NewsBlotter.com

WHOI Image of the Day -

WHOI scientist Joan Bernhard — shown here in a cold van subsampling multicores for FLEC (Fluorescently Labeled Embedded Core) analyses —  and colleagues from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute tested whether a proposed method to sequester excess atmospheric carbon in the deep sea would damage single-celled organisms called foraminifera. Read more about the research in Oceanus magazine. (Photo by Joanne Eberhardt, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

InvestorWords.com - An amount of an employee's income that an employer sends directly to the federal, state, or local tax authority as partial payment of that individual's tax liability for the year. When a person starts a new job, he/she is required to fill out a W-4 form on which he/she can indicate his/her filing status and the number of allowances he/she is claiming.

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Scientific American -

I don’t know how many e-mails I have received fromchildren who are terrified that 2012 will somehow involve the end of life as we know it, all because of an unfounded fringe religious prophecy that has received mass-market exposure with the release of a recent Hollywood movie. I have tried to reassure those children (and not a few adults) that this date represents nothing more cosmically special than the year of the next presidential election.

Having said that, however, I just realized there might be a genuine connection between 2012 and an end-of-days menace!

[More]

Scientific American -

A multinational, robotic air corps is quietly invading the polar regions of the earth. Some catapult from ships; some launch from running pickup trucks; and some take off the old-fashioned way, from icy airstrips. The aircraft range from remote-controlled propeller planes--of the type found at Toys “R” Us--to sophisticated, high-altitude jets. All are specially outfitted, not with weapons but with scientific instruments.

Unmanned aircraft have made headlines in the mountains of Afghanistan, but the technology has quickly trickled down to scientists seeking a less expensive, safer way to study the earth’s poles. Researchers have begun to put unmanned aerial systems, or UASs, to a variety of tasks, from monitoring the ozone layer to counting seal populations. Thanks to lower costs and improved technologies, “it’s absolutely exploded in the past couple of years,” says Elizabeth Weatherhead, who is an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

[More]

Entrepreneurship Blog -

Elizabeth Olson’s New York Times article “What States and Cities are Doing to Help Small Businesses” highlights several initiatives at the state and municipality levels to save small businesses and jobs.

The local approaches are as varied as subsidizing wages for new hires, running a $100,000 regional business-plan competition and giving out grants to help small manufacturers reposition themselves. Some states and cities are using federal stimulus dollars, and others are mixing federal, state and private dollars.

Some examples include:
 
-    San Francisco’s Job Now: this $25 million program reimburses owners for 100 percent of the wages for certain new hires. So far, businesses hired nearly 1,800 people through the program.

-    Michigan’s Training for Laid-Off Workers: last June, the Michigan Small Business and Technology Center began to train laid-off workers to start new ventures through the Kauffman Foundation’s FastTrac program.

-    Florida’ GrowFL: this state-financed program helps businesses with at least $1 million in annual sales and 10 or more workers keep their employees by expanding their customer base through strategies for new markets, research industry developments and their use of social media.

For more on these and other programs, access the article here.

 

Entrepreneurship Blog -

Robert X. Cringely, author of the technology blog “I, Cringely” (www.cringely.com), has launched a plan to restart the economy called “Cringely's (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour.” People are invited to nominate startup companies in six different categories, discuss them, and vote for favorites on a special website created just for the tour.

After about six weeks of collecting nominations and reviewing candidates, Cringely will announce the top 24 companies. He will then take the show on the road this summer, with a camera crew, to visit all 24 companies to learn about the businesses and the entrepreneurs who started them. Ultimately, the stories he collects will become a 12-hour reality TV series to be broadcast on a major cable network.

PDE readers are encouraged to participate in this initiative. You can click here to nominate and vote.

Entrepreneurship Blog -

According to a new Kauffman Foundation study, High-Growth Firms and the Future of the American Economy, high-growth firms account for a disproportionate share of job creation despite their relatively small numbers.

More specifically, the study showed, that so-called “gazelle” firms (ages three to five) comprise less than 1 percent of all companies, yet generate roughly 10 percent of new jobs in any given year. The “average” firm in the top 1 percent contributes 88 jobs per year, and most end up with between 20 and 249 employees. In contrast, the average firm in the economy as a whole adds two or three net new jobs each year.

In light of these findings, the authors suggest three policy strategies to support high-growth startups to bolster job growth:

•    Focus on creating more new firms, with the expectation that this also will increase, by basic arithmetic, the number of high-growth firms. Startup firms contribute a net increase in employment that is essential if the economy is to achieve positive net job creation in any given year. Since the level and rate of firm formation in the United States have basically been flat for 20 years, however, it’s not clear how successful the United States can be in actually creating more new companies. In addition, while it is possible that the recent recession will spur more individuals to start companies, there is no guarantee that this will automatically increase the number of high-growth firms.

•    Remove barriers that potentially block the emergence of high-growth companies among existing firms (e.g., access to capital, taxation and regulatory burdens).

•    Target immigrants and universities, which have been known to produce high-growth firms but which often suffer from bottlenecks. Recent research has shown that U.S.-based technology and engineering companies founded by immigrants have created thousands of jobs for Americans. While many Americans might perceive immigrants as competition for a limited supply of jobs, many immigrants end up making, rather than taking, jobs. To draw into the United States those immigrants who intend to start firms, either establish a new visa program—such as an expansion of the “Startup Visa Act” recently introduced in the U.S. Senate that would create a new visa for immigrants who can raise $250,000 for their startup company—or expand the existing EB-5 visa program for immigrant investors. On the university front, enhance innovation and job creation by breaking down barriers in the commercialization process that could impede university researchers from moving their innovations into new companies.

“While some new companies will undoubtedly fail, high-growth firms must be started somehow, and the more quickly they are launched and in larger numbers, the faster both output and employment will grow,” said Robert E. Litan, vice president of Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation.
 

HR Executive - Since their pay is associated with time worked, hourly employees -- and even highly paid technical consultants -- are more likely to link workplace happiness with their pay checks, according to a new study. The same is true for attorneys, who bill by the hour. But placing an emphasis on pay to drive productivity is a mistake.

Entrepreneurship Blog -

Vivek Wadhwa, senior research associate at the Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke University, has a new article on BusinessWeek. In “States, Innovate in IT or Else,” Wadhwa looks at the way antiquated and expensive IT systems used in some states hinders innovation.

“The public sector is effectively walled off from the innovation that has made Web 2.0 a rich, contextually relevant environment,” explains Wadhwa. He argues that many government agencies and corporations are still entrusting critical tasks to antiquated computer systems that cost a fortune to operate and maintain.

The problem is particularly acute at the state level. Each U.S. state has its own unique computer systems to process the same types of information and provide the same services as every other state. Worse, even within states, each division or agency has its own IT department and maintains its own computer systems. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of IT spending every year—on clunky old infrastructure.

This, he argues, has implications for data sharing and updating and for adjusting to regulatory changes. “Simple changes cost tens of millions of dollars and can take years. When President Obama signed legislation extending benefits for unemployed workers in November, out-of-work Californians had to wait as long as two months because the systems couldn't be updated.” In contrast, social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter process more transactions in a day than many financial companies and states process in a month.

What’s the solution? “We need to open the bidding to new players, loosen opaque requirements written under the false guise of security and compatibility, and retool our way of thinking about IT for the public sector.”

Read Vivek Wadhwa’s entire report on the issue, here.

Discovery Channel - Grocery stores and consumers may want to rethink how they store their produce.

Scientific American -

Every 30 minutes, all of the blood in our bodies is filtered through two fist-size kidneys. But diseases such as diabetes can cause them to fail, leading to a build-up of chemicals in the blood that without dialysis (mechanical blood filtration) or a kidney transplant would be fatal. And the wait for a new kidney can be long, unless someone you know is willing to give one of theirs to you. [More]

Seth Godin -

When the platform changes, the leaders change.

Wordperfect had a virtual monopoly on word processing in big firms that used DOS. Then Windows arrived and the folks at Wordperfect didn't feel the need to hurry in porting themselves to the new platform. They had achieved lock-in after all, and why support Microsoft?

In less than a year, they were toast.

When the game machine platform of choice switches from Sony to xBox to Nintendo, etc., the list of bestelling games change and new companies become dominant.

When the platform for music shifted from record stores to iTunes, the power shifted too, and many labels were crushed.

Again and again the same rules apply. In fact, they always do. When the platform changes, the deck gets shuffled.

Think this only applies to software?

The platform for healthcare changed from independent doctor's offices and small practices to hospitals and hmos.

The platform for TV changed from airwaves to wires (so HBO and ESPN win, NBC loses).

The platform for cars is changing from gas engines to alternatives.

And the platform for books is changing (fast!) to e-books and readers. Just published today: the Vook multimedia production of Unleashing the Ideavirus. The price will increase to $5 in two weeks, but right now it's 99 cents. It runs on the web and on your iphone (and the iPad on April 3rd.)

Here's the thing: Vook abridged it, built it, filmed it and distributed it in less than ninety days. They have a software application that they can use again and again for other titles. They've organized themselves to be profitable at a profit margin that few big book publishers can match.

Once again, the platform changes. Insiders become outsiders and new opportunities abound.

CNN - Personal Finance - Ford is back. The automaker recently reported its first annual profit in four years; sales are improving; and investors have pushed up its stock 550% in the past year.

NYT > Science - The countries are the last two major economic powers to agree with the aims of the nonbinding agreement.

NYT > Science - Can wine help you digest your meal?

Dictionary.com Word of the Day - phantasmagoria: a shifting series or succession of things seen or imagined.

Dictionary.com Word of the Day -

NYT > Science - A study of farming colonies in Canada found that giving flu vaccine to schoolchildren protected the community.

HybridCars.com -

James Sikes, a 61-year-old San Diego-based real estate executive, made national news this week when he claimed that his 2008 Toyota Prius sped out of control on California’s Interstate 8. Sikes said, “I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car and it did something kind of funny…it jumped and it just stuck there." Speaking at a news conference yesterday, Sikes said, "I was trying the brakes...it wasn't stopping, it wasn't doing anything and it just kept speeding up." The story was picked up by major national media and ricocheted around the Internet.

According to Sikes, he was unable to shift into neutral, power down the car, or apply the parking brake—but but he did manage to call 911. Whle Sikes was on the call, which lasted 23 minutes, a California Highway Patrolman raced to the side of the speeding car. The patrolman used a loudspeaker to advise Sikes to apply the parking brake and foot brake simultaneously, and thereby successfully bring the car to a stop. There are conflicting reports about whether or not Sikes tried to put the Prius into neutral during the early part of the incident.

Runaway News Reports

A local television news report misreported that the patrolman used “his own police cruiser as a brake.” CNN reported that the main “claimed that he almost flew over a hill at more than 90 miles per hour in his Prius.”

There were other mistakes in national media coverage, including the report that the Sikes incident caused Toyota to issue a new recall for 2004 – 2009 Toyota Priuses. Those vehicles were included in a late 2009 voluntary safety recall—related to accelerator pedals that could be trapped by floor mats. There have been reports that some Toyota vehicles that received service in a separate recall are still experiencing problems, but second-generation Priuses, such as Sikes’s, have not yet been called into dealerships. Nonetheless, Sikes claims that he was turned away from a Toyota dealership when he tried to get the Prius serviced as part of a recall.

read more

NYT > Health - DePuy Orthopaedics alerted doctors to a high early failure rate of its artificial hip after announcing it would phase out the device citing slow sales.

NYT > Health - President Obama’s health reform plan is a mixed bag, but it may be the only program passed.

Search Engine Watch - There's a growing divide between online marketers who enjoy organic search and those who prefer paid search. What do your preferences say about you? ...

NYT > Health - The combined business would jointly control about 29 percent of the $19 billion-a-year global market for medicines for pets and livestock.

Official Google Blog - Whenever I meet someone who finds out that I work on the directions team for Google Maps, the first question I'm asked is often "So when's Google Maps going to add biking directions?" We're big biking fans too, so we've been itching to give you a concrete answer. I don't want to keep the good news a secret any longer, so the answer is: right now!

Today we've added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that's exactly what we've done.

Let's say you want to bike to work, or maybe you want to drive less and spend more time outdoors. Biking directions can help you find a convenient and efficient route that makes use of dedicated bike trails or lanes and avoids hills whenever possible. To find biking directions, select "Bicycling" from the drop-down menu when you do a directions search:


So, how does it work? Well, I'm based in Seattle, along with the rest of the biking directions team. The city is notoriously hilly, but also has some great trails and a strong cycling community. Let's say I'm trying to get from Golden Gardens to a friend's house in Montlake:


This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city's busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. If I decide that I want to stop at Woodland Park Zoo along the way, I can click on the blue path and drag it to my desired route — just like with driving directions — and we'll still customize the journey for cycling suitability. Over on the Lat Long Blog, you can read more about all the unique tweaks and calculations factored into our routing algorithm.

We've also added information about bike trails, lanes and recommended roads directly onto the map. This can help you get a better sense of your route, or let you find trails nearby for a recreational ride. When you're zoomed into a city, click on the "More" button at the top of the map to turn on the "Bicycling” layer. You'll see three types of lines appear on the map:

• Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
• Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
• Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

Thanks primarily to our partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, we now have more than 12,000 miles of trails included in biking directions and outlined directly on the map. We also have data on bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. We'll continue to add new trail information and encourage riders to send feedback (biking directions is in beta, after all) and route information for inclusion via the “Report a Problem” tool. When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes.

We know that many of you have been anxiously awaiting this feature, so head over to http://maps.google.com/biking to try it for yourself and then hop on your bike!

Posted by Shannon Guymon, Product Manager

InvestorWords.com - A bond which the issuer has the right to redeem prior to its maturity date, under certain conditions. When issued, the bond will explain when it can be redeemed and what the price will be. In most cases, the price will be slightly above the par value for the bond and will increase the earlier the bond is called. A company will often call a bond if it is paying a higher coupon than the current market interest rates. Basically, the company can reissue the same bonds at a lower interest rate, saving them some amount on all the coupon payments; this process is called "refunding." Unfortunately, these are also the same circumstances in which the bonds have the highest price; interest rates have decreased since the bonds were issued, increasing the price. In many cases, the company will have the right to call the bonds at a lower price than the market price. If a bond is called, the bondholder will be notified by mail and have no choice in the matter. The bond will stop paying interest shortly after the bond is called, so there is no reason to hold on to it. Companies also typically advertise in major financial publications to notify bondholders. Generally, redeemable bonds will carry something called call protection. This means that there is some period of time during which the bond cannot be called. also called callable bond. opposite of irredeemable bond or non-callable bond.

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Getting Things Done - A search of my workspace will usually yield an assortment of flyers and brochures headed Calendar of Events, Spring Schedule, Lecture Series, et cetera. For example, somewhere on my desk is a film festival schedule. My reaction to receiving it was "I hope I can get to one or two of those films."...

Official Google Blog - The Renaissance, Europe's period of cultural, political and scientific rebirth, began in Florence around 600 years ago. At Google we're interested in a (small “r”) renaissance of a different kind — a digital one. Since the launch of Google Books, we’ve been working with libraries and publishers around the globe to bring more of the world's books to more readers around the globe. Any school child should be able to access the works of Petrarch, Dante or Vico (or, if they're so inclined, Machiavelli). In the case of these more famous authors, this is already largely possible, but what about the work of Guglielmo il Giuggiola or Coluccio Salutati? We want all of the great literature and writings of Italy to be accessible to the general public.

Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage that will push this vision forward. Working with the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, we’ll digitize up to a million out-of-copyright works. The libraries will select the works to be digitized from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy's most famous poets and writers. It marks the first time we’ve ever joined forces with Italian libraries, and the first time we've worked with a ministry of culture.

Around Europe and the rest of the world, we are effectively witnessing a digital renaissance, with an increasing number of organizations running ambitious and promising book digitization projects. We're not the only ones who have seen the need to bring the world's books into digital form. Digitization of books is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the joint effort of a great number of public and private stakeholders. For this reason, we’re supportive of many other efforts at digitization, such as the European Commission's Europeana. We want to see these books have the broadest reach possible — the books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana, of which the Florence Library is a founding member, and other digital libraries. The more of the world's historical, cultural treasures we can bring online, the more we can unlock our shared heritage.

We believe today’s announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world's books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius — like Shakespeare and Cervantes — are part of our human cultural history.

Posted by Gino Mattiuzzo, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Italy

NYT > Science - Mr. Thorbjarnarson was a scientist with wide interests in saving and learning about many species.

Discovery Channel - The epic start-up drama surrounding the world's most powerful particle accelerator just took another painful twist.

Discovery Channel - It was the blockbuster environmental deal of a lifetime: Florida Governor Charlie Crist announced in 2008 that the state was going to buy 180,000 acres of wetlands from United States Sugar Corporation. The purchase would effectively close U.S. Sugar's doors ...

Discovery Channel - There's flame in the trenches, but not the one Space Exploration Technologies was hoping for, as it counted down Tuesday afternoon to the first test-firing of its new Falcon 9 rocket. Two seconds before the rocket's nine motors were to ...

Discovery Channel - The Maldives government has banned shark fishing in its 35,000 square miles of sovereign waters.

Scrum Alliance

Scrum Alliance

Scrum Alliance

Scrum Alliance - As agile projects work better and better, an increasingly commonproblem is not the project itself, but the surrounding culture andmanagement structures.To realise business benefit in super speed you need to rebuild theorganisation around the projects. It is one thing to deliver a single successful agile project but quiteanother to change the culture and organization around the project toensure successful agile processes are repeatable long term.

Getting Things Done - We just posted Best Practices of Doing to the Connect Media Library. If you haven't caught the earlier ones, here are the links: Collect Process Organize Review I've loved doing this series. And for those of you who heard the rumor of a GTD Boot Camp...it's coming. Coach Meg and I met about it y...

Getting Things Done - What are the best practices of Doing? How often does David Allen really look at his lists? Listen as David Allen, Wayne Pepper and Kelly Forrister explore the Doing phase.

WebMD - One in six Americans between the ages of 14 and 49 have genital herpes and close to 1 in 2 black women are infected, new figures from the CDC reveal.

WebMD - Good health may not only help you live longer, it could help you enjoy a longer, more satisfying sex life as well, a study shows.

Zen Habits -

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on twitter or identica.

I don’t often write reviews of ebooks, but a handful of them have come out in the last couple weeks that I just can’t ignore — I really think they’ll be of interest to Zen Habits readers who are interested in getting out of debt, in minimalism, or in reducing dependence on cars.

The first is a project I’m involved in: Unautomate Your Finances. An ebook by Baker of ManvsDebt, it teaches you to curb your impulse spending and become more conscious of your financial habits, so you can stop living paycheck-to-paycheck and take control of your money. I wrote a forward to the ebook and there’s a video interview with me on these topics that comes with the book. Buy it here: Unautomate Your Finances.

A quick note: the links to the ebooks in this post are affiliate links, which means that while I’d fully recommend them without compensation, if you do buy a copy you’re helping to support Zen Habits.

Some other awesome ebooks I think you’ll be interested in:

• Simplify: focuses on 7 guiding principles used by the family of four who share their journey at the excellent blog, Becoming Minimalist. Must-read.
• Simply Car-free: wonderful ebook by Tammy of Rowdy Kittens (another awesome simplicity blog) that explores the whys and hows of becoming car-free. Very practical guide that’s been useful to me as my family and I move towards a car-free lifestyle (will be fully car-free when we move to S.F. in June).
• Project M-31: Simplify Your Life in 30 Days: excellent step-by-step approach by Dave of The Minimalist Path that will target one area of your life per day for 30 days. Makes a major change manageable.
• The Art of Being Minimalist: book by Everett Bogue, great advice on becoming a minimalist.

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Haiti Relief Donation
I’m also happy to report back to all of you that my fund-raising effort for the Haiti disaster relief was successful, thanks to all of you! As I said near the end of January, 100% of Zen Habits ebook sales for 30 days would be donated to Doctors Without Borders. Last week, I was happy to make a donation of $6,100 from those ebook sales.

So thank you, all of you, for your generosity!

If you’d still like to buy a Zen Habits ebook to support this site, you can do so:

1. Zen To Done.
2. The Simple Guide to a Minimalist Life.
3. The Zen Habits Handbook for Life.

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Zen Habits blog skin, plus a video
Finally, a couple things of potential interest to bloggers:

1. Zen Habits skin. If you buy the Frugal theme for Wordpress, or if you already own it, you can get the Zen Habits skin for Frugal. The skin is free, and it’ll make your blog look pretty much like this one, if that’s of interest.

2. Video interview with Leo: Making a living online. Eric Hamm, developer of Frugal and blogger at Motivate Thyself, did a video interview with me on making a living online. I don’t give you any get-rich-quick answers, but it’s a little insight into what has worked for me.

Discovery Channel - These ancient DNA samples could open the door to cloning long-extinct species.

WebWorkerDaily -

After you put your first corporate telework program in place, you’ll find that the actions and inactions of management, workers staying in the office, and the teleworkers themselves all have an impact on the success of the program. Managing these stakeholders and the politics they bring into play is integral to the success of teleworking in your organization.

Your organization needs to understand that is just not the teleworker who can wreck a telework program. Management, executive sponsorship and fellow workers can also do damage to your program. Here are the primary ways an organization can wreck its telework program:

1. It forgets about communicating and documenting expectations. Management, teleworkers and in-office staff are all going to have their expectations about how the telework program should and should not work. This is no time for “delegate and desert” management or mind reading. The communication and documentation of expectations is why I am such a fan of corporate telework plans.
2. It won’t alter business processes (if needed). Using teleworkers on a project team for the first time may require some alterations of existing business processes. Project managers, teleworkers, and other staff may need to work together to analyze and adapt to the impact that teleworking may have over their day-to-day team workflow and processes.
3. It fumbles expense reports. Teleworkers fudging their expense reports; management and accounting belaboring expense reports; and a corporate telework pilot plan ambiguous about what home office/business expenses the company will reimburse are all certain to contribute to the sinking of your corporate telework program. Put the right accounting and program controls in place up front so finances aren’t even a slight worry for teleworkers and their management.
4. It isn’t accessible. While it is easy to point to the teleworker always having to be accessible, the same rules need to apply to management and office-based staff. As more communications get lost in email inboxes and voicemail, there is a greater impact on productivity which could give rise to the end of the program. If email and phone call dodging is part of your corporate culture then you can expect these problems to contribute to the downfall of your telework program.
5. It forgets the business value of teleworking. After digging myself out from the recent record snowfall that hit my area, I came across many stories of businesses with telework programs where the home office workers didn’t have to work if their employer’s office was closed due to the weather. These businesses didn’t take didn’t take advantage of a natural event where formal and informal teleworking had the chance to really shine. The United States federal government and a number of non-profit organizations and companies shut down for more than a week where even a case-by-case teleworking plan could have meant that at least some business could have taken place, despite the record snowfall left by back-to-back storms. On top of any organization’s list of advantages for teleworking should be business continuity and to forget that is selling a telework program short.

What tools and processes is your organization putting in place to ensure the success of your teleworking program? Share your advice below.

Photo by stock.xchng user bamcopau.

Knowledge Problem -

Michael Giberson

The New York Times has a fascinating story on the solar power industry boom and bust in Spain created by shifting public policies. Similar effects have been observed from shifts in subsidy support for renewable power development in the United States, though because the subsidy was smaller and spread over a larger area the consequences were not so dramatic as described in the Spanish solar policy case.

The renewable power industry usually takes these boom-and-bust cycles as evidence that long-lasting subsidies are needed, but it may just signal that the subsidies are poorly designed and so neither economically nor politically sustainable.

WSJ.com Video - Business - With concerns mounting about tap-water purity, there are a slew of new products on the market. About the House columnist Wendy Bounds samples filters for faucets, showers, water bottles and pitchers - and even enlists the help of some thirsty friends to determine which filtered pitcher emerges as the winner of a taste-test.

NYT > Science - Are almonds a good source of calcium or do they block calcium absorption?

WebMD - While some researchers suggest the rising rates of melanoma may simply reflect a change in how doctors diagnose melanoma and the increased availability of skin cancer screenings, a leading dermatologist says the increase is real.

Flu.gov - Although flu activity has declined in recent weeks, 2009 H1N1 Influenza viruses continue to spread in the United States and abroad, causing illness, hospitalizations and even deaths.

Scientific American -

For the first time in U.K. history, an alien species (meaning one that is not native to the area) will be let loose in the kingdom to combat the growth of another species--also introduced. [More]

CNN - Personal Finance - The bright spot of the dreary 2009 economy: savings for everyone.

WebMD - Most companies lack meaningful policies to curb the marketing of high-fat and high-sugar junk food to children, according to a report by a consumer watchdog group.

Forbes Woman - No one likes to think about their demise, but it pays to be prepared--at least on paper.

Getting Things Done - One of the most common questions we get is how to get started with GTD.   New people, especially, will ask this after coming to us dazed and confused by what GTD is really about.   And, lots of people seem to be hoping a piece of software will teach them GTD.  Sorry, but that's kind of like buying a car and then learning how to drive.  You'll make your way down the road, but it won't be pretty. As a GTD Coach, and also intimately involved in the education and offerings from David Allen, I would suggest one of the following products:

The GTD System - This is, in my opinion, one of the best educational products we offer.  You get a ton of resources to learn GTD at your own pace.  You get the GTD book, coaching CDs with David Allen, GTD Connect and more. Good stuff. GTD Live - If you like to learn by listening, then this is for you.  It's David presenting the full two-day GTD seminar.  Follow along as if you are in the audience. I'd personally love to see a video version of this as well, being more visual than auditory in my own learning style. But it's a fantastic resource to learn directly from DA. The Getting Started Series - GTD Connect has a 16-part Getting Started series. It walks you through all of the key topics of GTD and includes audio and video of David and the coaches chatting about the best practices.  A great way to get up and running in bite -sized chunks.

...and if any of those don't do it for you, go back to the original manual for GTD: the book.  Can't go wrong. After all these years, I still find new pearls of wisdom in it, but then again, I love this stuff.  Of course, seminars and coaching are the crown jewels, but as far as products you can do at your own pace, the list above is where I would start. Cheers, Kelly more about me...

WSJ.com Video - Business - This could be a defining year for the electric car, and particularly for start-up companies. WSJ's Joseph B. White provides a look at Coda Automotive's offering, which combines U.S. and Chinese ingenuity.

National Geographic - At least one channel thought to have been carved by water was actually built by lava flows, according to a new study of Martian surface features.

National Geographic - For 4,500 years in what is now Mexico, decomposing bodies were pulled apart and reburied, according to what may be the first evidence for ritual "double burials."

Scientific American -

Whereas most discarded plastic water and beverage bottles (those imprinted with a number 1 within a triangular arrow) can be recycled , the resulting second-generation plastic is generally unusable for making new plastic bottles. This is because the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) thermoplastic polymer used to make the original bottles is often made with the help of metal oxide or metal hydroxide catalysts that linger in the recycled material and weaken it over time. [More]

National Geographic - It turns out evidence for water on the moon was right under our noses all along, according to new studies of rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts.

WSJ.com Video - Business - Anirvan Banerji, director of research at Economic Cycle Research, joins the News Hub to discuss why he believes the U.S. economy will experience more frequent recessions ahead.

NYT > Science - Making the leap from reactor-grade nuclear fuel to bomb-grade is like the rich getting richer: really fast.

Discovery Channel - A research team from IBM and Stanford announced that they have developed a new, inexpensive method for plastic recycling that could eliminate downcycling, resulting in higher quality products. One of the major problems with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, frequently used ...

NYT > Science - In a new book about the space race, Megan Prelinger sees hopes, dreams and fears in the form of magazine ads.

WebMD - New research confirms that giving flu shots to large numbers of school-age children can protect the community at large.

Scientific American -

Making aluminum requires a lot of electricity. That's because the metal bonds tightly to oxygen and it takes a lot of energy to break that bond. In essence, the process of making aluminum is a giant battery with the silvery metal being reduced to purity at the cathode while oxygen bonds with the carbon anode to make, you guessed it, CO2. It takes roughly 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity to make just one kilogram of aluminum via electrolysis. [More]

WebMD - Kidney donors fare just as well as non-donors over the long term, according to a new study.

WebWorkerDaily -

Most time tracking and management applications require some up front work before you can roll with them, but not Windows app Chrometa. This utility starts working for you as soon as you install it. Running in the background, Chrometa tracks all your computing activities including emails, visits to web sites and open applications. It sorts the activities by application or tool and does it all without you needing to do a thing.

You don’t need to work hard to figure out the simple interface, either. A calendar sits on the left side of the screen that lets you go back and review any day, week, month or selected timeframe to see how you spend your time. Categories appear below the calendar. The rest of the interface splits into two sections: Active Time and Away Time. That’s it.

Initially, all activities appear under “Uncategorized.” You can leave it like that, if you’d like. Or you can create new categories by project, client or others. If you want an application to always appear under an assigned category, Chrometa can do that. For example, you could tag Hootsuite and Tweetdeck so those entries always go into the “social media” category, or tag Thunderbird and Outlook  entries for the “email” category (note that if you use a web-based email app like Gmail, this won’t work unless you use a unique browser for Gmail only). Chrometa not only shows how much time you spend in email, but also it gives you an idea of what emails you worked on based on the subject of the email. Web browser activities work similarly, relying on the web site’s title.

Sometimes it’s hard to identify an activity. That’s not Chrometa’s fault. For example, say you start a new Word document that you have not yet saved. Unsaved documents show up in Chrometa as “Document1,” Word’s default name for an unnamed document. Confusing web site items are also out of Chrometa’s control. Furthermore, you can’t edit Active Time descriptions. This is both a good and bad thing. It’s good because clients who need to see where you spend your time know that they can trust the information. It’s bad because not everyone needs to share data with others.

Chrometa runs minimized, sitting in your system tray out of your way. When you step away, you don’t need to do anything to track your non-PC time. Chrometa knows you’re idle when you stop using the computer for a set time. Upon your return, an alert box appears so you can enter how you want to record the non-PC time or ignore it. This is the only time the app pops up without your involvement.

You can easily block applications that you don’t want to track. Additionally, we all visit web pages or look at an email for a few seconds. This can add up to a lot of activities, but you can hide activities that are shorter than one minute, five minutes and 10 minutes. Like blocked applications, this cuts the noise and concentrates on the real activities.

Other features include the ability to export data to an Excel spreadsheet, and Timestamps for showing a chronological record of your daily activities in one-hour blocks.

You may pause the app when you use the computer for activities not related to work that you don’t want to record. But be warned that it won’t remind you that you’ve paused the time in case you forget to turn it back on. A future release will need to address this.

The program has only a couple of niggles. The Active Time data sometimes disappears, and the only way to get it back is to close and open the application. The app could also stand some usability improvements to make it easier to change categories, or to move things around. However, the time management application is ahead of many others in its ease of use and effectiveness. The impressive thing about Chrometa is that you can benefit from the collected data without doing anything.

You can download Chrometa for free. The free version has all of the features of the paid version, and works for 30 days. After 30 days, you’ll need a license key to continue using the app either by purchasing Chrometa for a one-time fee of $99 or qualifying for a free license.

What do you think of Chrometa?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Forbes Woman - Norway's first male Minister of Children and Equality talks about why women and men should have equal power in the boardroom and the nursery.

The Gates Notes - For his lifetime contributions to computer science, the Association for Computing Machinery has honored Chuck Thacker with its prestigious Turing Award. Over four decades, Thacker’s work at Xerox PARC and Microsoft have helped pave the way for the modern personal computer.

National Geographic - See exclusive views of tsunami-tossed boats, a collapsed bridge, and a crumbled cliff—scenes of the devastating toll of the February 27 Chile earthquake.

WebMD - A moisturizing cream whose active ingredient is the extract that gives Indian curry its distinctive flavor, smel,l and deep orange color may help fade fine facial lines, wrinkles, and aging spots.

NYT > Health - This wonderful winter seafood stew is easy to make and to serve.

Discovery Channel - Jewish sites are as much a part of Egypt's culture as Muslim mosques or Coptic churches, according to Egypt's Ministry of Culture.

CPSC.gov - The saw side of the machete can stick in wood during use, and if the user's hand slips off the handle and slides forward across the machete blade, this poses a laceration hazard.

Scientific American -

WASHINGTON--Every second, our bodies capture carbon dioxide in our tissues, transport it via the blood, and dump it in the lungs from where it is exhaled. This unconscious process is yet another way humans contribute to the accumulation of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere--albeit in a miniscule volume compared with burning fossil fuels . The key to this metabolic process is an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase and it's efficiency at capturing and releasing CO2 is what human engineers want to mimic at the power plant scale. [More]

Harvard Business Blogs -

Toyota has announced three major recalls covering a total of eight million vehicles globally since October 2009. The recalls are for defects that have been associated with 52 fatalities and 38 injuries so far.

Not surprisingly, the business media and notable Toyota experts are starkly pessimistic. We looked at 108 Wall Street Journal articles discussing Toyota during February, 2010, and found that 106 were negative to Toyota. In a recent column by Dennis Seid, Jeffrey Liker, an economist and author of The Toyota Way observed that the hearings and the resultant lawsuits could severely damage the company in many ways. Management consultant Kenichi Ohmae expressed reservations regarding the ability of Toyota's management to meet the "psychological" challenge in the face of mounting political and media attacks in a New York Times op-ed.

It's a dismal time for once-great Toyota, right? Maybe not. Using a national online panel provided by TRC, a marketing research organization, we interviewed 455 U.S. American vehicle owners between February 20 and March 2 to find out how they feel about Toyota. A total of 58 Toyota owners (13% of total) and 397 owners of other brands (87% of total) completed the survey, which matches the proportion of Toyota to non-Toyota drivers in the U.S. Most of the survey was comprised of satisfaction questions ranked on a 0 to 10 scale (10 being completely satisfied).

Results: Toyota owners' overall satisfaction was in line with other vehicle owners'. Using regression analysis, we found that Toyota owners cited four drivers of overall satisfaction with vehicle quality: reliability; ease of maintenance; safety; and brakes. These four predictors explained 88% of the variance in overall satisfaction with their vehicles. The same four factors explained 83% of variance in satisfaction with non-Toyota owners. We concluded that safety and brakes are equally important for both Toyota owners and owners of other vehicles when evaluating how satisfied they are with their vehicle's quality.

These respondents aren't living under rocks. Both for Toyota and non-Toyota owners, 93% of respondents had heard about the recalls. But contrary to media prognostications, the recalls don't appear to have affected the Toyota brand image adversely among its customers. Toyota owners, compared to owners of other vehicles, agreed more strongly that Toyota appropriately handled issues with respect to the brake-pedal recall; they were more likely to say they believed that this incident is an outlier, that typically Toyota has a strong reputation for quality, and that recall shows Toyota's commitment to customer safety.

We measured a number of perceptions regarding other brands among respondents. Toyota owners did not believe that domestic automakers such as GM, Ford, and Chrysler are catching up to Toyota and Honda in either safety or reliability. These results again indicate a clear and solidly strong brand advantage for Toyota among current Toyota vehicle owners.

Finally, the big question: Would you buy another Toyota? Again, the results were clear. Toyota owners did not believe they would be less likely to buy a Toyota vehicle in the future because of this incident, indicated greater willingness than non-Toyota customers to consider a Toyota for purchase, and considered Toyota to be one of the most reliable automotive brands.

Recall from the regression analysis that brakes and safety were two of the four factors that are equally, if not more important for Toyota owners than owners of other makes. Seems that the recalls for problems with these attributes should have made Toyota owners much less satisfied with the brand and seeking alternatives. Yet our respondents seem perfectly sanguine about their Corollas and Priuses.

We're chalking this up to the "brand insulation effect." For a brand to be insulated it needs to deliver two things to customers: a high level of satisfaction and, this is key, a consistent satisfaction. If you have both, you can withstand an instance of lapsed performance. If, on the other hand, satisfaction is high but also highly variable, there is no such insulation. If, for example, more recalls become necessary, Toyota's consistency will begin to wane and its insulation will begin to fail. Instances of negative performance reflect poorly on the brand, leading to a downward spiral of declining satisfaction and sales.

Our results show Toyota has brand insulation. Customers refute the overly pessimistic views being taken by many reporters and business experts. So, it was a great story, the Fall of Toyota. But so far, it's just a story.

Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke professor of management at the Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University. Rajan Sambandam is the Chief Research Officer at TRC. Utpal M. Dholakia is an associate professor of marketing at Rice University.

WebMD - Reovirus is harmless to normal cells -- but it destroys many kinds of cancer cells. A new study in patients with prostate cancer takes the virus closer to being a new cancer treatment.

Harvard Business Blogs -

Jeffry Liker, in his recent HBR blog post, minimizes the scope of quality problems arising from Toyota's hyper growth over the last decade. He sees those who believe Toyota has serious quality/safety problems as uninformed. He accuses them of contributing to a "growing mythology," viewing their "faulty generalizations" as "laughable." It is hard to square his views with the following three statements.

In January 2008, Chris Tinto, then Toyota's Vice President for Technical and regulatory Affairs, in an internal presentation, warned "some of the quality issues we are experiencing are showing up in defect investigations (rear gas struts, ball joints, etc)." "Although we rigorously defend our products through good negotiation and analysis, we have a less defensible product."

In Sept 2006, Jim Press, then the company's President of North American Operations, at a Toyota Japan headquarters presentation, reported that the number of Toyota vehicles recalled had increased sharply from 2003 to 2005. Parenthetically, I note that complaints lodged against Toyota with NHTSA, increased in almost linear fashion from about 1,100 in the year 2000 to almost 5,000 in 2009. Mr. Press concluded that "as more of our customers experience recalls, customer loyalty will suffer."

Recently, President Akio Toyoda repeatedly attributed Toyota's quality/safety problems to its rapid growth which outstripped its human resources. He said the company could not train enough personnel to keep up with its rapid growth. He acknowledged that a misguided strategic focus at the company warped the "order of Toyota's traditional priorities" so that the stress on product safety and quality first, and sales volume and cost second, became inverted as Toyota began rapidly expanding a decade ago.

Company executives do not casually make such damning statements about their own firm. Are these executives uninformed as to their own company's problems? Does Prof. Liker know Toyota better than its own executives? Prof. Liker's concluding statement, "I am not suggesting that Toyota is perfect," seems light years away from the harsh reality captured in these statements. Prof. Liker's analysis limits the problem scope to what he sees as two isolated engineering incidents. He asks where is the data that indicates a trend toward greater quality/safety problems? Consistent with John Shook's (a former Toyota manager) observations, the three statements strongly suggest that while one can assign Toyota's current problems to specific causes, they are also part of a pattern, one that reveals growing quality problems.

Notwithstanding Prof. Liker's attempt to discredit opposing views, knowledgeable outsiders are also attributing Toyota's problems to hyper growth and the growing technical complexity of autos. These developments have stretched thin its cadre of engineers. This was the thesis in my earlier blog post, one quite parallel to that of Prof. Takahiro Fujimoto, the leading student of the Toyota production system in his Nikkei Business Online analysis (in Japanese).

Prof. Liker critiques use of recalls as a measure of quality "when you are trying to make inferences about operations strategy." He notes that one problem can cause 2 million car recalls, but it is only "one problem." From an operational perspective, he is almost right (it's two: first the original defect, and second, the failure of quality control to catch it before products were shipped). From a customer perspective, however, he is dead wrong. For 2 million customers, it is 2 million problems. Here, Prof. Liker fundamentally misunderstands Toyota's traditional guiding principle of Customer First.

Recalls are, in fact, a powerful measure of quality because they are an important determinant of customer trust. Customer trust, in turn, is a major factor in quality perception. A survey commissioned by Toyota found 30% of U.S. customers said "having a recall on their current vehicle would make them seriously consider not buying that automotive brand again." With quality, perception is everything. A recent USA/Gallup national survey finds that 31% of respondents now believe Toyota vehicles are unsafe. It doesn't matter if the media hyped the problem or the politicians politicized it. Customer perception is what it is.

Prof. Liker says Consumer Reports' (CR) evaluations are a better measure of quality than recalls. He claims that information from CR shows that "Toyota had one of its best years of the decade in 2009." Yet, if we examine the percentage of a brand's vehicles recommended by CR, the trajectory shows significant decline from 85% in 2007, to 73% in 2008, to 47% in 2009 (partially reflecting current recalls).

Prof. Liker vigorously denies that rapid growth led to problems with supplier quality. His assuredness is mystifying since the relationship between rapid volume growth and the emergence of quality problems is well recognized by both quality experts and practitioners.

The growing difficulty Toyota had with growth and complexity in relation to supplier management is three fold. They had to delegate more design work to suppliers, Toyota personnel found it increasingly difficult to closely supervise suppliers' detailed component design, and less experienced Toyota engineers increasingly came to evaluate supplier work.

The CTS brake pedal module is a case in point. No one at Toyota denies that the detailed design and material choice was done by CTS. Toyota, per its policy, however, had full responsibility for approving that design, including providing testing instructions. Given the problems that arose, it is hard to deny its monitoring of the design process and outcome was insufficient. For Prof. Liker to assert as "truth" that the sticky pedal was "one very specialized isolated design issue" appears questionable at best.

Prof. Liker doubts there is a "need to explain the failure of the Toyota production system based on the current recalls." No knowledgeable expert has made such claims. Many of us are saying, however, that Toyota stressed its production system beyond its capabilities. What resulted was not a failure of the Toyota production system, which is still deservedly the envy of almost every major manufacturing firm worldwide. Rather, it was a failure of management, letting its 15% global market share target overshadow its traditional priorities.

Robert E. Cole is Professor Emeritus, Haas School of Business and Dept. Sociology, UC Berkeley, Executive Director, and Visiting Researcher, ITEC, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan

HybridCars.com -

Toyota officials last week confirmed that the Lexus CT 200h, a premium hybrid hatchback, is coming to the United States, according to a report in Automotive News. The Lexus CT 200h would be Lexus’s first compact car, and the first compact hybrid sold by Toyota in the US.

The car was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show last week, but until recently the company insisted that the compact hybrid would only be sold in Europe. According to Automotive News, Lexus executives pleaded with Japan to bring to the car to the US—partly in hopes that the smaller Lexus would appeal to a younger demographic. "When the all-new Lexus CT 200h enters the market it will be the only hybrid vehicle in the emerging premium compact segment," said Mark Templin, Lexus Division group vice president and general manager.

The Lexus CT 200h will make its US debut at the 2010 New York Auto Show later this month. Production begins in late 2010. The car could go on sale in the US sometime in 2011.

Small Luxury Compact Hybrid Hatchback

The recipe for the CT 200h is to place a Prius-type hybrid system—featuring a 1.8-liter gas engine with variable valve timing, and energy storage with a nickel-metal hydride battery pack—into small relatively affordable premium compact car. Lexus said the CT 200h will ride on a new front-wheel-drive platform with a MacPherson strut front suspension and double wishbones at the rear.

read more

Woods Hole Oceanographic - ABE, a pioneering deep-sea exploration robot—one of the first successful submersible vehicles that was both unmanned and untethered to surface ships—was lost at sea Friday, March 5, on a research expedition off the coast of Chile.
» Join WHOI's Facebook page and share your stories about ABE

Scientific American - Funding from ARPA-E could allow researchers to take a liquid metal battery from a 'shot glass size cell to a pizza box cell.'

Harvard Business Blogs -

What is an economy? Is it just rivers of money and stuff, flowing back and forth between consumer and producer, resting on a bed of information? That's more or less the way we've conceptualized it. It's why economists often say that banks and funds make up the "financial economy," while industries that make stuff are the "real economy."

When we conceptualize an economy that way, the implicit goal for both "producers" and "consumers" is merely accumulation of money and stuff. More, more, more. That's what I call a "thin" economy. That kind of economy is thin in three ways: it's brittle, easily broken; it's fragile, crisis-prone; and it's as shallow as Paris Hilton.

Consider Adam Smith's famous quote:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

The First Law of Economics, the big bang that sparked the discipline, expresses a thin economy perfectly. Stuff flows in one direction, money in another.

It's funny how much has changed since Smith's time. We don't have so many butchers, brewers, or bakers anymore. We have meat "processed" by the ton in city-sized factories, mega-scale manufacturing of "soft drinks," and, of course, industrialized agriculture.

And that's kind of the problem.

An economy is more than just money and stuff, glued together by information. It is flows of opportunity, creativity, passion, trust, and happiness — glued together by ethics. Its goal isn't just accumulation, but prosperity, flourishing, becoming. That's a thick economy: one that's resilient, lasting, and meaningful.

We're deeply in debt. But the real debt crisis isn't financial.

We're in debt to each other. There is a real real economy glimmering beneath the sharp machinations of money, corporations and stuff. It is the thick economy; it's that which makes us human. The way we conceptualize the global macroeconomy leaves out everything that, well, mattered to people. That is the debt we must repay.

The real roots of the crisis, as I said in my last post, aren't just in banks, bonuses, or bailouts — but in our culture. The real crisis isn't just a crisis of financial debt: it is a crisis of debt to each other, and the debt we to owe to another is not delineated in dollars, euros, or yen.

So how do we discharge that debt?

By updating Adam Smith's First Law. Here's how the First Law of 21st Economics should read:

"It is not from benevolence towards the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we should expect our dinner, but from our regard to our own interest."

Why is it in our own self-interest to expect our dinner from the baker, brewer, and butcher — instead of the big-box store, the strip-mall, and the frozen foods section?

Because that's when our towns and communities will thrive again. Because that's when meaningful, purposive, careful work meant for humans will return again. Because that's how the power of the vertically integrated agricultural giant, the bundling-and-tying pharmaceutical behemoth, and the prop-trading Medusa will start to evaporate.

Yes, tomorrow's organizations must be engines of more than merely money and stuff. They must learn to contribute to — and become essential components of — a thriving thick economy. Some companies are making a thicker economics peripheral to what they do, taking baby steps, like Pepsi's doing with Refresh, still trading stuff for money, but using some of that money to do slightly more meaningful things. Some companies are making thicker economics central to what they do, taking great leaps, like Wal-Mart's doing with zero waste: no longer just trading money for stuff, but zapping unnecessary stuff in the first place.

Yet even that's just a beginning. The economy is "constructed" by us: built anew every second of every day by each of our billions of tiny decisions, emergently. The real change begins with each of us, and the choices we make.

Adam Smith's famous quote — so often taken entirely out of context — wasn't merely a paean to greed. It was a recognition of the power of self-interest. Yet, on its own, it is unbalanced. Yes, the butcher, baker, and brewer offer us dinner out of their self-interest. But it is in our self-interest, too, to choose them. Because when we don't, we — with every choice we make, every step we take — enact a thin economy, one of merely money and stuff. When we do choose them, we enact a thick economy: one made up of stuff that matters to humans.

Smith was the archetypal Enlightenment thinker. Today, economics is undergoing a new Enlightenment. Geniuses with a billion times the brainpower of a snot-nosed punk like me are reconceiving it.

But even that's not enough. The roots of the recovery begin with each of us bringing a thick economy roaring back to life. The only lasting recovery is the transition to a thick economy — one that's not just a glorified Ponzi scheme that rips off the natural world, the powerless, and the future. That transition will only be sustainable when each of us lives it. An economy isn't built by big governments, giant evil corporations, or nerdy academics. It's built by the tiny choices of individual people.

There is no more left to borrow from each other. The Ponziconomy has had its day. Every day, with our actions, we construct a new economy, and create the future. Today, perhaps, it's time for the 21st century to be handcrafted with love, purpose, and meaning — not by Barack Obama, Wen Jiaobao, or Ben Bernanke. But by each of us.

Harvard Business Blogs -

The other night I went to see Mark Halperin and John Heilemann talk about their 2008 campaign bestseller, Game Change, at Harvard's Kennedy School. They were very sharp and entertaining, and they persuaded me to buy the book (the $8.61 Kindle price was a factor, too). They were also touchier than I would have expected about the criticism their book has received for its focus on the trivial and the personal.

Their defense was that political campaigns turn on the trivial and the personal, so if you ignore it you ignore the essence of why one candidate prevails over another. As Heilemann put it (I wasn't taking notes so this is a bad paraphrase, not a real quote): Voters didn't choose based on the fact that Hillary Clinton wanted a health insurance mandate and Barack Obama didn't.

As a defense of the book, I thought this was valid enough. It was kind of funny when a student in the audience asked Halperin (a former colleague of mine at Time) what lessons could be learned from Game Change, and all he could come up with was: Candidates whose private and public personas are more or less the same (Barack Obama) tend to have fewer troubles than those with private doings and attributes that they try to hide or at least play down (John Edwards, Hillary Clinton). Gee, thanks, guys. That's really informative.

This is of course the core of a long-running and entirely valid criticism of how the mainstream media cover politics: The narrative is all about personal characteristics and fleeting controversies, and leaves those who consume it intellectually undernourished. That debate gets enough play elsewhere that I won't go into it here, other than link to this fine Ezra Klein post about the differing fortunes of political and policy journalists. But what struck me while listening to Halperin and Heilemann defend their approach were the echoes of a different debate that runs through a book I've been reading, Walter Kiechel's Lords of Strategy (it's an HBS Press book, so you can discount anything I say as biased, but it really is excellent).

Kiechel tells of the rise of gurus — from the consultants of Boston Consulting and Bain to Harvard professor Michael Porter — who cut through the messy realities of business with strategic abstractions that purported to explain why companies succeed and fail. By the 1980s, critics were beginning to complain that the whole strategy exercise was too abstract, that what mattered were people or quirks of history. Even these critics (Tom Peters, Richard Pascale, Jeffrey Pfeffer) were operating at level of abstraction that consumers of political journalism would find deeply foreign. But the basic question was the same: Are you better off learning the particulars of how a candidate won or a corporation made money, or focusing on more universal explanations that can presumably be applied elsewhere?

My general sense is that most of us could use more of the latter (I like Malcolm Gladwell's line that "People are experience-rich and theory-poor"). But, clearly, you can overdo it with the abstraction (a case in point that I've spent way too much time studying: the efficient market hypothesis). The real lesson may be that we always need to be mixing and matching the two approaches, taking caution not to go too far in one direction or another. Which is why I'd like to propose a job exchange: Michael Porter takes over Halperin's political site The Page for six months, and Halperin comes to HBS to teach strategy. Just think: campaign hacks poring over Porter's Five Forces of Political Competition; MBA students digging through Indra Nooyi's latest speech in search of gaffes. Wouldn't it be fun?

NYT > Health - When you blanch the greens, these panini make for a quick and wonderful meal.

NYT > Health - Looking for new ways to get greens in your diet? An innovative panino and luxurious gratin are among this week’s recipes.

Official Google Blog - Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.

We've found that when businesses begin to experience the benefits of cloud computing, they want more. We're often asked when we'll offer a wider variety of business applications — from accounting and project management to travel planning and human resources management. But we certainly can't and won't do it all, and there are hundreds of business applications for which we have no particular expertise.

In recent years, many talented software providers have embraced the cloud and delivered a diverse set of features capable of powering almost any business. But too often, customers who adopt applications from multiple vendors end up with a fractured experience, where each particular application exists in its own silo. Users are often forced to create and remember multiple passwords, cut and paste data between applications, and jump between multiple interfaces just to complete a simple task.

Today, we're making it easier for these users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses, including:

NYT > Science - A procedure gains popularity but doesn't improve survival odds.

WebWorkerDaily -

While we may not all agree on the “rules” when it comes to marketing, we can all agree that marketing has changed considerably in recent years, largely due to social media. “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs” by HubSpot’s Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah is a primer for those looking to learn how to make the most of social media to pull in customers.

A broad book, its contents revolve around how to get prospects to find you through blogs, search engines and social media. Halligan and Shah also discuss converting customers and how to apply that to your business and web site.

The short first chapter explains what has changed in marketing, and how online technologies effected the change. The first part of the book provides little value with its brief coverage of your web site as a marketing hub and creating a remarkable strategy. Really, these first chapters set the tone for the rest of the book in that its contents are wide and shallow.

The bulk of the book rightfully focuses on “Getting Found,” with 100 pages devoted to the topic out of the book’s roughly 200. Despite that much coverage, it’s still elementary stuff. The section on converting customers only lasts for three chapters, and it needs more material than the five chapters of “Make Better Decisions.”

The “Make Better Decisions” section included a whole chapter devoted to picking a PR agency and another on how to hire the right people for your marketing team. The advice given on how to find marketers who are digital citizens, however, is outdated. For example, the suggestion to hire people based on their web reach recommends looking at how many followers they have in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Most of us know that raw follower numbers have little value, with so many low quality users who know how to rack up the numbers.

The authors are also behind the Website Grader and Twitter Grader web sites, which they mention so frequently that at times it reads like a promotion. This book really is just a primer: You won’t glean anything new if you know the basics of search engine optimization, such as the difference between organic and paid listings, and you already know how to use social media tools and connect those tools with your business and web site. ”Inbound Marketing” does a good job for those who don’t have a clue about how to use social media for business and want to understand the bigger picture.

Have you read “Inbound Marketing?” Please share what you think in the comments.

Harvard Business Blogs -

Over the past few months there has been growing anger and frustration about outsized Wall Street bonuses awarded by institutions that were rescued by taxpayer funds. At the core of this anger is the feeling that the pursuit of big payoffs caused bankers to develop complex products and take big risks which ultimately caused the financial system to crash — and if this dynamic is not curbed, it will happen again. At the same time, there is also a feeling, reinforced by President Obama, that Wall Street bankers have not really been held accountable for their risky actions and, in fact, are being unduly rewarded while everyone else continues to suffer.

Unfortunately, the focus on Wall Street masks a more dangerous pattern of rewarding failure that is deeply embedded in the highest levels of corporate and governmental culture. For example, President Obama's point person for reforming Wall Street is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. But somehow Geithner himself has not been held accountable for the financial crisis. This is despite the fact that as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Geithner was responsible for the supervision of Wall Street banks. His reward for allowing these banks to create unsustainable balance sheets: He was made Treasury Secretary.

Similarly Geithner's boss in the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, was not held accountable for the interest rate and regulatory policies that some say caused the crisis. Instead, he was confirmed for a second term by a wide margin in the Senate. And to complete the failure trifecta, Lawrence Summers, who supported many of the policies that caused the financial crisis and resigned from his position as President of Harvard after making unfortunate statements about the capabilities of women, was given a senior role as a White House economic policy advisor.

But this culture of rewarding failure is not limited to the highest levels of government. Virtually every senior corporate leader of a failed institution walks away with millions of dollars. Many move on to other senior corporate jobs or board positions. Take Robert Nardelli as an example. After not getting the top job at GE in 2001, Nardelli became the CEO of Home Depot where he made a series of strategic missteps and displayed an arrogance that alienated employees and customers. After being ousted from that job (with millions of dollars) he was hired by Cerberus to turn around Chrysler — another failure which ultimately resulted in its acquisition by Fiat. And while thousands of Chrysler employees and dealers lost their jobs and their incomes, again Nardelli walked away with his fortune intact and enhanced.

None of this is to blame Geithner, Bernanke, Summers or Nardelli. The point of this argument is that at the highest levels of government and corporations, we have accepted a culture of rewarding failure. That is why perhaps the best job in America is to be a failed CEO. You receive millions in severance and are once more given opportunities to either try it again, or serve on a board of directors where you can again escape accountability for failure. In fact, while President Obama calls for "clawbacks" of banker's bonuses, nobody seems to be calling for directors to return the compensation that they received for poorly "supervising" financial institutions and other corporations that struggle or fail.

Steve Kerr, former chief learning officer of GE and Goldman Sachs, notes that the biggest problem with compensation is what he calls "asking for A while rewarding B." If we are serious about asking for excellent performance, then we have to stop rewarding failure. It's a simple equation — and until we get it right, the President's calls for greater accountability will have a hollow ring.

What do you think?

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Harvard Business Blogs -

Should Sally slowly build her case for evidence-based management or does she need to take a more aggressive approach?

Editors' Note: This fictional case study will appear in a forthcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, along with commentary from experts and readers. If you'd like your comment to be considered for publication, please be sure to include your email address.

Sally Randolph rose from her swivel chair and walked over to the Norman Rockwell print hanging on her wall. A remnant from the days when she and Mark Wiley worked together as resident physicians, it showed a concerned young girl holding up her doll to a white-haired doctor, who was kindly "listening" to its heart.

She loved this image and what it stood for: medicine focused on people. Mark had caught a glimpse of the print in her locker, and back then he had liked it. She wondered what he'd think of it now.

They both still worked at American Medical Center, a $2 billion institution with one thousand beds and a $2 billion budget, but Mark was now CEO and Sally chief medical officer. The image of the e-mail he'd just sent— marked urgent with a red exclamation point and the subject line "Evidence-Based-Management Seminar Canceled" — blurred her vision. Apparently the focus for Mark had shifted to profits.

Middle Managers Versus Chiefs
"Hi, Dr. Randolph. Are you interruptible?"

Richard Lee stood with his fist against the door frame, as if he'd been knocking. She wondered how long he'd been there but had a good idea what he wanted.

"Oh, sorry, Richard! Yes, of course. Come in."

She walked back behind her desk and motioned for Richard to take the seat across from her.

"What's on your mind?"

Richard was one of the 36 participants in the Evidence-Based-Management (EBMgmt) seminar Sally had run for the past year with Harry Bradshaw, a professor of management at Lucas Business School. Every other month, clinicians and managers had met in teams of six and tackled the management challenges facing AMC. Richard's team had focused on how to better coordinate patient care.

"I just read the memo from Mark, and, frankly, I'm really frustrated," Richard said. "I appreciate that he values the skills we acquired in the seminar and says he wants to use them somehow, but making us middle managers on some new task forces won't change how anyone works. The medical chiefs weren't receptive to the seminar's recommendations. What makes him think they'll be receptive to the practices behind those recommendations? I feel like creating these task forces may just be Mark's way of softening the blow."

Sally couldn't argue with him. His team had tirelessly followed the seminar's evidence-based approach: translating management challenges into a set of research questions, answering those questions with the best literature out there, and conducting pilot research studies to support the alternative interventions they eventually proposed to senior management.

But despite all the proof of fragmented patient care and the need to improve AMC's delivery system, the medical chiefs didn't think the team's recommended process improvements were more important than their research and teaching. Without support from senior management, the recommendations never made it off the ground.

"I know, Richard," Sally sighed. "It's hard to imagine decisions ever getting made differently around here, especially now. You make a very good point, though. If the chiefs weren't wowed by evidence-based management when Harry and I were the ones selling it, all of you middle managers on the new task forces will have an even harder time getting them on board. I'll mention this to Mark, but I'm afraid I can't make any promises."

She thought of the part in Mark's e-mail where he talked about Centers of Excellence as a new top priority. These would be run by the chiefs, and with this new responsibility — and power — she worried they'd have even less tolerance for change.

"Thanks, Sally. I appreciate it," Richard said as he pushed back his chair and stood to leave.

"Well, we'll see how it goes," Sally said. But she thought to herself, "Don't thank me yet."

Running Out of Options
Deciding to make her morning run six miles instead of three, Sally turned the corner to begin a second loop around the lake. She always entered a sort of Zen state after 30 minutes of pounding the pavement, and today she needed all the clarity she could get.

She knew AMC historically broke even financially, and chatter among senior management hinted that Mark had received clear direction from the board to focus on "not losing money." One way to boost the center's financial results was to increase volume, which surely was behind Mark's new strategic plan.

Centers of Excellence attracted more patients, and more patients equaled bigger profits — in most circumstances. Sally couldn't help but think that Mark had missed one crucial fact: 90% of AMC's current patients were low income, and their health care was paid for by Medicare or Medicaid. The chances of the new centers attracting enough higher-income patients to make up for the no-pay patients were slim, especially considering the nicer facilities that already existed in wealthier neighborhoods.

Shaking out her arms on a downhill stretch, she wondered if it was possible to turn the situation from a lose-lose into at least a lose-win. Perhaps if evidence-based management were part of the larger strategic plan, the data would eventually tell the story the EBMgmt team had been trying to tell for some time now.

Before she approached Mark, though, she knew she should probably check in with Harry. He had corun the seminar, after all, and might have some ideas of his own.

A Patient Approach
"Have you tried the stir fry?" Sally asked.

Sally and Harry maneuvered their way around the Lucas Business students bustling through the dining hall between classes. It was a beautiful day — April like it is only in Virginia — and many students were taking their lunches out to the quad. One of them recognized Harry as her professor, giving him a polite smile as she passed with her cell pressed against her ear.

"The stir fry is good, but beware the hot sauce. It's more garlic than spice," Harry responded.

"Sally," he went on, "you know I've worked with Mark for 16 years. I know him, and I know AMC. My advice is to start small. There's just no proof out there that evidence-based management has a high ROI. Limit your efforts to your jurisdiction, to regulating quality and safety, and prove its effectiveness there before trying to convince Mark of broader structural change. We're lucky that he wants to promote the process at all, considering the seminar didn't produce any tangible results."

"But, Harry, Mark's focus on Centers of Excellence is a definite step in the wrong direction," Sally said.

"Believe me, I wish the seminar hadn't been cancelled. I completely agree it's a bad idea to leave it to the middle managers to enlighten the chiefs. At this point, though, there's not enough financial or political support for restructuring."

Back in her office, Sally pondered Harry's advice. Following his recommendations would take endless months to produce modest results, and for that entire time the center would be pouring resources into a misguided plan to increase profits while moving further away from better patient care.

True, the consequences of not having a seamless delivery system weren't always dire — one patient receiving a cold meal wasn't the end of the world. But it really wasn't acceptable when a high-risk patient had trouble scheduling a crucial follow-up visit or when a patient missed several doses of medication because of miscommunication.

Doing what was right to improve the patient experience was increasingly complex, but every indicator suggested a seamless delivery system was the solution. If the organization seriously committed to using evidence for making better managements decisions, maybe everything else would fall into place. Fostering that sort of commitment would require leadership from the top. And what better way to begin that process than as part of a new strategic plan?

Proof of Evidence
Back at home, Sally plopped down on the couch, mentally exhausted. Her husband, Joe, walked in minutes later with their small dog, Penny, who was excited and straining to be let off her leash.

"How's it going?" he asked.

She let out a big sigh and recapped her conversation with Harry.

"I can accept not being able to restructure the organization wholesale, but creating these Centers of Excellence shows a complete lack of interest in using evidence to make smart decisions. Mark needs to do more than pay lip service to promoting the 'great skills' learned in the seminar. "

"Well, maybe Harry has a point," Joe said, unlacing his shoes. "We have all the evidence we need that the U.S. health care system is not sustainable. Our costs are too high, quality is too uneven, and millions of people can't even get care. Still, all that evidence hasn't resulted in the right changes. Proving the value of evidence-based management is going to be tough."

Sally's look told him that wasn't the reaction she wanted.

"But why do I need to prove its value first?" she asked. "Is there a known positive ROI for top-down decision making? For decisions based on anecdotes and gut reactions?"

Joe didn't have the answers, but he did have the ingredients to make a killer baked ziti. As Sally watched him walk to the kitchen, Penny pitter-pattering behind, she thought about the odds of changing Mark's mind. At most institutions, it would be career suicide to confront the CEO about the flaws in his strategic plan. But Sally and Mark had been residents together, and he had personally recruited her for this position. If she played up the potential cost savings of EBMgmt, she might have a chance.

Unfortunately, as Harry pointed out, scientific proof of evidence-based management's positive ROI did not exist — yet. She'd be taking a gamble by advocating for it so strongly. On the other hand, if they committed to Mark's plan as is, they might never make any improvements at all in patient care.

Should Sally listen to Harry and slowly build her case for evidence-based management, or should she immediately launch a campaign to sell the CEO on the approach?

Anthony R. Kovner is a professor of public and health management at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.