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Asking potential customers to buy a mobile app instead of giving them a free one is a huge mistake, said investors on a panel at Google I/O about the freemium business model, where companies give their product away for free and charge for premium features and services.

Subscription models, in-app upgrades and virtual goods are a much better idea than an upfront fee, said the panelists. Charging for mobile apps “sucks,” said Brad Feld of the Foundry Group. “You never want a customer to be a single-instance experience.” That’s a surprising statement, given the popularity of paid mobile apps, and the propensity of freemium businesses to offer a paid mobile app and a free “lite” version. But Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC agreed. “Now that you have the ability to charge in-app you really want to do your math,” Clavier said. “Recurring revenue will make you way more than $4.99.”

Some of the other strong and quotable advice from the VCs and angels on the panel:

Know why you’re going freemium: There are three main reasons to offer a version of your paid product for free, said Dave McClure of the Founders Fund. First, giving a new user time to learn what your product is; second, taking advantage of viral distribution; and third, improving the value of your product for users via the network benefit of having more people using it. Know which reason you’re choosing and design around it.

Don’t forget the business model: “Put your business model into beta at the same time you put your product into beta,” said Joe Kraus of Google Ventures.

Pick big markets: The vast majority of customers for any freemium business will choose the free option. For just about everything except antivirus apps, “It’s about a 2 percent asymptote on conversion for most apps from free to premium,” said Kraus. Don Dodge of Google said he’d surveyed 25 freemium companies and found the average was between 3 and 5 percent of users converting to paid, depending on the price point. The lesson? “You want these markets to be really big,” said Matt Holleran of Emergence Capital. That may mean that the enterprise market doesn’t make sense — though you may be able to successfully piggyback onto Google Apps, Holleran said.

Making some customers pay will cap your growth: Feld spoke of his experience with the RSS company FeedBurner, which had 100,000 publishers at the time it was bought by Google. Of those, just 2,000 paid $5 per month for premium features. But the real business was advertising within feeds. After Google bought the company, it extended the premium version to everyone for free. The lesson, said Feld: “The freemium model may actually get in your way relative to the indirect opportunity.”

Making some customers pay will divide your company: The real danger in a freemium model, said Kraus, is it introduces a “cultural split” within the company between what to put in the paid version and what to put in the free one. But McClure disagreed, saying great businesses are not a zero-sum game. Let the customer advocates clash with the people trying to keep the lights on and see what happens, he said.

Don’t trust yourself; trust the numbers: “Your instinct about what a customer will pay for is likely wrong,” said Feld. McClure recommended that any would-be freemium entrepreneur read the book “Predictably Irrational” to learn about people’s non-intuitive buying preferences. The panelists agreed heartily that startups should collect and analyze analytics before, during and after a product is launched.

Pricing is hard: But here are some tips: Kraus, who founded and ran online document editor JotSpot before it was acquired by Google, said to look at consumer behavior around cell phone plans, where they tend to pay one tier higher than what they use. Over the course of a year, that’s more expensive than just incurring a couple overage charges. “People are not optimizing for lowest price, they optimize for least surprise.” Kraus also argued, “It’s much easier to raise prices than to lower prices. The people who got the earlier price feel like they got a good deal. If you lower they’re p***ed off.”

Related research from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Report: Monetizing Digital Content

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ProBargainHunter has got the entire list of Amazon’s official coupon codes for May. Here’s some of the deepest discounts:

35% off Java Juice JAVAJ555
35% off Taco Bell TACOBEL5 mmm!
40% off Plum Tots baby foods PLUMTOT5

Whenever you use a coupon code, a frugal fairy gets its wings.

Amazon Coupon Codes for May 2010 [ProBargainHunter]

by Jonathan Hiskes

Climate and energy
issues barely registered in this month’s primary coverage, but Rand Paul (son of
Ron) saw fit to take on the Copenhagen climate talks after becoming the
Republican Senate candidate in Kentucky last night.

“We have a president
who went to Copenhagen and appeared with Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chávez and others—Evo
Morales—to apologize for the Industrial Revolution,” he said. “These petty
dictators say that to stop climate change it’s about ending capitalism. The president, by attending Copenhagen, gives credibility and credence to these
folks, and he should not go.”

Reality check: Obama supports
a market-based (i.e. capitalist) response to climate change—cap-and-trade. That’s
the policy he backed in Copenhagen. He joined more than 100 heads of state
there and didn’t show any love to Mugabe, Chávez, or Morales. In fact, when Bolivian
president Morales boycotted the Copenhagen Accord reached last December, Obama’s
State Department withdrew climate adaptation funding from the country.

Sounds like we can look
forward to more nuanced discussions of who’s for and against the Industrial
Revolution.

A few other notes from
last night’s election:

Paul’s victory gives
Democratic candidate Jack Conway a swinging chance in typically red Kentucky,
according to Internet
Speculation. Actually, Salon’s Alex Pareene points
out that both Conway and his Democratic opponent got more votes in Tuesday’s primary
than Paul, which suggests Kentucky isn’t entirely excited about a Paul-style libertarian
rEVOLution.
And while Conway, who currently serves as Kentucky’s attorney general, professes
his love for Kentucky coal, he sounds like he could be a potential “yes” vote for a Senate
clean-energy bill.
In Pennsylvania’s rather
conservative 12th Congressional District, Democrat Mark Critz decisively beat Republican Tim
Burns in a special election. That’s good news for Democrats but bad news for
cap-and-trade, Michael Levi notes,
as Critz loudly opposed the climate policy and professed
his love for Pennsylvania coal.
Arkansas Sen. Blanche
Lincoln failed to win a majority in the Democratic primary and faces a runoff against challenger Bill
Halter. A while back we summarized her dismal
environmental record and his blank slate on green issues.

 

Related Links:

Obama admin overhauls MMS, the agency in charge of offshore drilling

Robert Redford and green groups tell Obama to step up on Gulf oil leak

Friedman nails Obama for his timid response to the “environmental 9/11”

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In a pair of blog posts released simultaneously this afternoon, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer General Manager, Dean Hachamovitch, walked on eggshells in explaining why his group is staying the course with respect to its decision on the H.264 codec in IE9. This in the wake of Google’s historic move today to release the VP8 video codec it acquired under a full open source license under the umbrella title WebM, even though it could mean legal action against Google down the road.

“The issue of potential patent liability is ‘ultimately for the courts to decide,’” wrote Hachamovitch in one post, citing an Engadget article from earlier this month. Reaffirming his company’s commitment to the ideals of HTML 5 — whatever those may be today — he stated at two points, “IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.”

When one parses the sentence for the fact that Hachamovitch did not mention the user needing to install an H.264 codec on Windows (although Silverlight does provide such a service), one may conclude that the way one enables Internet Explorer to play any VP8 video will actually remain unchanged from today. Microsoft may not be distributing the VP8 codec itself with either IE or Windows Media Player, so IE users (along with Apple Safari users, most likely) will find themselves downloading the codec separately. Though it’s too early in the game to say for certain, Google could probably establish a portal for such distribution, maybe even through YouTube.

In a second blog post, gently but very deliberately, Hachamovitch addressed what he characterized as “the uncertainty” over H.264 and HTML 5 by explaining that IE9 will be open in its acceptance of third-party plug-ins that offer functionality above and beyond HTML 5. Notice how that casts VP8 in the “other” category.

“Of course, IE9 will continue to support Flash and other plug-ins,” Hachamovitch wrote for IEBlog. “Developers who want to use the same markup today across different browsers rely on plug-ins. Plug-ins are also important for delivering innovation and functionality ahead of the standards process; mainstream video on the web today works primarily because of plug-ins. We’re committed to plug-in support because developer choice and opportunity in authoring web pages are very important; ISVs on a platform are what make it great. We fully expect to support plug-ins (of all types, including video) along with HTML 5.”

Hachamovitch noted that while Microsoft is a participant in the licensing group MPEG LA, which manages the portfolio for H.264, it actually loses money in the process, making back about half of what it puts in. “Microsoft pledged its patent rights to this neutral organization in order to make its rights broadly available under clear terms, not because it thought this might be a good revenue stream. We do not foresee this patent pool ever producing a material revenue stream, and revenue plays no part in our decision here,” he wrote.

The general manager’s comments came a few hours after the posting of a detailed technical analysis of the VP8 codec by Jason Garrett-Glaser, the principal developer of the competitive x264 codec — an open source technology that produces video compatible with H.264. The long post shares valuable information that Garrett-Glaser may not have been able to share before today.

Though generally balanced throughout, Garrett-Glaser opens up his dissection of the VP8 specification (as opposed to the software itself) with a noise familiar to readers of the comic strip “Peanuts,” usually found whenever Lucy yanks the football out from Charlie Brown’s feet. Prior to several pages of extremely thorough explanation as to why, he suggests that merely open-sourcing the spec may not be enough: “The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code — up to and including TODOs, ‘optimizations,’ and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec. I may have complained about the H.264 spec being overly verbose, but at least it’s precise. The VP8 spec, by comparison, is imprecise, unclear, and overly short, leaving many portions of the format very vaguely explained. Some parts even explicitly refuse to fully explain a particular feature, pointing to highly-optimized, nigh-impossible-to-understand reference code for an explanation. There’s no way in hell anyone could write a decoder solely with this spec alone.”

Garrett-Glaser points to areas where VP8’s overall performance is at least competitive with, but sometimes less than competitive with, both H.264 Baseline Profile and VC-1, the standard previously advanced by Microsoft. In his closing, he makes one very ominous, though perhaps acutely accurate, statement: “With regard to patents, VP8 copies way too much from H.264 for anyone sane to be comfortable with it, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free.”

Betanews has been advised to await a forthcoming statement from MPEG LA, which may address precisely this point.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Neither a ‘white on brown’ nor a ‘minority’ issue

Editor, The Times:

I am very surprised and worried that apparently only minority organizations have formed a coalition to address the recent episode of Seattle police officers using what appears to be undue force on a Latino man, as well as invoking race to denigrate him [“Group wants cops in video fired,” NWWednesday, May 19].

This episode would have been as egregious for all these reasons had the prone, defenseless and innocent suspect been white. This is not just an incident of “white on brown” or a “minority” issue. This kind of behavior on the part of our police force against our citizens should concern us all regardless of our race or ethnicity.

Let’s hear from the churches and other organizations in our community to speak out against racial profiling and to expect more fair and professional behavior from Seattle police.

— Patricia Fong, Seattle

Two-year moratorium, plus best-practices requirements

Following the recent disaster off the coast of Louisiana, opponents of offshore drilling have gained support. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray have sponsored a bill that would impose a ban on drilling. [“Ban Pacific drilling,” Opinion, May 16.]

This is a questionable approach. It is inevitable that we would drill for oil. Once we face that reality, we could focus our energy on the real issue —ensuring that when drilling occurs, it is done as safely as possible.

As an alternative to a ban, I propose a two-year moratorium on offshore drilling. During the moratorium, oil companies that wish to drill will fund a “best practices” study that determines the state of the art in safe drilling practice.

Once the moratorium is lifted, companies funding the best-practices document may be granted offshore drilling leases if they agree to meet the following conditions before drilling:

• All drilling activities would adhere to best practices and to predetermined fines for failure.
• Companies would create a detailed, federally approved disaster-mitigation plan. Resources identified in the plan would have to be maintained for immediate availability in the event of a disaster.
• Companies would be subject to a predetermined fine schedule for spills based on the volume and impact of the spill, as well as the company’s safety record.

This plan would ensure that drilling is carried out at the highest level of safety, creates an incentive for companies to avoid spills and ensures that when spills do occur, an effective and timely response would be made.

— Nathan Le, Issaquah

No, you’re not going crazy, we just did this on Sunday, but out of dedication, and to get back on the routine, here it is again folks. Without further ado, we bring you some more selections.

read more

Money over morals

The Seattle City Council’s boycott of Arizona is both wrong and hypocritical [“Who are we to judge Arizona?” Danny Westneat column, NWWednesday, May 19].

The Seattle Municipal Code states the city will not discriminate in employment because of political ideology, yet it does just that with its boycott of Arizona. By leaving room to renew the city’s traffic camera contract with American Traffic Solutions, the City Council proved that money is more important than whatever morals the council members might have.

The Seattle resolution is that immigration reform is best handled at the federal level, though nothing in the Constitution prohibits state enforcement. This is odd, after the city defied both state law and the Bill of Rights by banning guns on city property, infringing on a right that is found in the state constitution and the U.S. Constitution.

Perhaps the council should consider a boycott of California as well, since it has had similar laws for many years.

I had hoped the City Council would have better things to do with taxpayer money than such childish gestures. I will be spending my money elsewhere —someday in Arizona.

— John O’Brien, DuPont

Boycott in lunacy

Why are some people up in arms about asking suspected undocumented immigrants for identification? I have no problem with it.

Every time we board an airplane, not only are we asked for government-issued identification but we are scanned and searched.

California and Washington boycotting Arizona is lunacy.

— Jorge del Campo, Camano Island

City Council’s decision ignores public opinion

An unofficial poll conducted by Q13 FOX shows 88 percent of Washingtonians surveyed agree with Arizona. The latest Gallup Poll shows nearly 70 percent of all Americans agree with Arizona. I count myself among the majority.

Everyone has their panties in a wad over what could happen —racial profiling —while ignoring the fact that illegal immigration is happening.

I wonder if anyone actually read the new Arizona law. It specifically prohibits racial profiling.

— Larry Brown, Seattle

Virtue and character needed for diversity

I was dismayed to learn the Seattle City Council voted to boycott Arizona.

This does not help bring us together —it divides us. Most of us agree diversity is positive, but it also requires virtue and character. Skin color or national origin alone mean nothing without virtue and character.

It is not the color of a person’s skin that has added to America’s greatness. It is the content of their character that adds to America’s greatness. I cannot walk in the shoes of Arizonans and endure what they endure, and I do not think our City Council could either. It has better things to do.

— John Payseno, Seattle

Anna Malova, Miss Russia and Miss Universe semifinalist of 1998, was apprehended by a special narcotics officer. The New York Police Department revealed that she has been hiding a habit that brought her to trouble again. She was taken right after she walked out of a pharmacy on 6^th Avenue in Greenwich Village. The pharmacist stated that the doctor of Malova believes that Malova had stolen a prescription pad and wrote out a phony prescription for painkillers.  She reacted calmly as she was taken away. The former Miss Russia seemed to be on top of the world when she made the top 10 contestants for the Miss Universe 1998.

Malova, 38 years old, was a medical doctor in her native country, Russia. She was also praised for the being a doctor when she won the Miss Russia crown, but she is not licensed to practice in the United States.  She was charged with criminal possession of narcotics, forgery and criminal impersonation of a physician. Malova was also charged with larceny for the same crime less than three months ago.

The Miss Universe organization and Donald Trump, who owns the franchise, was contacted by Fox 5 but neither had any comments on the issue.

Related posts:

1. Former Miss Russia Apprehended For Narcotics-Related Fallacies
2. Miss USA 2010 Pageant: Rima Fakih Crowned as Miss USA 2010!
3. Miss USA 2010 Scandal Pictures!

May the best tanker win

If Boeing wins the U.S. Air Force’s tanker contract, it would mean 11,000 jobs at the company’s local manufacturing facilities, as [“Gregoire, Murray boost Boeing in tanker bid,” Seattletimes.com, May 10] mentioned. However, the story did not explain how European aerospace giant Airbus is attempting to steal the contract and the jobs by submitting an illegally subsidized tanker aircraft.

Obviously, local workers care deeply about this injustice. But it is a national issue as well. As President Obama launches a campaign against corporate greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street, voters are watching to see if he applies the same principles to other areas of government.

In particular, voters would be outraged if an Obama Pentagon outsources a $35 billion defense contract to a company —Airbus —that has financed its bid with $5 billion in illegal subsidies, according to a final World Trade Organization ruling. Corporate accountability should apply to Pentagon contracts as well as Wall Street derivatives.

President Obama promised French President Nicolas Sarkozy that the tanker competition would be fair and transparent. However, there could be no fair competition as long as Airbus is bidding an illegally subsidized tanker. The Pentagon should discount launch aid subsidies from Airbus’ bid and let the best tanker win.

— Don Brunell, Association of Washington Business president, Olympia

A slaughter of innocence

“The inevitable blowback of war” [Opinion, May 17] equates the loss of civilians in Pakistan with the foiled attempt of the Times Square car bomber, inferring that both are acts of terrorism.

The U.S. military does not intentionally target civilians. This, however, was the intent of the Times Square bomber and those responsible for the 9/11 slaughter. There is a huge, gaping moral chasm separating these admittedly tragic events.

Blurring the ethical boundaries between a deliberate slaughter of innocents —or an attempt —and an unintended loss of civilian lives is, frankly, vile.

— Gregg Rice, Seattle

It’s easy to overlook crucial provisions of the Senate climate bill that address strategies to reduce non-CO₂ climate-forcing that accounts for almost half of the warming effect our activities cause.  In the brouhaha the bill caused, it was also easy to overlook the significance of a petition from NGOs to EPA asking it to end the privileged status of the most widely used mobile air conditioning refrigerant, which has a global warming potential (GWP) up at 1,400.  Yet these two closely-related actions, despite having nothing to do with CO₂ emissions from the power plants targeted by the Senate bill, may well provide the most significant climate protections the US achieves in the near term.

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The Senate climate bill unveiled on May 12^th by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman contains a section titled “Achieving Fast Mitigation” to address non-CO₂ climate forcers, including black carbon soot, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).  When combined with other similar sources like ground-level ozone, these non-CO₂ greenhouse gases and pollutants make up 40 to 50 percent of total climate forcing.

Why is this called Fast Mitigation? The non-CO₂ forcers are short-lived in the atmosphere — a few days to about fifteen years — meaning reductions will produce benefits fast and help to avoid the tipping points for abrupt climate change.  Reductions in CO₂ of course are essential but will not produce cooling for centuries.

We addressed controls over HFC greenhouse gases with hundreds to thousands the global warming potential of CO₂ 19 months ago here.  Both the Senate bill and the House’s Waxman-Markey bill now address HFCs and thus complement the proposal by the US, Canada, and Mexico under the Montreal Protocol ozone treaty which, if the Parties reach agreement in November, would result in avoided emissions of at least 100 billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent.

Studies show that technology is already available to address the non-CO₂ pollutants and gases.  Expanding biochar production is one such strategy but the hugest GWP reductions can be made in HFC refrigeration and air conditioning applications.  That’s where the NGO petition on HFC 134a comes in.

The NRDC, joined by the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) and the Environmental Investigation Agency, filed the petition to withdraw EPA approval for use of HFC-134a in mobile air conditioning installed in new cars.  HFC-134a has a GWP 1,400 times greater than CO₂, while replacements such as soon-to-be approved HFC 1234yf (GWP: 4), already-approved HFC-152a (GWP of ~140), hydrocarbons (GWP: 5), and CO₂ (GWP: 1) have comparatively tiny GWPs. 

Durwood Zaelke of the IGSD, one of the groups filing the petition, says that “reducing all HFCs can produce a planet-saving 100 billion tonnes or more of CO₂-equivalent in climate mitigation.  We can get 30 percent of this by outlawing high GWP HFCs in mobile air conditioning, as the European Union is already doing, starting with new models in 2011.  And we can do it fast—easily in seven years for new cars as required in Europe, or in as little as three years if automakers get serious about improving their cars.”

[JURIST] The government of Thailand on Wednesday imposed a curfew on Bangkok and other areas of the country in response to violence that erupted when the leader of the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship [party website, in Thai], also known as the red shirts [BBC backgrounder], announced an end to the two-month long conflict in Bangkok [JURIST news archive] and surrendered to police. Members of the red shirts, known for supporting ousted [JURIST report] prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra [BBC profile; JURIST news archive], refused to accept the end of the demonstrations and began rioting [Al Jazeera report] and setting fire to parts of Bangkok. Citizens of the areas affected by the curfew have been ordered to stay inside to ensure their own safety. The Thai military is expected to work through the night to try and reestablish order in the city.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights [official website] Navi Pillay [official profile] on Monday urged both the Thai government and anti-government protesters to seek a peaceful resolution [press release; JURIST report] to the current conflict. Last week, a Thai court sentenced 27 red shirt protesters [JURIST report] to six months in prison. Last month, Thailand’s pro-government People’s Alliance for Democracy Network [party website, in Thai; BBC backgrounder], known as yellow shirts, called for a declaration of martial law [JURIST report] to quell the anti-government movement spearheaded by the red shirts. Earlier in April, Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva announced that he was prepared to negotiate [JURIST report] with red shirt protesters once they cease their illegal conduct. Because of the mounting violence, Abhisit has imposed a state of emergency [JURIST report] in Bangkok and neighboring provinces.

Filed under: SUV, Truck, Recalls, Safety, Infiniti, Nissan

The Associated Press is reporting that Nissan will recall 48,700 trucks and SUVs for a suspension problem that could lead to an unforgiving ride. The recall, which could officially begin as early as this week, involves the 2010 Nissan Titan, Pathfinder, Armada and Xterra, along with the Infiniti QX56. The recall is related to a suspension control link that may not have been welded properly. If the weld is insufficient, the bushing collar could crack, leading to the kind of ride that bruises kidneys and rattles fillings.

Nissan spokesman Colin Price reported to the AP that the company is working with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to get the recall processed as quickly as possible. Once a recall is officially announced, Nissan will provide a fix at no cost to the customer. No accidents have been reported as a result of this potential issue.

[Source: The Associated Press]

AP: Nissan to recall 48k trucks, SUVs over potential suspension issue originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 19 May 2010 16:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’m sure there were a lot of pretty things on display at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, but I’m thinking that Crystal, a snap-together LED light by QIS Design, had to be the prettiest. [Designboom] More »

The financial reform debate will go on. A motion to limit debate and consider the Senate’s regulation bill as is failed this afternoon, by a vote of 57 to 42. It needed 60 votes to pass. What went wrong? Two Democrats broke with their party.

In fact, two Republicans voted for the motion — the Senators from Maine Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. All other republicans voted against it. But with 59 seats, Democrats only actually needed one Republican to defect, so those two should have been plenty. That means Democrats have their own party to blame for preventing the bill from moving forward.

Two Democrats were responsible for the bill failing: Sen. Maria Cantwell (WA) and Sen. Russ Feingold (WI). Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) also voted against the motion, but did so for the procedural purpose of being able to call it back up later. Arlen Specter (D-PA) did not vote.

So why did Cantwell vote ‘no’? She had actually already threatened to do so if her amendment was not heard. It wasn’t. Her proposal would reinstate Glass-Steagall, which forbid retail banks from certain investment banking activities. She made good on her promise. After the vote, she began speaking in favor of her amendment on the Senate floor.

Feingold released the following statement regarding his no-vote:

After thirty years of giving in to the wishes of Wall Street lobbyists, Congress needs to finally enact tough reforms to prevent Wall Street from driving our economy into the ditch again. We need to eliminate the risk posed to our economy by ‘too big to fail’ financial firms and to reinstate the protective firewalls between Main Street banks and Wall Street firms. Unfortunately, these key reforms are not included in the bill. The test for this legislation is a simple one – whether it will prevent another financial crisis. As the bill stands, it fails that test. Ending debate on the bill is finishing before the job is done.

That is sufficiently vague, but it sounds like he essentially didn’t think that the Senate’s work was done, as there were still issues that needed to be considered with further amendments.

As mentioned, Reid reserved the right to call the cloture vote again. Another vote will almost certainly be held before the Memorial Day recess, though it’s unclear precisely when. You can probably expect Democratic leadership will do whatever it can to satisfy Cantwell and Feingold, however, since those are the only votes they need get the bill through. And that also probably sheds some light on when the vote will take place — once those two Senators are on board. Given the Republicans from Maine voting for cloture, the bill will almost certainly pass in the days to come.

Update: Just heard from Reid’s office. They hope to hold another vote to end debate on Thursday.

An oatmeal raisin cookie sounds like a simple thing – and it can be, judging by the number of totally mediocre oatmeal raisin cookies that are out there – but when you get a good one, it can be heavenly. It will have just the right amount of cinnamon to set off the buttery notes in the nutty, oatmeal-packed dough, and highlight plump, sweet raisins. They are all great flavors, and there is no reason why they should only come together in cookie form. This is what inspired this Oatmeal Raisin Coffee Cake.

This cake is delicious, and perhaps doubly so for fans of oatmeal raisin cookies! It is sweet and buttery, with great flavor from brown sugar, oatmeal, cinnamon and raisins. Unlike a cookie, this cake isn’t chewy. It is moist and tender, with just enough richness to make it just as suitable for dessert as it is for breakfast or tea.

The cake is a simple buttermilk cake with oatmeal added to the batter. I prefer quick cooking oats (not instant) because of their not-too-big size and finer texture, and you can make them by pulsing regular rolled oats in the food processor a few times if you don’t have them. The filling and topping for this coffee cake are made with the same mixture, but raisins and chopped pecans are added to the filling of the cake. The topping will melt a bit into the cake itself as it bakes, but this just distributes all its brown sugar, cinnamon  and butter goodness over the entire cake. (more…)

In the comments below a question was asked in regards to “fundamentalist” vs. agnostic Jews. I put the quotations around fundamentalist because the term means different things in different religions. As for the idea of an agnostic Jew, remember that Jews are a nation (ethnicity) as well as a religion, and that religious belief has traditionally been less explicitly emphasized than religious practice.

It wasn’t too hard to find some answers in the GSS. I used the somewhat crude “BIBLE” variable again. Remember that BIBLE asks if the respondent believes that the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God, the inspired Word of God, or a book of fables. I reclassified these as Fundamentalist, Moderate, and Liberal, respectively. There are two variables I used in the first chart, JEW and RELIG. The former looks just as Jews, and breaks down by Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. The latter I combined with BIBLE to bracket out Fundamentalists, Moderates and Liberals of each religious group. The vocabulary test scores are from WORDSUM. Remember that they correlate 0.71 with adult IQ. Because the sample size for Jews was so small I included 95% intervals so you can modulate confidence appropriately. I limited the sample to whites.

Jewish readers can correct me if I’m wrong, but I am to understand that the gap between Conservative and Reform is actually not very large in terms of belief and practice today, as it may have been in earlier decades. In fact the two movements emerge as much from cultural differences between earlier German Jewish immigrants and the later Eastern European migration. And Orthodoxy and a Protestant understanding of “fundamentalism” do not necessarily overlap. It is notable that for the other groups the Fundamentalist segment had smaller vocabularies. This probably aligns with our intuition. But I was curious, is the pattern among Protestants a regional effect? It isn’t. When I controlled for region the same pattern exists. So rather than plotting that chart, I decided to look at the combination of educational attainment and Fundamentalist orientation for white Protestants only (the sample sizes here are large).

To some extent the pattern is as you’d expect. Those with less education have smaller vocabularies. But notice the step-wise pattern. Fundamentalists with a greater level of education than religious liberals do not necessarily have much larger vocabularies. That’s interesting to know.

A guest blog post by Eric Holst, Managing Director of EDF's Center for Conservation Incentives.

Nitrate pollution in groundwater is a critical and under-reported problem associated with food production in California—an issue that journalists Julia Scott, Sasha Khokha, Christopher Beaver and Lisa Pickoff-White have reported on over the past week.

Nitrate is a reactive form of nitrogen that can leach into groundwater as a result of a number of agricultural practices including over-application of nitrogen fertilizer or manure on crops, and pastures. Additionally, discharges from wastewater treatment plants and septic tank leakage can lead to nitrate pollution in surface and groundwater supplies. Excessive levels of nitrate in groundwater threaten California’s drinking water supplies, public health and the environment.

Nitrogen, like water, is an essential input to agriculture. In fact, Nitrogen is among the most abundant elements on earth; virtually inert nitrogen gas (N2) makes up nearly 80% of the air we breathe. However, under natural conditions, reactive forms of nitrogen (nitrates) would be much less abundant. The availability of reactive nitrogen, like nitrate, is one of the key factors controlling crop and other plant growth. Fertilizers are industrially produced to overcome the limited availability of natural reactive nitrogen needed by plants to provide the extensive crop production that sustains the world’s population today. But, if not managed properly, reactive forms of nitrogen can have a variety of negative impacts by elevating risks to public health and the environment.

Nitrate in groundwater is a particularly troublesome problem because it is difficult if not impossible to clean up. The best way to ensure clean groundwater is to prevent or minimize nitrate leaching to begin with. This can be accomplished in two ways: 1) by applying fertilizer and manure more efficiently to crops and 2) by filtering the runoff of irrigation water through natural filters such as vegetative filters and wetlands.

EDF’s Center for Conservation Incentives works in partnership with farmers throughout the US to show that both approaches are feasible, economically viable, and allow farmers to maintain profitability while reducing environmental impact. Farmers in the Chesapeake Bay, in North Carolina, and Western Lake Erie Basin participate in the On-Farm Network®, a voluntary program designed originally by the Iowa Soybean Association. The On-Farm Network® provides farmers with site specific information about the nitrogen needs of crops and creates a forum for sharing this information within groups of farmers in the same area. Farmers enrolled in the On-Farm Network® have experienced an average of 20% reduction in nitrogen use with no impact on yield and in so doing have saved substantially on input costs.

A range of state and federal programs exist to help farmers install vegetative filters on and around farms. Nitrogen laden runoff effectively fertilizes plants in riparian and wetland buffers transferring the nitrogen from the water to the plants and storing it for long periods of time. More importantly, bacteria associated with plant roots remove the nitrate by converting it into N2, a benign end product, through a process known as denitrification. Many farmers in the California’s San Joaquin Valley are installing tailwater retention ponds (tailwater is the excess water that leaves the farm after irrigation) to help them comply with surface water quality rules. When surrounded by native wetland vegetation, these ponds can act as effective nitrate filters and provide wildlife habitat at the same time. Valley farmers are eligible to receive financial support from the US Department of Agriculture to install tailwater ponds.

These are just a few of the incentives for good environmental management that EDF is committed to implementing in California and beyond.

[JURIST] The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) [official website] on Wednesday affirmed the contempt conviction [press release] of Vojislav Seselj [case materials; JURIST news archive], a Serbian politician and former president of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) [BBC backgrounder]. Trial Chamber II found Seselj guilty of contempt [JURIST report] last year for authoring a book revealing pertinent information about several key witnesses and sentenced him to 15 months in prison. The Appeals Chamber denied all eight of Seselj’s grounds of appeal. Seselj’s war crimes trial just resumed in January, after being delayed [JURIST reports] for nearly a year over fears that witnesses were being intimidated. He is currently being tried before Trial Chamber III on 14 counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war.

The ICTY had previously stripped Seselj of his right to defend himself after he failed to appear in court, despite an earlier appeals court ruling that he could represent himself [JURIST reports] provided he did not engage in courtroom behavior that “substantially obstruct[ed] the proper and expeditious proceedings in his case.” Seselj is accused of establishing rogue paramilitary units affiliated with the SRS, which are believed to have massacred and otherwise persecuted Croats and other non-Serbs during the Balkan conflict.