 billion becomes a very big number. (2.5 billion is the population of China plus India.)

The rise of China and India is really just the most obvious manifestation of a rising world. In dozens of big countries, one can see the same set of forces at work—a growing economy, a resurgent society, a vibrant culture, and a rising sense of national pride. That pride can morph into something uglier. For me, this was vividly illustrated a few years ago when I was chatting with a young Chinese executive in an Internet café in Shanghai. He wore Western clothes, spoke fluent English, and was immersed in global pop culture. He was a product of globalization and spoke its language of bridge building and cosmopolitan values. At least, he did so until we began talking about Taiwan, Japan, and even the United States. (We did not discuss Tibet, but I'm sure had we done so, I could have added it to this list.) His responses were filled with passion, bellicosity, and intolerance. I felt as if I were in Germany in 1910, speaking to a young German professional, who would have been equally modern and yet also a staunch nationalist.

As economic fortunes rise, so inevitably does nationalism. Imagine that your country has been poor and marginal for centuries. Finally, things turn around and it becomes a symbol of economic progress and success. You would be proud, and anxious that your people win recognition and respect throughout the world.

In many countries such nationalism arises from a pent-up frustration over having to accept an entirely Western, or American, narrative of world history—one in which they are miscast or remain bit players. Russians have long chafed over the manner in which Western countries remember World War II. The American narrative is one in which the United States and Britain heroically defeat the forces of fascism. The Normandy landings are the climactic highpoint of the war—the beginning of the end. The Russians point out, however, that in fact the entire Western front was a sideshow. Three quarters of all German forces were engaged on the Eastern front fighting Russian troops, and Germany suffered 70 percent of its casualties there. The Eastern front involved more land combat than all other theaters of World War II put together.

Such divergent national perspectives always existed. But today, thanks to the information revolution, they are amplified, echoed, and disseminated. Where once there were only the narratives laid out by The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the BBC, and CNN, there are now dozens of indigenous networks and channels—from Al Jazeera to New Delhi's NDTV to Latin America's Telesur. The result is that the "rest" are now dissecting the assumptions and narratives of the West and providing alternative views. A young Chinese diplomat told me in 2006, "When you tell us that we support a dictatorship in Sudan to have access to its oil, what I want to say is, 'And how is that different from your support of a medieval monarchy in Saudi Arabia?' We see the hypocrisy, we just don't say anything—yet."

The fact that newly rising nations are more strongly asserting their ideas and interests is inevitable in a post-American world. This raises a conundrum—how to get a world of many actors to work together. The traditional mechanisms of international cooperation are fraying. The U.N. Security Council has as its permanent members the victors of a war that ended more than 60 years ago. The G8 does not include China, India or Brazil—the three fastest-growing large economies in the world—and yet claims to represent the movers and shakers of the world economy. By tradition, the IMF is always headed by a European and the World Bank by an American. This "tradition," like the segregated customs of an old country club, might be charming to an insider. But to the majority who live outside the West, it seems bigoted. Our challenge is this: Whether the problem is a trade dispute or a human rights tragedy like Darfur or climate change, the only solutions that will work are those involving many nations. But arriving at solutions when more countries and more non-governmental players are feeling empowered will be harder than ever.

IV. The Next American Century
Many look at the vitality of this emerging world and conclude that the United States has had its day. "Globalization is striking back," Gabor Steingart, an editor at Germany's leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, writes in a best-selling book. As others prosper, he argues, the United States has lost key industries, its people have stopped saving money, and its government has become increasingly indebted to Asian central banks. The current financial crisis has only given greater force to such fears.

But take a step back. Over the last 20 years, globalization has been gaining depth and breadth. America has benefited massively from these trends. It has enjoyed unusually robust growth, low unemployment and inflation, and received hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. These are not signs of economic collapse. Its companies have entered new countries and industries with great success, using global supply chains and technology to stay in the vanguard of efficiency. U.S. exports and manufacturing have actually held their ground and services have boomed.

The United States is currently ranked as the globe's most competitive economy by the World Economic Forum. It remains dominant in many industries of the future like nanotechnology, biotechnology, and dozens of smaller high-tech fields. Its universities are the finest in the world, making up 8 of the top ten and 37 of the top fifty, according to a prominent ranking produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A few years ago the National Science Foundation put out a scary and much-discussed statistic. In 2004, the group said, 950,000 engineers graduated from China and India, while only 70,000 graduated from the United States. But those numbers are wildly off the mark. If you exclude the car mechanics and repairmen—who are all counted as engineers in Chinese and Indian statistics—the numbers look quite different. Per capita, it turns out, the United States trains more engineers than either of the Asian giants.

But America's hidden secret is that most of these engineers are immigrants. Foreign students and immigrants account for almost 50 percent of all science researchers in the country. In 2006 they received 40 percent of all PhDs. By 2010, 75 percent of all science PhDs in this country will be awarded to foreign students. When these graduates settle in the country, they create economic opportunity. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or first generation American. The potential for a new burst of American productivity depends not on our education system or R&D spending, but on our immigration policies. If these people are allowed and encouraged to stay, then innovation will happen here. If they leave, they'll take it with them.

More broadly, this is America's great—and potentially insurmountable—strength. It remains the most open, flexible society in the world, able to absorb other people, cultures, ideas, goods, and services. The country thrives on the hunger and energy of poor immigrants. Faced with the new technologies of foreign companies, or growing markets overseas, it adapts and adjusts. When you compare this dynamism with the closed and hierarchical nations that were once superpowers, you sense that the United States is different and may not fall into the trap of becoming rich, and fat, and lazy.

American society can adapt to this new world. But can the American government? Washington has gotten used to a world in which all roads led to its doorstep. America has rarely had to worry about benchmarking to the rest of the world—it was always so far ahead. But the natives have gotten good at capitalism and the gap is narrowing. Look at the rise of London. It's now the world's leading financial center—less because of things that the United States did badly than those London did well, like improving regulation and becoming friendlier to foreign capital. Or take the U.S. health care system, which has become a huge liability for American companies. U.S. carmakers now employ more people in Ontario, Canada, than Michigan because in Canada their health care costs are lower. Twenty years ago, the United States had the lowest corporate taxes in the world. Today they are the second-highest. It's not that ours went up. Those of others went down.

American parochialism is particularly evident in foreign policy. Economically, as other countries grow, for the most part the pie expands and everyone wins. But geopolitics is a struggle for influence: as other nations become more active internationally, they will seek greater freedom of action. This necessarily means that America's unimpeded influence will decline. But if the world that's being created has more power centers, nearly all are invested in order, stability and progress. Rather than narrowly obsessing about our own short-term interests and interest groups, our chief priority should be to bring these rising forces into the global system, to integrate them so that they in turn broaden and deepen global economic, political, and cultural ties. If China, India, Russia, Brazil all feel that they have a stake in the existing global order, there will be less danger of war, depression, panics, and breakdowns. There will be lots of problems, crisis, and tensions, but they will occur against a backdrop of systemic stability. This benefits them but also us. It's the ultimate win-win.

To bring others into this world, the United States needs to make its own commitment to the system clear. So far, America has been able to have it both ways. It is the global rule-maker but doesn't always play by the rules. And forget about standards created by others. Only three countries in the world don't use the metric system—Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States. For America to continue to lead the world, we will have to first join it.

Americans—particularly the American government—have not really understood the rise of the rest. This is one of the most thrilling stories in history. Billions of people are escaping from abject poverty. The world will be enriched and ennobled as they become consumers, producers, inventors, thinkers, dreamers, and doers. This is all happening because of American ideas and actions. For 60 years, the United States has pushed countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. American diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals have urged people in distant lands to be unafraid of change, to join the advanced world, to learn the secrets of our success. Yet just as they are beginning to do so, we are losing faith in such ideas. We have become suspicious of trade, openness, immigration, and investment because now it's not Americans going abroad but foreigners coming to America. Just as the world is opening up, we are closing down.

Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that by the turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its great, historical mission—globalizing the world. We don't want them to write that along the way, we forgot to globalize ourselves.

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

2008-02-25T17:10:00.000-08:00

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
By Chris Anderson Email 02.25.08 | 12:00 AM

Webmail Windfall
How Can Air Travel Be Free?
How Can a CD Be Free?
How Can a DVR Be Free?
How Can Directory Assitance Be Free?
How-To Wiki
How To Make Money Around Free Content

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

One day, while he was shaving with a straight razor that was so worn it could no longer be sharpened, the idea came to him. What if the blade could be made of a thin metal strip? Rather than spending time maintaining the blades, men could simply discard them when they became dull. A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable-blade safety razor was born. But it didn't take off immediately. In its first year, 1903, Gillette sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits ("shave and save" campaigns). Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley's gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.

Chris Anderson discusses "Free."
Video produced by Annaliza Savage and edited by Michael Lennon.

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything "free" was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You'd get one thing free if you bought another, or you'd get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)

You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be "really special ... and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive." This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand's original aphorism from 1984: "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away.")

Scenario 1: Low-cost digital distribution will make the summer blockbuster free. Theaters will make their money from concessions — and by selling the premium moviegoing experience at a high price.

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

But tell that to the poor CIO who just shelled out six figures to buy another rack of servers. Technology sure doesn't feel free when you're buying it by the gross. Yet if you look at it from the other side of the fat pipe, the economics change. That expensive bank of hard drives (fixed costs) can serve tens of thousands of users (marginal costs). The Web is all about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources, spreading those costs over larger and larger audiences as the technology gets more and more capable. It's not about the cost of the equipment in the racks at the data center; it's about what that equipment can do. And every year, like some sort of magic clockwork, it does more and more for less and less, bringing the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume closer to zero.
Photo Illustration: Jeff Mermelstein

As much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we're surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper. Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it's obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Even cocaine has pretty much never been cheaper (globalization works in mysterious ways).

Digital technology benefits from these dynamics and from something else even more powerful: the 20th-century shift from Newtonian to quantum machines. We're still just beginning to exploit atomic-scale effects in revolutionary new materials — semiconductors (processing power), ferromagnetic compounds (storage), and fiber optics (bandwidth). In the arc of history, all three substances are still new, and we have a lot to learn about them. We are just a few decades into the discovery of a new world.

What does this mean for the notion of free? Well, just take one example. Last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage. Just in case that wasn't totally clear, that's "unlimited" as in "infinite." So the market price of online storage, at least for email, has now fallen to zero (see "Webmail Windfall"). And the stunning thing is that nobody was surprised; many had assumed infinite free storage was already the case.

For good reason: It's now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There's never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.

One of the old jokes from the late-'90s bubble was that there are only two numbers on the Internet: infinity and zero. The first, at least as it applied to stock market valuations, proved false. But the second is alive and well. The Web has become the land of the free.

The result is that we now have not one but two trends driving the spread of free business models across the economy. The first is the extension of King Gillette's cross-subsidy to more and more industries. Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set. Ryanair, for instance, has disrupted its industry by defining itself more as a full-service travel agency than a seller of airline seats (see "How Can Air Travel Be Free?").

The second trend is simply that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs. There's nothing new about technology's deflationary force, but what is new is the speed at which industries of all sorts are becoming digital businesses and thus able to exploit those economics. When Google turned advertising into a software application, a classic services business formerly based on human economics (things get more expensive each year) switched to software economics (things get cheaper). So, too, for everything from banking to gambling. The moment a company's primary expenses become things based in silicon, free becomes not just an option but the inevitable destination.

WASTE AND WASTE AGAIN
Forty years ago, Caltech professor Carver Mead identified the corollary to Moore's law of ever-increasing computing power. Every 18 months, Mead observed, the price of a transistor would halve. And so it did, going from tens of dollars in the 1960s to approximately 0.000001 cent today for each of the transistors in Intel's latest quad-core. This, Mead realized, meant that we should start to "waste" transistors.

Scenario 2: Ads on the subway? That's so 20th century. By sponsoring the whole line and making trips free, the local merchants association brings grateful commuters to neighborhood shops.

Waste is a dirty word, and that was especially true in the IT world of the 1970s. An entire generation of computer professionals had been taught that their job was to dole out expensive computer resources sparingly. In the glass-walled facilities of the mainframe era, these systems operators exercised their power by choosing whose programs should be allowed to run on the costly computing machines. Their role was to conserve transistors, and they not only decided what was worthy but also encouraged programmers to make the most economical use of their computer time. As a result, early developers devoted as much code as possible to running their core algorithms efficiently and gave little thought to user interface. This was the era of the command line, and the only conceivable reason someone might have wanted to use a computer at home was to organize recipe files. In fact, the world's first personal computer, a stylish kitchen appliance offered by Honeywell in 1969, came with integrated counter space.
Photo Illustration: Jeff Mermelstein

And here was Mead, telling programmers to embrace waste. They scratched their heads — how do you waste computer power? It took Alan Kay, an engineer working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, to show them. Rather than conserve transistors for core processing functions, he developed a computer concept — the Dynabook — that would frivolously deploy silicon to do silly things: draw icons, windows, pointers, and even animations on the screen. The purpose of this profligate eye candy? Ease of use for regular folks, including children. Kay's work on the graphical user interface became the inspiration for the Xerox Alto, and then the Apple Macintosh, which changed the world by opening computing to the rest of us. (We, in turn, found no shortage of things to do with it; tellingly, organizing recipes was not high on the list.)

Of course, computers were not free then, and they are not free today. But what Mead and Kay understood was that the transistors in them — the atomic units of computation — would become so numerous that on an individual basis, they'd be close enough to costless that they might as well be free. That meant software writers, liberated from worrying about scarce computational resources like memory and CPU cycles, could become more and more ambitious, focusing on higher-order functions such as user interfaces and new markets such as entertainment. And that meant software of broader appeal, which brought in more users, who in turn found even more uses for computers. Thanks to that wasteful throwing of transistors against the wall, the world was changed.

What's interesting is that transistors (or storage, or bandwidth) don't have to be completely free to invoke this effect. At a certain point, they're cheap enough to be safely disregarded. The Greek philosopher Zeno wrestled with this concept in a slightly different context. In Zeno's dichotomy paradox, you run toward a wall. As you run, you halve the distance to the wall, then halve it again, and so on. But if you continue to subdivide space forever, how can you ever actually reach the wall? (The answer is that you can't: Once you're within a few nanometers, atomic repulsion forces become too strong for you to get any closer.)

In economics, the parallel is this: If the unitary cost of technology ("per megabyte" or "per megabit per second" or "per thousand floating-point operations per second") is halving every 18 months, when does it come close enough to zero to say that you've arrived and can safely round down to nothing? The answer: almost always sooner than you think.

What Mead understood is that a psychological switch should flip as things head toward zero. Even though they may never become entirely free, as the price drops there is great advantage to be had in treating them as if they were free. Not too cheap to meter, as Atomic Energy Commission chief Lewis Strauss said in a different context, but too cheap to matter. Indeed, the history of technological innovation has been marked by people spotting such price and performance trends and getting ahead of them.

From the consumer's perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you're in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of "free" is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.

This difference between cheap and free is what venture capitalist Josh Kopelman calls the "penny gap." People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all.

The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't show up on your credit card. It's why modern Web companies don't charge their users anything. And it's why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first.

Traditionalists wring their hands about the "vaporization of value" and "demonetization" of entire industries. The success of craigslist's free listings, for instance, has hurt the newspaper classified ad business. But that lost newspaper revenue is certainly not ending up in the craigslist coffers. In 2006, the site earned an estimated $40 million from the few things it charges for. That's about 12 percent of the $326 million by which classified ad revenue declined that year.

But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they're distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You're probably experiencing it right now. It's the basis of virtually all media.

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is "free to air," and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don't charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They're not selling papers and magazines to readers, they're selling readers to advertisers. It's a three-way market.

In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts. This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, "value-added" subscriptions, and direct ecommerce (see wired.com/extras for a complete list). Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.

A TAXONOMY OF FREE
Between new ways companies have found to subsidize products and the falling cost of doing business in a digital age, the opportunities to adopt a free business model of some sort have never been greater. But which one? And how many are there? Probably hundreds, but the priceless economy can be broken down into six broad categories:

· "Freemium"
What's free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version.

This term, coined by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, is the basis of the subscription model of media and is one of the most common Web business models. It can take a range of forms: varying tiers of content, from free to expensive, or a premium "pro" version of some site or software with more features than the free version (think Flickr and the $25-a-year Flickr Pro).

Again, this sounds familiar. Isn't it just the free sample model found everywhere from perfume counters to street corners? Yes, but with a pretty significant twist. The traditional free sample is the promotional candy bar handout or the diapers mailed to a new mother. Since these samples have real costs, the manufacturer gives away only a tiny quantity — hoping to hook consumers and stimulate demand for many more.
Photo Illustration: Jeff Mermelstein

But for digital products, this ratio of free to paid is reversed. A typical online site follows the 1 Percent Rule — 1 percent of users support all the rest. In the freemium model, that means for every user who pays for the premium version of the site, 99 others get the basic free version. The reason this works is that the cost of serving the 99 percent is close enough to zero to call it nothing.

· Advertising
What's free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone.

Broadcast commercials and print display ads have given way to a blizzard of new Web-based ad formats: Yahoo's pay-per-pageview banners, Google's pay-per-click text ads, Amazon's pay-per-transaction "affiliate ads," and site sponsorships were just the start. Then came the next wave: paid inclusion in search results, paid listing in information services, and lead generation, where a third party pays for the names of people interested in a certain subject. Now companies are trying everything from product placement (PayPerPost) to pay-per-connection on social networks like Facebook. All of these approaches are based on the principle that free offerings build audiences with distinct interests and expressed needs that advertisers will pay to reach.

· Cross-subsidies
What's free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another.

Scenario 3: It's a free second-gen Wiii! But only if you buy the deluxe version of Rock Band.

When Wal-Mart charges $15 for a new hit DVD, it's a loss leader. The company is offering the DVD below cost to lure you into the store, where it hopes to sell you a washing machine at a profit. Expensive wine subsidizes food in a restaurant, and the original "free lunch" was a gratis meal for anyone who ordered at least one beer in San Francisco saloons in the late 1800s. In any package of products and services, from banking to mobile calling plans, the price of each individual component is often determined by psychology, not cost. Your cell phone company may not make money on your monthly minutes — it keeps that fee low because it knows that's the first thing you look at when picking a carrier — but your monthly voicemail fee is pure profit.

On a busy corner in São Paulo, Brazil, street vendors pitch the latest "tecnobrega" CDs, including one by a hot band called Banda Calypso. Like CDs from most street vendors, these did not come from a record label. But neither are they illicit. They came directly from the band. Calypso distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns it plans to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. That's OK, because selling discs isn't Calypso's main source of income. The band is really in the performance business — and business is good. Traveling from town to town this way, preceded by a wave of supercheap CDs, Calypso has filled its shows and paid for a private jet.

The vendors generate literal street cred in each town Calypso visits, and its omnipresence in the urban soundscape means that it gets huge crowds to its rave/dj/concert events. Free music is just publicity for a far more lucrative tour business. Nobody thinks of this as piracy.

· Zero marginal cost
What's free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.

This describes nothing so well as online music. Between digital reproduction and peer-to-peer distribution, the real cost of distributing music has truly hit bottom. This is a case where the product has become free because of sheer economic gravity, with or without a business model. That force is so powerful that laws, guilt trips, DRM, and every other barrier to piracy the labels can think of have failed. Some artists give away their music online as a way of marketing concerts, merchandise, licensing, and other paid fare. But others have simply accepted that, for them, music is not a moneymaking business. It's something they do for other reasons, from fun to creative expression. Which, of course, has always been true for most musicians anyway.

· Labor exchange
What's free: Web sites and services. Free to whom: all users, since the act of using these sites and services actually creates something of value.

You can get free porn if you solve a few captchas, those scrambled text boxes used to block bots. What you're actually doing is giving answers to a bot used by spammers to gain access to other sites — which is worth more to them than the bandwidth you'll consume browsing images. Likewise for rating stories on Digg, voting on Yahoo Answers, or using Google's 411 service (see "How Can Directory Assistance Be Free?"). In each case, the act of using the service creates something of value, either improving the service itself or creating information that can be useful somewhere else.

· Gift economy
What's free: the whole enchilada, be it open source software or user-generated content. Free to whom: everyone.

From Freecycle (free secondhand goods for anyone who will take them away) to Wikipedia, we are discovering that money isn't the only motivator. Altruism has always existed, but the Web gives it a platform where the actions of individuals can have global impact. In a sense, zero-cost distribution has turned sharing into an industry. In the monetary economy it all looks free — indeed, in the monetary economy it looks like unfair competition — but that says more about our shortsighted ways of measuring value than it does about the worth of what's created.

THE ECONOMICS OF ABUNDANCE
Enabled by the miracle of abundance, digital economics has turned traditional economics upside down. Read your college textbook and it's likely to define economics as "the social science of choice under scarcity." The entire field is built on studying trade-offs and how they're made. Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that "there's no such thing as a free lunch.

"But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn't necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you'll pay for it later — it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab. Second, in the digital realm, as we've seen, the main feedstocks of the information economy — storage, processing power, and bandwidth — are getting cheaper by the day. Two of the main scarcity functions of traditional economics — the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution — are rushing headlong to zip. It's as if the restaurant suddenly didn't have to pay any food or labor costs for that lunch.

Surely economics has something to say about that?

It does. The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we've always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The "attention economy" and "reputation economy" are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there's something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

FREE CHANGES EVERYTHING
Between digital economics and the wholesale embrace of King's Gillette's experiment in price shifting, we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly. How big a deal is that? Well, consider this analogy: In 1954, at the dawn of nuclear power, Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, promised that we were entering an age when electricity would be "too cheap to meter." Needless to say, that didn't happen, mostly because the risks of nuclear energy hugely increased its costs. But what if he'd been right? What if electricity had in fact become virtually free?The answer is that everything electricity touched — which is to say just about everything — would have been transformed. Rather than balance electricity against other energy sources, we'd use electricity for as many things as we could — we'd waste it, in fact, because it would be too cheap to worry about.

All buildings would be electrically heated, never mind the thermal conversion rate. We'd all be driving electric cars (free electricity would be incentive enough to develop the efficient battery technology to store it). Massive desalination plants would turn seawater into all the freshwater anyone could want, irrigating vast inland swaths and turning deserts into fertile acres, many of them making biofuels as a cheaper store of energy than batteries. Relative to free electrons, fossil fuels would be seen as ludicrously expensive and dirty, and so carbon emissions would plummet. The phrase "global warming" would have never entered the language.

Today it's digital technologies, not electricity, that have become too cheap to meter. It took decades to shake off the assumption that computing was supposed to be rationed for the few, and we're only now starting to liberate bandwidth and storage from the same poverty of imagination. But a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want — and free, increasingly, is what you're going to get.

Southern California Water Crisis

2008-02-24T10:09:00.000-08:00

From the San Diego Union tribune
Sunday, February 24, 2008

When the well goes dry

Southern California's water crisis

By Cary Lowe
February 24, 2008

“We'll never know the worth of water until the well goes dry.”

– Scottish proverb.

The announcement by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California that it soon may need to slash water deliveries to dozens of local water agencies and their 18 million residential customers took many by surprise. It shouldn't have. This is only the latest in a series of warnings of an impending crisis in our region's water supply. The agency previously announced a 30 percent cutback in agricultural water deliveries and indicated that mandatory urban water rationing soon may be required.

It was not always so. For nearly a century, readily available, low-cost water – brought to us over long distances through a massive system of canals, pipelines and pumps – has been the fuel that powered the engine of growth in Southern California.

That is changing, and rapidly. Even as population and demand for water continue to increase, the supply is being constrained on several fronts. California's share of Colorado River water already has been slashed, as other states have asserted their rights under a 1922 treaty. At the same time, river flows throughout the region are being reduced drastically by long-term drought and diminished mountain snow pack, at least partially attributable to global warming. Moreover, water available from the Sacramento River Delta, the source for the big state and federal aqueducts bringing water south, is expected to be reduced by as much as a third beginning this year under a court order aimed at protecting an endangered fish species, and the state Department of Water

Resources forecasts declining supply every year for the next two decades. As a result of all these trends, reservoirs throughout the state are at dangerously low levels. Occasional rainy periods create an illusion that the crisis has passed, but the overall trend is disastrous.

Not only is there less water available, but the cost of building new facilities and the cost of energy to move water from its distant sources both are increasingly dramatically. With Southern California dependent on outside sources for more than half of its water, the picture is bleak overall. It is particularly bleak for San Diego, which still relies on imported water to meet about three-fourths of its needs.

Political conflicts stand in the way of any large-scale remedies. The governor and the Legislature have been unable to agree on priorities for a major state bond issue to fund new water facilities. The Democratic leadership wants greater emphasis on conservation and local groundwater storage, while the Republicans favor new dams and state-level reservoirs. Both groups now are pursuing statewide initiatives, but there is no assurance the voters will authorize any new borrowing by the state.

When the pie is shrinking, not all appetites will be satisfied. In the absence of decisive action, conflict will increase – between the northern and southern parts of the state, between urban and rural communities, and between residential and agricultural water users. Already, uncertainty over long-term water supply is being used by environmental groups as a basis for challenging new development approvals. The state Supreme Court recently affirmed such a challenge to a new planned community in Northern California. There also is an international dimension to this competition, as Mexico is protesting both the minuscule Colorado River flows that it receives and actions by local water agencies in California to reduce leakage from canals along the border.

It is not necessary to wait for a comprehensive, state-level solution. There is much that can be done immediately at the local level:

Agriculture still consumes far more water than all other uses combined, and has the greatest opportunity for savings, through more efficient irrigation systems and a movement away from lower-value, water-intensive crops such as alfalfa and cotton. In some areas, agricultural water suppliers have rights far in excess of what they need, and can sell surplus water for urban use, as in the arrangement between the Imperial Irrigation District and the San Diego County Water Authority. Farmers also can be paid to take land out of production where water use is excessive, as MWD has done in some desert areas.

There are huge savings possible in domestic water use, especially with half of that currently going merely to irrigate landscaping. Shifting to drought-tolerant landscaping, using more efficient irrigation systems and mandating low-flow plumbing fixtures and appliances could reduce consumption by as much as one-third very quickly. Such measures would need to be mandated, as voluntary programs in Los Angeles, San Diego and other cities have not garnered significant public cooperation.

Storage needs to be increased to capture available runoff. MWD and local agencies have built up appreciable reserves, but those will be consumed rapidly if drought conditions persist. Meanwhile, most rain and snowmelt still run into the ocean. Without waiting for construction of new reservoirs, local water agencies can significantly boost their use of groundwater storage.

Used water needs to be recycled. Despite the controversy it has generated in San Diego and some other jurisdictions, treated wastewater is the most readily available source of additional supply, as agencies such as the Orange County Water District already are demonstrating. Opponents should remember that much of the current water supply previously passed through sinks, toilets and storm drains in other regions before being transported here and treated for domestic use. At the very least, recycled water can replace potable water now being used on landscaping.

Desalinization and other new technologies need to be explored. They remain controversial, due to both environmental and cost concerns, but it is hard to imagine solving the current dilemma without including this option.

New development needs to be tied more closely to local availability of water. There already are some state requirements in that regard, but local water agencies will have to be more restrained in providing the required certifications of available long-term supply for large new projects.

All of this will require a significant change in consciousness on the part of the public. State and local officials know what needs to be done, but fear a political backlash from telling voters they can't have what they are accustomed to getting, or that it will cost more. This is a historic opportunity for the governor, the Legislature and a myriad of other officials to demonstrate real leadership and come to an accommodation on a comprehensive program of water conservation, supply and infrastructure. At long last, it is time to reverse Mark Twain's famous dictum, that “Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lowe is a San Diego-based lawyer and land-use consultant.

Picking a College Major - Don't Forget Outsourcing As A Consideration

2008-02-24T10:05:00.000-08:00

From Time Magazine
2-14-2008

The Force is definitely with Travis Ho. Like millions of computer-science students before him, the 19-year-old Singaporean's lifelong fantasy has been to work for Lucasfilm, the empire launched 30 years ago by George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars. Ho, however, did not have to journey to a galaxy far, far away; Lucasfilm came looking for him.

Eighteen months ago, the digital-art powerhouse launched its first overseas studio in Singapore. The 170 employees come from 33 nations, and together they make sure that Luke Skywalker's animated cloak swings naturally in the TV series Clone Wars and that Jackie Chan slides effortlessly down the Eiffel Tower in Rush Hour 3. Like their colleagues back at Lucasfilm's San Francisco headquarters, the Singapore crew members work in jeans and decorate their cubicles with their favorite Star Wars action figures. But while years of experience and Yoda-level technical skill are prerequisites for joining Lucasfilm's U.S. team, the developers and animators in Singapore were hired less for their résumés than for their artistic eye. Students like Ho at Asian universities are its top potential recruits. "Our experiment is to take the most talented, passionate artists we can find and give them the necessary technical know-how," says Gail Currey, vice president and general manager of Lucasfilm Animation. The company's goal is to turn Singapore into a base for a new style of animation that combines East and West and could serve as a template for other U.S. studios expanding abroad.

Lucasfilm is the first major production studio to set up shop in Asia, but competitors are right behind it. For years Hollywood has cut costs by outsourcing post-production--the editing, sound mixing and special effects that turn raw film into a blockbuster movie--to overseas firms. More than 90% of the animation for American films and television shows is processed in Asia, mainly in Japan and South Korea. Now, however, the $100 billion animation industry is rushing to tap the deep pools of young, well-trained artists in countries such as Singapore, China, India, South Korea and the Philippines.

That young Asian talent forms the core of Lucasfilm's Singapore team. Ian Pang, 29 and Singaporean, studied Japanese thinking he would one day have to move to Japan to design video games. "I thought I was going to have to pack my bags; Singapore had no games industry," Pang says. Instead, he now produces the latest Star Wars handheld game from Lucasfilm's 40,000 sq.-ft. (3,700 sq m) office space near Singapore's Changi Airport. Ho, the computer-science student, says he struggled to convince his parents that he could make a living in digital art and gaming. "Having Lucasfilm here really legitimizes the field as a career choice for Asians," Ho says. Not all of Lucasfilm's talent in Singapore is homegrown. Canadian Kalene Dunsmoor, 27, was designing motorcycle decals in Toronto when she sent her portfolio on a whim to a Lucasfilm recruiter. Now she works in Singapore, collaborating with Lucas' iconic special-effects shop Industrial Light & Magic to add computer-generated imagery to films including the Harry Potter and Indiana Jones series. "They were willing to take a chance even though I didn't have conventional experience," Dunsmoor says. "I was willing to travel far from home for that."

Lucasfilm didn't open its office in Singapore just to fulfill the dreams of a few dozen lucky young sci-fi fans. The company's desire to develop these workers into cross-disciplinary, creative thinkers will be crucial to its efforts to turn every Lucasfilm project into a multiplatform, multimedia event. Since arriving at Lucasfilm, both Pang and Dunsmoor have gotten intensive training in classical art, and their more experienced colleagues have helped them sharpen their technical knowledge. Those skills can be applied to any medium Lucasfilm works in, from feature films to TV animation to video games. "We keep talent by letting them work on all our projects, from games to movies to TV. Nobody else in this business gets to do that," says Micheline Chau, Lucasfilm's president and COO. Being able to create content across several disciplines, Chau adds, is "the new world order in entertainment."

It's also, of course, a cost-effective strategy for Hollywood. As paychecks for actors get higher every year, studios are putting more effort into developing films like 300, which proved that gorgeous digital effects can draw box-office numbers as big as any movie star. "It's not just the actors but also elaborate sets, huge [production] crews and worldwide marketing campaigns," says Vivek Cuoto, executive director of Hong Kong-based consultancy Media Partners Asia.

Animation is even cheaper when it's produced in Asia, but Lucasfilm executives deny that cost cutting brought them to the region. Still, the move has allowed them to experiment with new ideas--including its first animated TV show--and take chances on young talent without as much financial risk. The Singapore studio's less experienced artists demand lower salaries than their California counterparts, and Lucasfilm doesn't have to navigate U.S. immigration laws to hire them. And by making use of the 16-hr. time difference between Singapore and San Francisco, Lucasfilm has essentially doubled its productivity.

Lucasfilm's biggest competitor in animation, Disney, has so far limited its creative forays in Asia to teaming up with local companies, using a very different formula with some early success. In June, Disney released The Secret of the Magic Gourd, its first Mandarin-language film made for mainland China. But the movie was produced entirely by Hong Kong-based Centro Digital Pictures. Under Disney's watchful guidance, Centro adapted a classic Chinese bedtime tale, shooting and editing it into a 90-min. live-action feature. Disney then directed the film's marketing and distribution. The Magic Gourd became China's top-grossing children's film ever, generating $2 million in its first two weeks, says John Chu, Centro's founder, who oversaw the production. "It was a matter of finding a story that matched Disney's values but also resonated with every Chinese youngster."

Disney announced a similar alliance last June with India's Yash Raj Films, one of Bollywood's premier studios. The two companies will produce a series of computer-animated films in Hindi using nearly all local talent. Their first co-production, Roadside Romeo, is set for release later this year. "We believe that China, India and Russia are the main strategic markets from which our growth will come in the future," says Jo Yan, senior vice president of sales, co-productions and acquisitions for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Asia Pacific. "But at this point we're not arrogant enough to think that we know everything about these markets, so we believe working with key partners is the way to go."

Lucasfilm, on the other hand, believes that its team in Singapore will be an integral part of every film or video game it produces for every market--not just in Asia. "We've always concentrated on making sure our characters have global appeal," says Christian Kubsch, managing director of the Singapore studio. In fact, the company has made Singapore a key part of its strategy. Company execs see it as a launching point for building the brand in neighboring countries like China and India, two of its fastest-growing marketplaces. The Singapore studio will also spearhead Lucasfilm's first animated feature film this year, and its employees will soon make up at least one-third of Lucasfilm's staff.

Asia's fast-growing economies welcome the investment and are putting their resources into nurturing the digital-animation industry. Singapore hopes that by 2018, digital media will generate $10 billion a year, or about 5% of last year's GDP. India's animation sector has grown 50% over the past two years and is expected to attract $950 million in outsourcing contracts with Hollywood studios by next year. The number of animation departments in Chinese universities has quadrupled, to more than 400, over the past five years, and animation supports a nearly $2 billion industry. Thailand has sold popular television cartoon series to China and South Korea and hopes to export more than $2 billion worth of products by next year. Working with local universities to incorporate animation into curriculums, the Animation Council of the Philippines plans to have more than 25,000 digital artists by 2010.

Another, smaller player is the rogue communist state of North Korea. Under the patronage of leader Kim Jong Il, a movie buff, animation is one of the rare sectors in which North Korea is following the global trend. Animation houses from North America, Europe and Asia have all subcontracted work there. The state-owned SEK Studio last year paired up with South Korean animators to produce Empress Chung, a $6.5 million animated feature film based on a Korean Cinderella story.

The bane of any creative industry in Asia--intellectual property protection-- remains the most pressing concern for animation. Chu, who has worked in animation in Hong Kong for more than 20 years, has given up. "There's really nothing that can be done," he says. "The only hope is that someday our product is cheap enough that it's not affordable to counterfeit." Lucasfilm, on the other hand, chose to operate in Singapore because of the country's strict copyright laws and advanced legal system. "We feel comfortable that the infrastructure is in place to protect individual IP," says Kubsch.

For now, Lucasfilm's biggest challenge is snatching up the best talent within Singapore's burgeoning digital-arts community before rivals move in. In November, the studio launched the Jedi Masters Program, a two-year paid apprenticeship designed to attract Singaporean students like Travis Ho. Lucasfilm better move fast. Ho, who won't graduate for another two years, has already co-founded a small video-game development firm that has gotten government and foreign contracts. "It's a small operation," Ho says. "But we're doing pretty innovative stuff for beginners." It's no match for Lucasfilm yet, but who knows? The next George Lucas may be working for him in Singapore.

College Dorm Room Checklist - What to Bring to School

2007-08-26T15:58:00.001-07:00

CollegeBoard.com offers this checklist
Off-to-College Checklist
Print this checklist to make sure you have everything you need for your first year at college. Each person's needs are different, so tailor this list to suit your requirements.

Kitchen Needs
Plastic bowl and cup
Coffee cup
Fork, knife, spoon
Can/bottle opener
Chip clips
Room Needs/Storage
Bedside lamp
Alarm clock/clock radio
Wastepaper basket
Milk crates or other sturdy storage cubes (a collapsible crate also comes in handy for carrying laundry or other things)
Stacking baskets
Under-the-bed storage trays
Lots of hangers
Desk lamp
Fan
Drying rack
Adhesive hooks, tacky adhesive, and mounting tape
Bulletin board and push pins
Dry erase wall calendar/board
Toolkit
Electronics
Computer and printer
Phone cord/Ethernet cord for computer
Headphones
Surge protector
Extension cords
3-2 prong adapters
Phone (Check with roommate(s) to avoid duplication.) It should be cordless, with multiple message boxes in the answering machine, unless you're using voicemail.
Portable CD or cassette player (great to use at the gym)
Linens/Laundry Supplies
Sheets and pillowcases (2 sets. Check with school for size needed—some college twin beds are extra long.)
Towels (3 each of bath, hand, and face)
Pillows (2)
Headrest pillow
Mattress pad (Check with school for size needed—some college twin beds are extra long.)
Blankets (2)
Comforter and duvet cover (makes laundering easier)
Clothes hangers (wire takes up less space, plastic are easier on your clothes)
Laundry bag/basket
Laundry marking pen
Laundry stain remover
Roll(s) of quarters
Quarter dispenser
Lint brush
Sewing kit
Toiletries/Misc
Pepto-Bismol®
Imodium®
Aspirin or ibuprofen
Vitamin C
Neosporin®
Band-Aid® bandages
Cough drops
Shower tote
Shampoo & conditioner
Hair-styling products
Bath and face soap
Traveling-soap container(s)
Toothpaste and toothbrush
Dental floss
Comb/brush
Tweezers
Nail clippers
Hair dryer
Razor and shaving cream
Lotion and/or facial moisturizer
Q-tips®
Office/Desk Supplies
CD-ROMs/Memory Sticks
Phone/address book
Assignment book
Heavy-duty stapler and staples
Printer paper
Pens and pencils
Pencil holder and sharpener
Notebooks
Pocket folders
Labels of various sizes
3 x 5 cards
Post-it® notes
Paper clips
Rubber bands
Scissors
Highlighter pens (multiple colors)
Ruler
Stackable desk trays (at least 4)
Hanging files or folders
Dictionary and thesaurus
Stamps/envelopes
These Can Be Purchased Upon Arrival
Paper towels
Trash bags
Lightbulbs
All-purpose cleaner
Ziploc® bags
Kitchen storage containers
Laundry detergent (tablets are easiest to manage)
Fabric softener (sheets are easiest to manage)
Dish soap
Wet wipes
Tissues
Clothing Guidelines
21 pairs of underwear
21 pairs of socks (more if you play sports)
7 pairs of pants/jeans
14 shirts/blouses
2 sets of sweats
Pajamas
Slippers and/or flip-flops
2 sweaters (if appropriate)
Light/heavy jackets
Gloves/scarf/hat (if appropriate)
1 pair of boots
2 pairs of sneakers or comfortable/walking shoes
1 pair of dress shoes
1 set of business attire
1 set of semi-formal attire (optional)
Shared Items (Check with roommate(s) to avoid duplication.)
Audio equipment
TV and VCR/DVD player
Coffee maker/hot pot
Microwave/toaster oven
Small refrigerator
Area rug
Camera
Posters/art

CollegeView.com offers a list of what to bring for your college dorm room

What to Bring to College — Your Dorm Room Checklist
Before running out to the nearest store to purchase the items for your dorm room, it's a great idea to check out your college's Web site (more specifically their Office of Residence Life page). Frequently there will be a list of items that are not permitted on campus, sometimes including air conditioners, space heaters, pets, toasters, etc.

Also, be sure to contact your college roommate to decide who is bringing which items from your dorm room checklist. This lowers the possibility of a duplicate supply of items that may not fit in the small space of dorm room storage.

Here's a college dorm room checklist of essential items that you will want to bring:

Alarm clock
Bed linens/towels
Carpet/throw rug
Chair/bean bag
Clothes drying rack
Compact refrigerator
Computer
Cup/mug/glass/plate/bowl/silverware
Dish soap
Fan
Fish
Handi-Tak to hang posters
Hangers
Iron
Laundry bag
Laundry detergent
Medicine
Microwave (one cubic foot)
Plants (real or fake)
Radio/stereo
Rolls of quarters for laundry
School supplies
Sewing kit
Shower caddy
Telephone
Toiletry items/soap dish
TV/VCR/DVD player

MSNBC adds the following

1. Zip-loc bags
You never know when you might need a helpful container or two, and baggies can serve many purposes. Not only are they good for storing leftover slices of late-night pizza in your new mini-fridge, but they are also good for keeping other trinkets. For me, they have functioned as a place to save spare change for that upcoming spring break trip, and were tacked to the bulletin board to hold important receipts and coupons for the Chinese food joint down the street.

2. Sunblock
Just because school isn’t always a beach, doesn’t mean you won’t be spending much time in the sun. Football games involve long hours in sunlight reflecting stands. You never know when a random weekend road trip to a nearby lake, or the ocean, might pop up — and generally, professors aren’t too pleased when your excuse for missing that test is a second-degree sunburn.

3. Stamps
College will bring many things worth writing home about (and maybe some things you won’t want to write home about). You may also have to be more responsible for your own finances. Having stamps on hand helps you not procrastinate in paying bills, and just might ensure that you send out Grandma’s birthday card on time.

4. Plastic-ware
Let’s face it, you’ll probably be too busy with class, studying and social endeavors to do dishes. Save yourself the trouble and mess by having plastic utensils on hand. Same goes for paper plates. Just be sure to have at least one real set of silverware around for food that calls for something a tad more sturdy.

5. First aid kit
At some point during the year, you’re going to need a band-aid. Chances are it could be from wearing cute shoes while walking around campus all day or a severe paper cut from all the textbooks you’ll be reading. But nonetheless, a small kit with bandages and antibiotic ointment is guaranteed to be useful.

6. Batteries
Think about what other items you are bringing that run on batteries. Alarm clocks, digital cameras, remote controls and calculators will probably require them. AAs are always a good bet, but it doesn’t hurt to have a variety on hand.

7. Umbrella
I recommend getting a small umbrella that will easily fit into a pocket on your backpack. You never know when a downpour will catch you between classes, and sitting through a lecture soaking wet usually isn’t the best learning environment. One more tip — don’t leave it in the hallway to dry on a rainy day, or it will disappear like socks in the dryer.

8. Bucket
Not only are buckets good for holding all of your cleaning supplies to keep that dorm room nice and clean, they also work for other purposes. To put it nicely — if you aren’t feeling quite so well, and the room just won’t stop spinning — your bucket is probably a lot closer than the bathroom. Enough said.

The idea in packing for college is to bring everything you probably will need, and nothing you won’t. Space is limited, so sort through your belongings as well as possible. Be prepared, and remember that if you pick up the odds and ends before you get to school, chances are more likely that your parents will be buying.

LoHud Moms suggests this list
Products that help students stay organized:

1. Elfa Mesh Compact Fridge Cart, The Container Store. A cart on rollers with two storage units underneath. This provides a space for a mini-fridge with drawers for kitchen items. Available in white and platinum. $125.

2. MacBook laptop, Best Buy. A laptop is a must for college students, says Donna Youdin of Scarsdale, a junior at New York University. The MacBook is light and easy to carry around campus, says Youdin, who recently made the upgrade. The MacBook also features a built-in Web cam and DVD drive. $1,099 to 1,999.

3. Microfiber Shoe and Sweater Organizers, Bed Bath and Beyond. Maximize space by utilizing the vertical space in closets, says Vitris. These tan over-the-shelf hangers will get shoes and sweaters organized. $19.99 each, sold separately.

4. Storage Ottoman, JCPenney. Fun and functional, this square piece is a chair, table and storage unit all in one. It will add color to the room and offers 150 pounds of storage. $59.99.

5. Geometric Bulletin Board, top left, The Container Store. A great way to post notes, messages, menus and tickets, keeping them at easy reach. The board comes in either pink/orange or blue/green. Message board $14.99, pushpins $4.99.

6. Fabric Tote Boxes, left, The Container Store. Staying organized will keep you less stressed and more focused, says Vitris. This item can hold linens, school supplies, dishes and out-of-season clothes. The cute geometric designs also add flair to any dorm. $9.99-14.99.

7. Bed in a Bag, Linens 'n' Things. Get bold with purple and fuchsia bedding. The Bed in a Bag comes with towels and a throw rug. Davina Chesterton of Yonkers, a senior at SUNY Binghamton, suggests beginning with a favorite color for the room scheme, choose bedding and decorate the rest with matching accessories. $19.99-119.99.

8. Flower Pop and Graphic Lap Desk,The Container Store. Great for comfortable studying or typing on your laptop with a soft pillow underneath. Comes in polka dot, kaleidoscope and flower designs. $24.99.

9. Collapsible Hamper/Dorm Caddy, Target. This hamper is great for tight quarters. When empty, it collapses flat for easy storage. Soft handles make it easy to drag to the laundry room. $14.99.

10. Emerson 20-inch LCD television with DVD player and Digital Analog Tuner, Wal-Mart. Perfect for late-night studying or just watching a movie in your room. The Emerson has a built-in DVD player and speakers with surround-sound. $298

JustDorm suggests:
Dorm Room
Dorm Bedding
Bed sheets

Usually dorm mattresses are extra long twins and require specially fitted sheets
Pillows
Pillows can make the difference between a good or bad nights sleep so make sure you have a pillow that supports your head.
Blankets/comforter
Dorm rooms have regulated heating systems and most students find that one down comforter is sufficient so extra blankets are not usually needed.
Bathroom
Three piece towel set
Bath and hand towels as well as washcloths are necessities in any dorm life.
Toiletry bag
Most students share one bathroom between multiple people. There is not usually a place inside to keep your personal items. Toiletry bags can hold your personal items and can be carried in and out of the bathroom with you.
Shower shoes
Dormitories showers are a highly trafficked location and the shower floors can contain many germ. It is recommended for both guys and girls to wear shower shoes/sandals.
Storage/Organizational
Coat hangers
Closet space is usually provided with each room and hangers are an easy way to organinize
Dresser Drawers
Check with your college to see if they provide dressers and if they don't, look into light weight dressers that are easy to move.
Electronics
Alarm clock
Alarm clocks are a necessitie that shouldn't be overlooked. Waking up to just any type of beep can start the day off wrong. Radio alarm clocks can be a much less annoying way to start the day.
Extension Cords
There are usually only one or two power outlets for each room, so at least one small extension cord is a must.
Power strip
Along with extension cords, power strips are recommended because of limited outlets.
TV / VCR
Dormitories commonly provide a cable tv outlet to each room. A combination tv/vcr/dvd player is a great way to save space, and enjoy a break from studying.
Stereo
A compact cd player enhances any dorm rooms ambience. Over powerful stereos aren't recommended as the excessive noise capacity isn't usable.
Touch Tone Telephone
Telephones are not included in dorm rooms, however, one telephone line per room is provided by the university. Cordless phones are convenient however the signals can be interrupted by other cordless phone signals close by.

Lighting
Study desk lamp
Dorm rooms usually come with a ceiling light, however a small desk light is preferred for studying.
Candles
are not allowed in any dorm room as they are an extreme fire hazard.
Clip-on reading light
A small reading lamp that can be clipped to a bed post or shelf is useful for bedtime reading or studying, while keeping your roommate happy.
Other
Dry Erase Board

Mini refrigerators and microwave oven
Small or folding chair
Bike and Lock
Plants
Laundry basket or hamper
Laundry Detergent
Reusable/recyclable-utensils, plates and mugs
Iron /Ironing board

Apartment
Cleaning
Dish Soap
Broom/Dusk pan
Mop
Sponges
Dish drainer
Cooking and Eating
Plates/Cups/Bowls/Glasses
Forks, knives, spoons
Serving dishes
Cutting Board
Pots/Pans
Cookie Sheet
Can opener
Spatula
Tea kettle
Toaster/toaster oven
Microwave
Potato peeler
Kitchen Linen
Dish towels
Hot pads
Living Essentials
Light Bulbs
Toilet paper

Chinese Proverbs

2007-08-13T14:07:00.001-07:00

Chinese Proverbs

ANGER & WAR
* The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.
* He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them.
* The greatest victory, is the battle not fought.
* The best soldiers are not warlike.
* If you are patient in a moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
* I was angered, for I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.
* The more you sweat in Peacetime, The less you bleed during War.
* Of all the thirty-six alternatives, running away is best.
* A young branch takes on all the bends that one gives it.
* Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.
* One never needs their humor as much a when they argue with a fool.
* He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount.

LEARNING & WISDOM
* Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.
* To teach is to learn.
* A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood.
* The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
* The pine stays green in winter...Wisdom in hardship.
* Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot.
* If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.
* He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
* Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.
* Experience is a comb which nature gives to men when they are bald.
* With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.
* Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time.
* A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows the public opinion.
* The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water moulds itself to the pitcher.
* A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.
* When a finger points at the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.
* Take a second look... It costs you nothing.
* The tongue like a sharp knife...Kills without drawing blood.
* It is not the knowing that is difficult, but the doing.
* Laws control the lesser man... Right conduct controls the greater one.
* Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own.

RELATIONSHIPS, TEAMWORK & GOVERNMENT
* With money you are a dragon; with no money, a worm.
* Love your neighbors, but don't pull down the fence.
* Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come.
* Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think.
* Behind every able man, there are always other able men.
* If there is light in the soul, there will be beauty in the person.
* If there is beauty in the person, there will be harmony in the house.
* If there is harmony in the house, there will be order in the nation.
* If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.
* A needle is not sharp at both ends.
* Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.
* Never do anything standing that you can do sitting, or anything sitting that you can do lying down.
* If a man does only what is required of him, he is a slave. If a man does more than is required of him, he is a free man.
* Clear conscience never fears midnight knocking.
* If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of he game, the stakes, and the quitting time.
* Men in the game are blind to what men looking on see clearly.
* Govern a family as you would cook a small fish -- very gently.
* Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.
* A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make a home.
* A man without a smiling face must not open shop.
* To open a shop is easy, to keep it open is an art.
* Virtue never dwells alone; it always has neighbours.
* Small men think they are small; great men never know they are great.
* One man will carry two buckets of water for his own use,
* Two men will carry one for their joint use;
* Three men will carry none for anybody's use.

PLANNING & LUCK
* The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.
* The second best time, is today.
* If luck comes, who comes not? If luck comes not, who comes?
* If you want happiness for an hour--take a nap.
* If you want happiness for a day-- go fishing.
* If you want happiness for a month--get married.
* If you want happiness for a year--inherit a fortune.
* If you want happiness for a lifetime--help someone else.
* When planning for a year, plant corn.
* When planning for a decade, plant trees.
* When planning for life, train and educate people.
* If you want 1 year of prosperity, grow grain.
* If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees.
* If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people.
* It is not necessary to light a candle to the sun.
* Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
* Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still.
* The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying a way small stones.
* Climb mountains to see lowlands.
* A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
* When you want to test the depths of a stream, don't use both feet.
* Enough shovels of earth -- a mountain. Enough pails of water -- a river.
* Men trip not on mountains they trip on molehills.
* There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.
* Give a man a fish, and you feed him a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
* A dog in a kennel barks at his fleas; a dog hunting does not notice them.
* The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory.
* If you want to know your past - look into your present conditions. If you want to know your future - look into your present actions.

Words To Live By: “People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”

2007-08-08T09:01:00.000-07:00

You will meet many people who will naysay your ideas, actions or beliefs. Generally it is because they are too lazy or too dumb or too jealous or too closed-minded to fully grasp what you are doing.

Follow your heart, follow your mind and do the right thing.

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”
Chinese Proverb

Life Lessons

2007-07-17T22:57:00.000-07:00

Success recipes most people know, but too few follow

If you want to look back on a life that fills you with joy, conventional rules for success are not the place to start

Don’t chase money, power, or status.

If they come to you, that’s fine. But most conventional ideas about success go wrong because they focus on outcomes instead of on the processes of living. Outcomes come around from time to time, but life itself—the process of living, acting, thinking, and being—happens all the time. No outcome is going to make a lousy, miserable process feel worthwhile.

If you hate what you do, no amount of power or money will make up for that.
If your life is constantly stressful, boring, unhappy, or frustrating, how can achieving some high status once in a while make up for all the miserable days and weeks you spent getting there? It’s tempting to feel that the end will more than make up for the means; that you’ll forget the misery in the blaze of achievement. And you will—for a few moments. Then you’ll be back on the treadmill, with only the distant hope of some fresh achievement or monetary gain to console you. That’s like being a laboratory rat conditioned to unnatural behavior by occasional pellets of food.

Take whatever time you need to discover what matters to you most

Success isn’t simply a matter of money, power, or prestige. You could gain all of those and still feel that you have fallen short of what you wanted; or you could gain none of them and be blissfully happy and fulfilled. What constitutes personal success is mostly in your mind. It has much less to do with finding the best career in other peoples’ eyes, creating a killer business, or holding down a fancy job with a big salary than with achieving what really matters to you. Many people find this out too late. They struggle for years to get where other people said they should go, only to find it does little or nothing for them. Sad;y, it’s often too late by then to do anything else.

Don’t base your choices on others’ approval.

We all want to please those we care about, so it’s natural to try to do what they approve. Natural, but rarely a good idea as the basis for life’s choices. I don’t say that you should deliberately ignore sound advice, or reject a career path simply because other people suggest it. But even the most loving parent or friend can’t always see what is going to make your heart sing. Listen to others. Value their input and their support. But go your own way. It’s better to be committed to doing what you truly love than accept something lesser for the sake of being approved by someone else.

Stay authentic.

That means always doing what truly matters to you and is part of who you are. The simplest definition of a hypocrite is someone who says one thing and does another: like a person who says that he or she wants to work at something that benefits society, then forgets that at the first sight of a fistful of dollar bills. Somewhere inside of you is a part that recalls what truly matters and will never quite let you forget it. Over the years, that inner voice is only going to get louder.

Go for meaning over money every time.

It’s perfectly possible to do something meaningless to you and earn a great deal of cash while doing so. Some people do, especially in parts of the media world. It just requires a stronger stomach and more cynicism that most people possess, plus a huge tolerance for boredom.

Is it worth it?

If money is truly all that matters to you—and you can make lots of it quickly and get out—it might be. Few areas of work will allow you to do that, aside from criminal ones. Meaningless days corrode most peoples’ minds and destroy their happiness. Doing something that means a great deal to you almost always makes you feel energized and alive. It’s your choice.

Be endlessly greedy—for learning.

You can never learn too much or overfill your mind with new ideas. Nothing is more useful in life than a well-developed, well-stocked mind, especially one that has been broadened and enlarged in the process. It’s hard to name a single famously successful person who was narrow-minded, bigoted, or stupid. The list of notable successes who are recognized for the power of their minds is long. And you don’t have to have had an expensive education to be able to develop a great mind. There have been plenty of near geniuses whose education was almost entirely self-produced.

Make a friend of failure.

You are certain to fail sometimes, and the higher your aspirations, the more frequent and significant that failure will be. People who don’t strive for anything glorious rarely fail; they take no risks and never aim beyond what is easily attainable. But if you treat failure as an enemy, it’s going to lead only to discouragement and even the abandoning of your hopes and dreams. Failure can be a friend, pointing out what isn’t right yet and showing you the way to do better. The more proficient you become at accepting the lessons of failure, the quicker you will succeed.

Make sure that every time you make a mistake, it’s a new one.

Making the same mistake several times shows that you haven’t learned what it can teach you. Making new mistakes proves that you’re trying something different. The best definition of a loser is someone who makes the same mistakes over and over again, never managing to learn anything in the process. Such a person is doomed.

Choose to spend your time with the right people.

I don’t mean that in the sense of the rich and the powerful, the movers and shakers of society. Whether they’re powerful or not, the best people to spend time with are those from whom you can learn most: the ones whose own lives have brought them joy and endless fulfillment. That means people who do what they love and love what they do. People who have become experts in life, thinking people, people with wide-open minds and wide-open hearts.

Seek them out wherever you can. Listen to them.

Never mind if they are no longer living. Read their books and emulate their largeness of spirit. Learn from them all, but don’t simply copy what they did in this world. What they did was right for them, but may not be right for you. What you need to use as models are their ways of thinking and responding to the challenges of the world; the process of their lives, not what it happened to contain.

Drop whatever is inconsistent with these principles.

That means all activities that don’t move you forward towards what you value most; things that get in the way of learning; pursuits that waste time and dull your senses; and people who hold you back. You may sometimes have to be ruthless. Each of us has only one life. If you waste it, you don’t get another chance. Besides, if you have chosen your dreams and aspirations wisely, what you must leave behind by dropping what’s inconsistent with those dreams will not be worth worrying about anyway. Those who make bad choices find, too late, that they have abandoned things and people that meant more to them than whatever they gained in exchange. If that happens, you have truly reached one of life’s lowest points.

Adrian Savage is a writer, an Englishman, and a retired business executive, in that order. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Efficiency Through Leverage

2007-07-16T07:43:00.000-07:00

Andrew Taylor writes:

I have a definition for "Efficiency" which is similar to the formula used in Physics.

The definition is -- Getting the most done with the least amount of effort, even if this means something or someone else doing it for you.

The example I use to teach this definition is:

A Managing Director wishes to send out a personal end of year letter to all 500 company employees and sits down at a typewriter and types up all of the letters himself. It takes him 30 minutes per letter thus taking 250 hours at a value per hour of £35. Total cost £8750

The next year the Managing Director has employed a personal Assistant and they are given the task of typing up the letters. The personal assistant is a touch typist and spends just 3 minutes per letter thus taking 12.5 hours at a value per hour of £15. Total cost 187.5

The next year the Personal Assistant has the use of a computer and a laser printer. The personal assistant types up a mail merge letter in 3 minutes and spend 30 seconds entering the contact details into a spreadsheet for use with the mail merge and printing out the letter thus taking 4.2 hours at a value per hour of £15. Total cost 63.25.

We may wish to do the job ourselves but we should always ask if this is the best use our time and energy, or should we be asking others to who are better at the task than us and have the tools to do the task quicker than we can.

The old adage "Time is money" still holds true, even in cyberspace.

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

2007-07-14T16:02:00.001-07:00

Intensity

2007-07-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

There is an intensity inside you waiting to be harnessed

Relationships: Where Eagles Dare to Fly, Few Go...

2007-07-03T19:44:00.000-07:00

Kenzie: You will find in life that when you're an eagle...the rewards are fantastic...the self-actualization is incomparable...and very often it's a lonely journey. Not forever, mind you -- just until you find a "space" in your life where there are others (even one or two?) who are like you. Who are also "eagles". Eagles don't flock. They fly alone in a universe where almost every other species' survival, much less entertainment, depends upon staying with "the group". You're an eagle, and that was apparent from the time you could talk.

Every single one of your teachers at St.John's told Dad and I what a leader you were -- how "special" an individual you were. We didn't ask -- they volunteered this information at parent-teachers' conferences over the years. The analysis of your abilities began at the "new school" -- the YMCA pre-school. It never stopped at St. John's. All of them were describing an eagle--a leader. That's what you are.

Think of it this way: right now in terms of your sporting career, you join teams where most, if not all, of the other girls are gold fish in the tank. They have bright colors, muted colors, some are beautiful, others are not. But they have one immutable trait in common: they're all gold fish in this tank.

One day another fish joins the tank. This fish is not a goldfish. This fish is a barracuda. Sleek, fast and bright as hell, and effective: terribly, terribly effective. And the barracuda likes the goldfish! She tries to play with them, joke with them, in effect, be like one of them! but that's impossible: she can never be a goldfish. Ever.

Now the goldfish are puzzled at firs by the presence of the barracuda, and not a little intimidated. They eye her warily, they tolerate her -- after all she is IN the tank, too. But they realize she is NOT a goldfish -- she is NOT one of them, no matter how hard she tries to be. And when the barracuda nudges the goldfish and tries to coach them into being faster, smarter, more effective...well they become annoyed. They know in their fish souls that they are NOT barracudas and will never be. And they don't understand why the barracuda just won't "let them be".

The nature of an eagle, a barracuda, a leader is to lead. By definition, that means pointing the "way" for others. As a leader, you must learn, and you will eventually, that your happiness and self-actualization will depend upon how closely you fulfill your destiny. And your destiny is to be an eagle/barracuda/goldfish.

There are other eagles and leaders out there...trust me. You won't be lonely on your journey forever. Just for a little while now even as you slog through your teen-age years. but the prize on the other side of personal integrity is awesome, and it's different for every individual. It's worth all of the effort, aggravation, pain, tears, fear and disdain.

Here's the key: remember who you are. Remember who you are. Never forget, not even for a moment, who you are. You've been given many gifts by God -- best get to figuring out how to employ them.

Dad and I love you and treasure you and will always be here for you.

Sports: Coaching

2007-07-01T23:37:00.000-07:00

HIGHLIGHT: Stats are only the beginning...

MORAL: Does the girl have passion, hustle, talent and heart?

Stats are only one way an introduction can occur.

More than how high or how fast are questions like:
Does she play hard? All the time?
Does she play smart?
Does she make players around her better?
Does she make plays?
Does she love the game?

For Kenzie

Words To Live By: Hard Work Beats Talent When Talent Fails To Work Hard

2007-07-01T23:13:00.000-07:00

HIGHLIGHT: Lots of great quotes.

MORAL: "The harder I practice, the luckier I get."

"A lot of us would like to move mountains, but few of us are willing to practice on small hills."

"Although we cannot do everything at once, we can do something at once."

"Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later." -- Og Mandino

"Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley

"Anything in life worth having is worth working for." -- Andrew Carnegie

"Before I get in the ring, I'd have already won or lost it out on the road. The real part is won or lost somewhere far away from witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym and out there on the road before I dance under those lights." -- Muhammad Ali

"Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out." -- Italian Proverb

"Blaze with the fire that is never extinguished." -- Luisa Sigea

"Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points." -- Knute Rockne

"By failing to prepare, you prepare to fail."

"By perseverance, the snail reached the ark." -- Charles Spurgeon

"Champions aren't made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them - a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill." -- Muhammad Ali

"Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice." -- Henry Ford

"Consider the postage stamp; it's usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there." -- Josh Billings

"Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work." -- H.L. Hunt

"Diamonds are just little chunks of coal that stuck to their job." -- 'The Old Farmer's Almanac'.

"Do or do not. There is no try." -- Yoda

"Dwell not upon thy weariness, thy strength shall be according to the measure of thy desire." -- Arab Proverb

"Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself." -- Samuel Butler

"Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits."

"Faith makes things possible, not easy."

"For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice. No paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service." -- John Burroughs

"Forget yourself and start to work." -- Gordon B. Hinckley

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." -- Thomas Edison

"Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard."

"Hard work can be fun."

"Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense." -- Thomas Bennett

"He who stops being better stops being good." -- Oliver Cromwell

"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

"I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: 'Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.' I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have - When he gives everything that is in him to do the job he has before him. That is all you can ask of him and that is what I have tried to do." -- Harry S Truman

"I have nothing to offer but toil, sweat, tears, and blood." -- Winston Churchill

"I learned that the only way you are going to get anywhere in life is to work hard at it. Whether you're a musician, a writer, an athlete or a businessman, there is no getting around it. If you do, you'll win -- if you don't you won't." -- Bruce Jenner

"I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it." -- William Hazlitt

"I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours." -- Jerome K. Jerome

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble." -- Helen Keller

"I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work." -- Thomas Edison

"I played as hard as I could...That's all I want to be remembered for." -- Larry Bird

"I will get ready and then, perhaps, my chance will come."

"I will prepare, and someday my chance will come." -- Abraham Lincoln

"Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company." -- Jeremy Collier

"If I do not practice one day, I know it. If I do not practice the next, the orchestra knows it. If I do not practice the third day, the whole world knows it." -- Ignace Paderewski

"If people knew how hard I have had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all." -- Michelangelo

"If you put in the work, the results will come."

"If you wear out the seat of your pants before your shoes, perhaps you are working the wrong end."

"It's a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired -- you quit when the gorilla is tired."

"It's not how many hours you put in but how much you put into the hours."

"It's not so much how busy you are, but why you are busy. The bee is praised, the mosquito is swatted." -- Catherine O'Hara

"It's not that I'm so smart; it's just that I stay with problems longer." -- Albert Einstein

"It's one thing to say you're going to do it. It's another thing to go out and do it."

"It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't, everyone could do it. It's the hard that makes it great." -- "A League of Their Own"

"It is better to wear out than to rust out." -- Bishop Richard Cumberland

"It is counter-productive to put your best foot forward while dragging the other."

"It takes no talent to hustle." -- Hans Schmidt

"Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer the goal." -- Elbert Hubbard

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." -- Goethe

"Lack of confidence is born from a lack of preparation." -- Shannon Wilburn

"Let him that would move the world, first move himself." -- Socrates

"Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it." -- Margaret Thatcher

"Look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before." -- Jacob A. Riis

"Lord, give me the determination and tenacity of a weed."

"Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor done." -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'" -- Dan Parker

"Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes."

"Never be satisfied or content. Always want more and you'll compete more."

"No man is ever whipped until he quits - in his own mind." -- Napoleon Hill

"Nobody is ever met at the airport when beginning a new adventure. It's just not done." -- Elizabeth Warnock Fernea

"Nothing ever comes to one that is worth having except as a result of hard work." -- Booker T. Washington

"Nothing will work unless you do." -- John Wooden

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas Edison

"Our days are identical suitcases -- all the same size -- but some people can pack more into them than others."

"People forget how fast you did a job - but they remember how well you did it." -- Howard Newton

"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work." -- Peter Drucker

"Practice without improvement is meaningless." -- Chuck Knox

"Push yourself again and again...don't give an inch until the final buzzer sounds." -- Larry Bird

"Quit the CRYING and WHINING, and start the GRITTIN' and GRINDING!"

"Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory." -- Mahatma Gandhi

"Some dream of worthy accomplishments, while others stay awake and do them."

"Sometimes our best is simply not enough. We have to do what is required." -- Sir Winston Churchill

"Strivers achieve what dreamers believe." -- Usher

"Talk about what one is going to do means little; doing it means all."

"Temporary Inconvenience -- Permanent Improvement." -- sign at road construction site

"That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The amount of confidence you have is directly proportional to how hard you work."

"The choicest laurel wreaths are the hardest won."

"The harder I practice, the luckier I get." -- Gary Player

"The man on top of the mountain did not fall there."

"The man who moved a mountain was the one who began carrying away small stones." -- Chinese Proverb

"The mark of a Champion, in any endeavor, is their pride in preparing for their competition. For the businessman, as well as the athlete, it's reading the right books, listening to the right tapes/CDs, attending the right seminars and choosing the right mentors and coaches. Champions are built, not born. There is no off season for someone on the road to being a champion. There is only preparation and competition." -- Greg Werner

"The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary." -- Vidal Sassoon

"The only thing in life achieved without effort is failure."

"The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work." -- Robert Frost

"The secret is this: strength lies solely in tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur

"The starting point of all achievement is desire. Weak desire brings weak results." -- Napoleon Hill

"The three great essentials to achieving anything worthwhile are; first, hard work, second, stick-to-it-iveness, and third, common sense." -- Thomas Edison

"The way to get to the top is to get off your bottom."

"The will to win means nothing without the will to prepare."

"The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the others willing to let them." -- Robert Frost

"There's no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love. There is only a scarcity of resolve to make it happen." -- Wayne Dyer

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there." -- Indira Gandhi

"There is one thing I can control. I will never be outworked."

"Those at the top of the mountain didn't fall there." -- Marcus Washling

"Those who work the hardest are the last to surrender."

"To do nothing is the way to be nothing." -- Nathaniel Howe

"Understand the difference between being at work and working."

"Unless you are willing to drench yourself in your work beyond the capacity of the average man, you are just not cut out for positions at the top." -- J.C. Penney

"Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."

"We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny, but what we put into it is ours." -- Dag Hammarskiold

"We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents." -- Eric Hoffer

"Well begun is half done." -- Aristotle

"What keeps so many people back is simply unwillingness to pay the price, to make the exertion, the effort to sacrifice their ease and comfort." -- Orison Swett Marden

"What we hope to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence." -- Samuel Johnson

"Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"When there's a piano to be moved, don't reach for the stool."

"When we accept tough jobs as a challenge to our ability and wade into them with joy and enthusiasm, miracles can happen." -- Arland Gilbert

"When you're not practicing, remember, someone, somewhere, is practicing, and when you meet him, he will win." -- Ed Macauley

"When you're through improving, you're through."

"Whenever I think I can't do something, I'm usually right. Whenever I think I can do something, I'm usually right again. Whenever I put 50 percent effort into a task, I'm usually 50 percent satisfied with the results." -- David Rich

"Work hard to make things easier." -- Pete Carill

"Work harder than the opposition."

"Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you." -- Henri F. Amiel

"You may have good luck or you may have bad luck: but remember, you make your own luck."

"You must have confidence in your ability to perform the act required. This comes from practice." -- Tony Alfonso

“The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion when no one else is watching” -- Anson Dorrance

for Kenzie

Sports: Great Football Players: Bo Jackson - LaDainian Tomlinson

2007-07-01T21:42:00.000-07:00

HIGHLIGHT: Bo Jackson - LaDainian Tomlinson

MORAL: By listening to great athletes, you can learn about greatness.

How LT LaDainian Tomlinson Trains

LaDainian Tomlinson, LT, Humble Post-game speech

Tips from LaDainian Tomlinson

Bo Jackson Highlights

Bo Jackson Nike Commercial

For Kenzie

Sports: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect - Perfect Practice Makes Perfect - Jim Edmonds

2007-07-01T21:12:00.000-07:00

HIGHLIGHT: Nobody but you really knows how hard you work in practice.

MORAL: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect - Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

A ball was hit to over the head of baseball center fielder Jim Edmonds, surely destined to be a home run. Edmonds put his head down and sprinted for the outfield wall. As he neared the wall, rather than stopping to watch the ball become a home run, he ran faster and climbed the wall, making the catch, with his glove over the top of the fence. A great catch.

Afterwards, a reporter asked a team mate if that was the greatest catch he ever saw Edmonds make. The player responded, "No, I have seen that play hundreds of times. Before games Edmonds has a ball boy throw the ball to the top of the wall and Edmonds practices running up the wall to catch it."

For Kenzie

Words To Live By: John Wooden

2007-07-01T20:51:00.000-07:00

HIGHLIGHT: Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

It isn't what you do, but how you do it.

Never mistake activity for achievement.

Sports do not build character. They reveal it.

Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.

MORAL: Read books by people who are great teachers.

A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.

Ability is a poor man's wealth.

Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.

Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.

Although I wanted my players to work to win, I tried to convince them they had always won when they had done their best.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

Be prepared and be honest.

Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.

Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.

For an athlete to function properly, he must be intent. There has to be a definite purpose and goal if you are to progress. If you are not intent about what you are doing, you aren't able to resist the temptation to do something else that might be more fun at the moment.

I'd rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent.

I always tried to make clear that basketball is not the ultimate. It is of small importance in comparison to the total life we live. There is only one kind of life that truly wins, and that is the one that places faith in the hands of the Savior. Until that is done, we are on an aimless course that runs in circles and goes nowhere.

If you're not making mistakes, then you're not doing anything. I'm positive that a doer makes mistakes.

If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

It's not so important who starts the game but who finishes it.

It's the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.

It is what we learn after we know it all that really counts.

It isn't what you do, but how you do it.

Material possessions, winning scores, and great reputations are meaningless in the eyes of the Lord, because He knows what we really are and that is all that matters.

Never mistake activity for achievement.

Our land is everything to us... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it - with their lives.

Sports do not build character. They reveal it.

Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.

Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts.

Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.

Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.

The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

There are many things that are essential to arriving at true peace of mind, and one of the most important is faith, which cannot be acquired without prayer.

Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.

What you are as a person is far more important that what you are as a basketball player.

Winning takes talent, to repeat takes character.

You can't let praise or criticism get to you. It's a weakness to get caught up in either one.

You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.

You cannot attain and maintain physical condition unless you are morally and mentally conditioned. And it is impossible to be in moral condition unless you are spiritually conditioned. I always told my players that our team condition depended on two factors / how hard they worked on the floor during practice and how well they behaved between practices.

Young people need models, not critics.

For Kenzie.

Interpersonal Skills: How To Read People - Eyes

2007-06-30T21:54:00.000-07:00

HIGHLIGHT: Do all liars have tells? Yes. When you lie, you're subconsciously trying to get out of your own insides, and so you overly externalize.

MORAL: Watch people, listen to what they say, how they say it and watch for subtle cues.

How to read liars and learn the trick to telling a whopper - and getting away with it

By: Ben Paynter

You know your son better than anybody else does, but you can't tell if he's lying to you or if he's just nervous talking about cigarettes. Or maybe you have an employee who seems to have an unusually high frequency of doctors' appointments. If you were fluent in body language, you'd always know guile from gospel, says Marc Salem, a self-described mentalist who holds advanced degrees in psychology and cognitive science from the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, respectively. For the past 30 years, he has made a career out of reading people. He has taught interrogation tactics to the FBI, the Secret Service, and the New York City Police Department. Salem has even beaten a polygraph, and now he shares the secrets of his craft in his book, The Six Keys to Unlock and Empower Your Mind, out this month. Here, the master interrogator explains how to read liars and reveals the trick to telling a whopper--and getting away with it.

Best Life: How can you discern genuine from dishonest body language?
Marc Salem: Think of a conversation as a package of related signals. What you're looking for are breaks in a person's normal pattern, abrupt gestures like hand clenching or head movements, or someone shifting his posture away from you. Imagine you're watching the scene back as a video: You might think slowing down the frames will help you pick out inconsistencies, but with lying, it is just the opposite. In fast-forward, suddenly you see repeated movements that you didn't realize were there before, because at normal speed, they are spaced farther apart. They're sort of like guilty tics.

BL: Do all liars have tells?
MS: Yes. When you lie, you're subconsciously trying to get out of your own insides, and so you overly externalize. A person who covers his mouth with his left hand while talking is usually lying. If someone looks up and to the right, he's probably trying to invent an answer rather than tell the truth. People look to the left, either up or down, when recalling the truth. But the ultimate red flag is pupil dilation. Almost no one can escape that.

BL: Why do the pupils dilate?
MS: Pupil dilation is a direct biological response to an emotional reaction. It shows a high level of excitation. Anyone who is telling a lie, unless he's pathological, will experience some sort of emotional discomfort, no matter how slight. That discomfort registers in this uncontrollable physical response. You can't fake it, and it will give you away almost every time. The only way to tell a lie successfully is to use the tools of a method actor and become someone else. You have to believe what you're saying.

For Kenzie

Things To Know: Happiness

2007-06-30T21:35:00.000-07:00

HIGHLIGHT: Quenching feelings of hardship also means never feeling desire or want. Unpleasant as those emotions can be, they're also the basis for ambition and creativity. "Happy people are not ambitious," Greenfield says. "They do not build civilizations."

MORAL: It'd is OK to have frustration and a restless fire within you.

Drugs. Implants. Virtual reality. Do we really want joy 24/7?

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed a universal right to the pursuit of happiness. The key word there is pursuit. Jefferson thought that people ought to be free to chase after happiness; whether they attained it was their own business. In the 18th century, the technology to get happy despite circumstance or personality did not exist. Now, though, it's on its way — and that's not as delightful as it sounds.

What constitutes happiness? Freedom from worry? Or maybe contentment? A good definition remains elusive despite decades of neuroscience and psychiatry. Many researchers today have come to think that people have affect set points and that some of us are naturally happier than others. In describing optimal experience — the subjective state of happiness he calls flow — the psychiatrist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says it comes down to engaging in activities just beyond our skill level. Like Jefferson, Csikszent mihalyi understands that pursuit, and not outcome, is what's important.

Being reductionist about happiness doesn't mean it isn't fun, in all its myriad forms — free-floating rapture, blissed-out contentment, ecstatic partying. It's just that as a species, we generally keep these experiences in check. After all, the ways to induce them — alcohol, drugs, OK Go concerts — have historically come at a high cost.

We're entering an age in which technology may allow us to produce pleasant sensations all the time. Hints of that future go back to Prozac and other neurotransmitter-controlling drugs introduced in the late 1980s. But our ability to manipulate the molecules and electrical impulses whizzing through our heads is reaching a newly sophisticated level. Precise brain scanning is creating a vast trove of information about what happens psychologically, physiologically, and chemically when we are happy or sad (or stressed, angry, loving, homicidal, spiritual, or altruistic). The narcolepsy drug Provigil turns out to make people feel pretty fabulous and is taken as a stimulant. Ecstasy use has declined and cocaine use seems to have leveled off, but use of the ADHD prescription drug Adderall — increased focus, higher productivity — is on the rise. Today, neural implants are used to treat more than 30,000 people worldwide with Parkinson's disease; someday soon they might reliably jolt regions of the brain to induce or suppress specific emotions. "There is an industry of sorts that is trying to seduce you," says Oxford University pharmacologist Susan Greenfield, author of Tomorrow's People: How 21st-Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Think and Feel. "They want you to lose yourself, to want more of their product, whether it's virtual reality or a pill."

Obviously, sick people — say, with Parkinson's or narcolepsy — need medical intervention. And some percentage of humans will seek out mood-altering substances or experiences that imperil their lives. The problems start when happy-making tech nologies can be plugged in all day long without any of the traditional limits. I'm certainly not against technology. But should we use it to cure insecurity? Normal anxiety? We risk medicalizing the human condition.

From a distance, pleasure without fear or desire sounds pretty good. But in your grasp, it starts to feel less like paradise and more like soma. A species that shuts out adversity does not survive very long in a Darwinian universe. In the short term, humans with happy-making neural implants would cease to be interesting. Quenching feelings of hardship also means never feeling desire or want. Unpleasant as those emotions can be, they're also the basis for ambition and creativity. "Happy people are not ambitious," Greenfield says. "They do not build civilizations."

Ultimately, the problem could be self-correcting. As rich Westerners buy all the happiness products they can jam into their amygdalas, the developing world will be left blissfully productive. A good thing, because places like China and India have mighty new cities and wealth to build.

Maybe it's no coincidence that some of the happy-making stuff is manufactured in those countries. It's reminiscent of the scenario laid out by another prescient thinker, H. G. Wells. In his book The Time Machine, Wells wrote about a world where the happy, indolent elite — the Eloi — are served by industrious outsiders called Morlocks. The Eloi are also the hardworking Morlocks' food. Grim stuff. And also the exact opposite of what Jefferson was trying to tee up for Americans. Maybe he knew that if you have too much happiness, you don't get life and liberty.

David Ewing Duncan

For Kenzie

Sports: A father's view of Title IX

2007-06-24T12:15:00.001-07:00

HIGHLIGHT: College used to be a "man's" world, with little attention to female athletes.

MORAL: Don't lose sight of the hard word of those before you and take advantage of college athletics if you can!

A father's view of Title IX

San Francisco Chronicle

THERE IS something special about seeing your daughter dressed up for the prom, looking poised and gorgeous, as mine was on a recent Saturday night. There is something equally beautiful about seeing her bolting through the rain for a soccer ball, hair matted and socks flecked with mud, against the bay-chilled wind on a February night.

You can credit Title IX with making the second scene an attainable dream for so many young women.

On June 23, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon signed a 37-word piece of legislation that prohibited discrimination "on the basis of sex" in any education program or activity that received federal assistance.

As anyone who was in high school or college in 1972 knows, Title IX's effects on competitive athletics have been profound. It is evident in the fivefold increase in the number of women participating in intercollegiate athletics today; and the tenfold increase in the number of young women competing in high school sports.

The positive impact of Title IX is apparent in the athleticism and self-image of the young women who participate in sports today. It helped put an end to the cultural notion that only a "tomboy" would relish robust athletic competition.

"When I was in grade school in Reston, Va., I wasn't allowed to do sports ... I was taught to put my hair up, walk upright, learn proper manners and makeup, while the boys got to play basketball," said Jill Lounsbury, the 40ish manager of the San Francisco Nighthawks, a soccer team that draws scholarship athletes from across the nation to compete in a summer league. "I was better than most of the boys in sports, yet I had to do my hair, which I'm still not very good at."

Lounsbury credits Title IX with giving her and her teammates the chance to inaugurate an NCAA soccer team at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Wash., in the early 1980s.

Lounsbury said the speed and intensity of the game has picked up immensely, but even more dramatic is the demeanor of today's intercollegiate athletes.

"Now the main quality they have in common is they're so confident, capable and independent," she observed. "They think they can do anything."

By now, various studies have established beyond doubt that girls who participate in sports have higher self-esteem, lower drug-abuse and pregnancy rates and better odds of attaining a college degree. Then there are the intangibles: lessons on teamwork, winning and losing gracefully, rebounding from failure.

"Sports is a place where you learn to be leaders," Lounsbury said.

It's hard to imagine that anyone would want to roll back the clock. But the 1972 law cannot be taken for granted. It has been maligned, unjustly, for causing the demise of non-revenue men's sports such as wrestling and gymnastics. A far greater stress on "minor sports" has been that the king of "revenue sports" -- football -- spends more than it takes in at almost half of Division I-A and I-AA schools. A 2005 survey of major college programs showed that football averaged operating deficits of $1 million.

The best that can be said of the Bush administration is that it has been passive about enforcing the law. Just one of the 416 complaints filed about Title IX violations from 2002 to 2006 were initiated by the federal government, according to the National Women's Law Center.

Earlier this month, the Pacific Legal Foundation and College Sports Council petitioned the U.S. Department of Education to remove one of the three tests of Title IX compliance: The determination of whether a school's athletic offerings for men and women is "substantially proportionate" to the student body's gender mix. That test has been vital in assuring opportunities for female athletes -- and they have seized them, as the participation numbers attest.

Guess what? More men are playing intercollegiate sports today than in 1972. Title IX, when fairly administered, is win-win.

Knowing how sensitive a 17-year-old can be about any public doting by a parent, I alerted my three-sport daughter that I wanted to mention her athletic endeavors in the course of a column about Title IX.

"What's Title IX?" she asked.

Perhaps that's the ultimate measure of Title IX's progress, 35 years later. It's no longer a huge controversy. Young women assume they have a right to athletic opportunities.

Yet all of us should be aware of the forces that want to declare victory or redefine "equality" even before the playing fields are truly level.

John Diaz is The Chronicle's editorial page editor.

For Kenzie

Employment: More American jobs may be headed offshore

2007-06-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

HIGHLIGHT:
Nearly 400,000, or 31 percent, of local San Diego jobs have the potential to be moved overseas during the next two decades, according to the analysis, based on an index created by Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder.

MORAL:
Pick you major wisely!

More American jobs may be headed offshore

Study: 400,000 in county have overseas potential

By David Washburn
STAFF WRITER

June 10, 2007

The offshoring debate was over at Sky Mobilemedia before it began.

Within two years of its 2003 inception, the San Diego-based maker of cell phone operating systems employed a work force spanning the globe. Now, only 30 of the company's 120 employees live locally, with the rest divided among offices in India, Israel and Croatia.

“This is the reality of a startup company,” said Naser Partovi, chief executive of Sky Mobilemedia.

He estimates that he can hire three – even four – software engineers in Bangalore, India, for the cost of one in San Diego. “The cost structure is prohibitive if you have everyone here,” he said.

Partovi's reality may be shared by an increasing number of San Diego County companies and their workers, according to an analysis by The San Diego Union-Tribune of the potential offshoring of county jobs.

Nearly 400,000, or 31 percent, of local jobs have the potential to be moved overseas during the next two decades, according to the analysis, based on an index created by Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder.

How exportable is your job?

To find out the “offshoreability” of specific jobs in San Diego, go to uniontrib.com/more/offshore
Nationally, Blinder estimates that 37.7 million jobs, or 29 percent of the current U.S. work force, could be outsourced to other countries within the next 10 to 20 years.

Blinder's study, released in March, is the most recent – and perhaps most ambitious – attempt to quantify the effects of globalization on American workers. He analyzed more than 800 occupations and placed each on a scale from “highly offshoreable” to “highly unoffshoreable.”

Not surprisingly, he found that computer programmers and data-entry clerks were the most vulnerable. But other jobs deemed “highly offshoreable” crisscross the employment spectrum and include such occupations as editor, drafter, graphic designer and insurance underwriter.

Blinder said he is estimating the number of jobs that potentially could go offshore, not the number that actually will move overseas. Nonetheless, he sees big changes ahead.

“I believe there will a long and somewhat painful reallocation of labor analogous to what has happened over the last 50 years with Americans in factories,” Blinder said.

U.S. companies have been moving jobs abroad for a generation. It started in manufacturing, with factory work moving to Mexico, China and other low-wage countries where everything from designer clothes to television sets could be made for a fraction of the labor costs in the United States.

Next to head offshore were American jobs in customer service and data entry. Today, U.S. companies employ more than 900,000 offshore service workers, according to McKinsey & Co., a San Francisco economic think tank.

And offshoring is moving up the food chain, as computer systems analysts, microbiologists and financial analysts join factory workers, telemarketers and call-center operators in “offshoreable” professions.

Current trends notwithstanding, several economists say Blinder vastly overestimates the potential for offshoring. One went so far as to call his analysis “dead wrong.”

A McKinsey & Co. study in 2005 concluded that the United States stands to lose at most 11 percent, or 18.3 million, service jobs to other countries by 2010.

Blinder argues that steady advances in communications technology, along with growing wealth in the developing world, will gradually increase the flow of service-sector jobs overseas. This will be especially true for computer-based jobs that do not require a lot of face-to-face contact.

“This will not be a permanent mass unemployment,” Blinder said. “But there needs to be internal migration from impersonal service jobs to personal jobs.”

Marney Cox, an economist for the San Diego Association of Governments, largely agrees with Blinder's conclusions and said San Diego County companies and policymakers need to prepare for a changing employment landscape.

“San Diego is more 'offshoreable' than most places,” Cox said. “Our most important jobs – jobs that drive our economy – are exportable.”

NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune
Naser Partovi, CEO of San Diego-based Sky Mobilemedia, says he can hire three or four software engineers in Bangalore, India, for the cost of one in San Diego.

The Union-Tribune analysis showed that 7.5 percent – or 95,795 – of the jobs in San Diego County are “highly offshoreable.” This compares with 6.3 percent of all U.S. jobs that Blinder puts in that category.

Among the highly threatened local workers are biochemists and biophysicists. These are bread-and-butter jobs in the county's biotech sector, which employs more than 36,000 people and is the third-largest concentration of biotech jobs in the nation.

There are no reliable estimates for the number of local jobs that have moved offshore from San Diego County in recent years, but there is some anecdotal evidence.

Over the past two years, locally based Accelrys, which develops drug-discovery software, has cut 100 employees from its San Diego operation and shifted more work to a facility in Bangalore.

Last year, San Diego's Immusol laid off about a dozen of its 50 employees – most of them scientists working in drug discovery – while continuing to contract out work to companies in Shanghai and Beijing.

“The most vulnerable job is chemists,” said Zhu Shen, vice president of business development at Immusol. “We are seeing great value from Russian, Chinese and Indian companies at a great price, and the quality of work is comparable to here.”

Yet, Cox said, local politicians are choosing to spend public money on ballparks, cruise ship terminals and convention centers, which create relatively low-paying jobs, rather than funding infrastructure and services for high-tech industries.

“What about biotech, environmental tech and software engineering?” Cox asked. “Where is the public investment in these industries? A few things in front of us today show we are not serious about these industries.”

Funding for alternative sources of energy and better local airport service are the kinds of public expenditures that policymakers need to be focusing on, he said.

Rare is the economist who would disagree with the notion that forward-looking public policy is the key to long-term economic health. But several prominent labor economists have taken issue with Blinder's study.

To begin with, Blinder makes broad assumptions that other economists say are unrealistic. For example, when determining how readily a job could be done offshore, he deems every worker in that job as equally movable.

“Let's say there are 4 million accountants. He says all 4 million are offshoreable,” said Lori Kletzer, a professor of economics at University of California Santa Cruz.

“That is a bit of a stretch – every accountant is not going to disappear from the U.S. work force.”

Blinder also fails to consider that as the Chinese and Indian economies continue to grow, they will need goods and services provided by U.S. workers, said Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University economics professor.

“He is just dead wrong,” said Bhagwati, who also is a senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “I would be astonished if something like he is predicting actually happened.”

Bhagwati and others say Blinder incorrectly assumes that any tradable job in the U.S. work force is vulnerable to offshoring. But in many cases, it will be workers in developing countries who will be more vulnerable as technology advances.

Companies in China and India will have the opportunity to employ the services of a highly skilled U.S. architect or accountant rather than settle for a lower-skilled practitioner in their own country, Bhagwati said.

“It is we who stand to gain in many cases, not them,” he said.

Diana Farrell, who wrote the McKinsey & Co. study, said her research jibes more with Bhagwati's position.

While acknowledging that her study has a shorter time frame – five years versus Blinder's 10 or 20 years – she said the less-tangible things, such as management attitudes and worries about intellectual-property protection, will keep companies from moving jobs overseas even if they could do so.

“We estimate that no more than several hundred thousand U.S. jobs per year will be lost to offshoring, affecting less than 2 percent of all service jobs,” Farrell said. “That is far fewer than the normal rate of job turnover in the economy.”

Regardless of which estimate proves to be more accurate, it's likely to be of little consequence to the workers at Sky Mobilemedia. Min Kim, a senior software engineer, said job insecurity has been a part of his life throughout his 15 years in high tech.

“Many companies don't care about the engineer; they care about profit,” the 38-year-old said. “You have to continually reinvent yourself or you will fall back.”

Blinder said that if every U.S. worker has Kim's attitude, the work force will not only survive but thrive as the global economy evolves.

“U.S. workers will win by staying ahead of the curve,” he said. “Creativity and innovation are crucial.”

For Kenzie

Employment: Why the World Is Flat

2007-06-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

HIGHLIGHT: For instance, what advice should we give to our kids?

When I was growing up, my parents told me, "Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving."

I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job."

MORAL:
When choosing a college major, choose wisely!

Thirty-five years ago this summer, the golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez was competing in his seventh US Open, played that year at Hazeltine Country Club outside Minneapolis. Tied for second place after the opening round, Rodriguez eventually finished 27th, a few strokes ahead of such golf legends as Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Gary Player. His caddy for the tournament was a 17-year-old local named Tommy Friedman.

Rodriguez retired from golf several years later. But his caddy - now known as Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and author of the new book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century - has spent his career deploying the skills he used on the golf course: describing the terrain, shouting warnings and encouragement, and whispering in the ears of big players. After 10 years of writing his twice-weekly foreign affairs column, Friedman has become the most influential American newspaper columnist since Walter Lippmann.

One reason for Friedman's influence is that, in the mid-'90s, he staked out the territory at the intersection of technology, financial markets, and world trade, which the foreign policy establishment, still focused on cruise missiles and throw weights, had largely ignored. "This thing called globalization," he says, "can explain more things in more ways than anything else."

Friedman's 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, provided much of the intellectual framework for the debate. "The first big book on globalization that anybody actually read," as Friedman describes it, helped make him a fixture on the Davos-Allen Conference-Renaissance Weekend circuit. But it also made him a lightning rod. He's been accused of "rhetorical hyperventilation" and dismissed as an "apologist" for global capital. The columnist Molly Ivins even dubbed top-tier society's lack of concern for the downsides of globalization "the Tom Friedman Problem."

After 9/11, Friedman says, he paid less attention to globalization. He spent the next three years traveling to the Arab and Muslim world trying to get at the roots of the attack on the US. His columns on the subject earned him his third Pulitzer Prize. But Friedman realized that while he was writing about terrorism, he missed an even bigger story: Globalization had gone into overdrive. So in a three-month burst last year, he wrote The World Is Flat to explain his updated thinking on the subject.

Friedman enlisted some impressive editorial assistance. Bill Gates spent a day with him to critique the theory. Friedman presented sections of the book to the strategic planning unit at IBM and to Michael Dell. But his most important tutors were two Indians: Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys, and Vivek Paul, a top executive at Wipro. "They were the guys who really cracked the code for me."

Wired sat down with Friedman in his office at the Times' Washington bureau to discuss the flattening of the world.

WIRED: What do you mean the world is flat?
FRIEDMAN: I was in India interviewing Nandan Nilekani at Infosys. And he said to me, "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." Indians and Chinese were going to compete for work like never before, and Americans weren't ready. I kept chewing over that phrase - the playing field is being leveled - and then it hit me: Holy mackerel, the world is becoming flat. Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance - or soon, even language.

So, we're talking about globalization enhanced by things like the rise of open source?
This is Globalization 3.0. In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny. There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind.

Is that why the Netscape IPO is one of your "10 flatteners"? Explain.
Three reasons. Netscape brought the Internet alive with the browser. They made the Internet so that Grandma could use it and her grandchildren could use it. The second thing that Netscape did was commercialize a set of open transmission protocols so that no company could own the Net. And the third is that Netscape triggered the dotcom boom, which triggered the dotcom bubble, which triggered the overinvestment of a trillion dollars in fiber-optic cables.

Are you saying telecommunications trumps terrorism? What about September 11? Isn't that as important?
There's no question flattening is more important. I don't think you can understand 9/11 without understanding flattening.

This is probably the first book by a major foreign affairs thinker that talks about the world-changing effects of … supply chains.
[Laughs.]

Why are supply chains so important?
They're incredible flatteners. For UPS to work, they've got to create systems with customs offices around the world. They've got to design supply chain algorithms so when you take that box to the UPS Store, it gets from that store to its hub and then out. Everything they are doing is taking fat out of the system at every joint. I was in India after the nuclear alert of 2002. I was interviewing Vivek Paul at Wipro shortly after he'd gotten an email from one of their big American clients saying, "We're now looking for an alternative to you. We don't want to be looking for an alternative to you. You don't want us to be looking for an alternative to you. Do something about this!" So I saw the effect that India's being part of this global supply chain had on the behavior of the Indian business community, which eventually filtered up to New Delhi.

And that's how you went from your McDonald's Theory of Conflict Prevention - two countries that have a McDonald's will never go to war with each other - to the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention.
Yes. No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain like Dell's will fight against each other as long as they are both part of that supply chain. When I'm managing your back room, when I'm managing your HR, when I'm doing your accounting - that's way beyond selling you burgers. We are intimately in bed with each other. And that has got to affect my behavior.

In some sense, then, the world is a gigantic supply chain. And you don't want to be the one who brings the whole thing down.
Absolutely.

Unless your goal is to bring the whole thing down. Supply chains work for al Qaeda, too, don't they?
Al Qaeda is nothing more than a mutant supply chain. They're playing off the same platform as Wal-Mart and Dell. They're just not restrained by it. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain. That's what we're up against in Iraq. We're up against a suicide supply chain. You take one bomber and deploy him in Baghdad, and another is manufactured in Riyadh the next day. It's exactly like when you take the toy off the shelf at Wal-Mart and another is made in Shen Zhen the next day.

The book is almost dizzily optimistic about India and China, about what flattening will bring to these parts of the world.
I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt. Bill Gates has a nice line: He says, 20 years ago, would you rather have been a B-student in Poughkeepsie or a genius in Shanghai? Twenty years ago you'd rather be a B-student in Poughkeepsie. Today?

Not even close.
Not even close. You'd much prefer to be the genius in Shanghai because you can now export your talents anywhere in the world.

As optimistic as you are about that kid in Shanghai, you're not particularly optimistic about the US.
I'm worried about my country. I love America. I think it's the best country in the world. But I also think we're not tending to our sauce. I believe that we are in what Shirley Ann Jackson [president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] calls a "quiet crisis." If we don't change course now and buckle down in a flat world, the kind of competition our kids will face will be intense and the social implications of not repairing things will be enormous.

You quote a CEO who says that Americans have grown addicted to their high salaries, and now they're going to have to earn them. Are Americans suffering from an undue sense of entitlement?
Somebody said to me the other day that - I wish I had this for the book, but it's going to be in the paperback - the entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

Let's talk about the critics of globalization. You say that you don't want the antiglobalization movement to go away. Why?
I've been a critic of the antiglobalization movement, and they've been a critic of me, but the one thing I respect about the movement is their authentic energy. These are not people who don't care about the world. But if you want to direct your energy toward helping the poor, I believe the best way is not throwing a stone through a McDonald's window or protesting World Bank meetings. It's through local governance. When you start to improve local governance, you improve education, women's rights, transportation.

It's possible to go through your book and conclude it was written by a US senator who wants to run for president. There's a political agenda in this book.
Yes, absolutely.

You call for portable benefits, lifelong learning, free trade, greater investment in science, government funding for tertiary education, a system of wage insurance. Uh, Mr. Friedman, are you running for president?
[Laughs loudly.] No, I am not running for president!

Would you accept the vice presidential nomination?
I just want to get my Thursday column done!

But you are outlining an explicit agenda.
You can't be a citizen of this country and not be in a hair-pulling rage at the fact that we're at this inflection moment and nobody seems to be talking about the kind of policies we need to get through this flattening of the world, to get the most out of it and cushion the worst. We need to have as focused, as serious, as energetic, as sacrificing a strategy for dealing with flatism as we did for communism. This is the challenge of our day.

Short of Washington fully embracing the Friedman doctrine, what should we be doing? For instance, what advice should we give to our kids?
When I was growing up, my parents told me, "Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving." I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job."

Think about your own childhood for a moment. If a teenage Tommy Friedman could somehow have been transported to 2005, what do you think he would have found most surprising?
That you could go to PGA.com and get the scores of your favorite golfer in real time. That would have been amazing.

The 10 Great Levelers

1. Fall of the Berlin Wall
The events of November 9, 1989, tilted the worldwide balance of power toward democracies and free markets.

2. Netscape IPO
The August 9, 1995, offering sparked massive investment in fiber-optic cables.

3. Work flow software
The rise of apps from PayPal to VPNs enabled faster, closer coordination among far-flung employees.

4. Open-sourcing
Self-organizing communities, � la Linux, launched a collaborative revolution.

5. Outsourcing
Migrating business functions to India saved money and a third world economy.

6. Offshoring
Contract manufacturing elevated China to economic prominence.

7. Supply-chaining
Robust networks of suppliers, retailers, and customers increased business efficiency. See Wal-Mart.

8. Insourcing
Logistics giants took control of customer supply chains, helping mom-and-pop shops go global. See UPS and FedEx.

9. In-forming
Power searching allowed everyone to use the Internet as a "personal supply chain of knowledge." See Google.

10. Wireless
Like "steroids," wireless technologies pumped up collaboration, making it mobile and personal.

For Kenzie