2011 Cadillac CTS Coupe – Click above for high-res image gallery
The North American International Auto Show is typically the big show for Detroit-based automakers and 2010 appears to be no different for General Motors. Chris Preuss, GM’s vice president of communications, has hit Twitter confirming that each of the General’s four brands will have at least one vehicle to display at the Detroit Auto Show next month. As expected, Cadillac will unveil the 2011 CTS-V coupe along with a concept version of its XTS sedan, a model slated to replace the aging DTS in the next year or two. GMC will unleash the Granite, which, according to earlier reports, will be based on the Delta platform and the forthcoming Chevrolet Orlando.
Chevrolet figures to have a somewhat quieter show, with its big reveal being the Aveo RS, which we hear is all-new and very little like the narrow and unattractive B-Segment hatch GM is selling now. Buick will be chasing the ghosts of Grand Nationals and T-Types past with a performance variant of the 2011 Regal that may share a lot of parts with the 325-horsepower Opel Insignia OPC. We can hardly wait for January 11.
The media’s coverage of mixed economic news led to a marginal rise in the Dow Jones Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) in December. The ESI rose to 38.7, up only minimally from 38.3 in November.
This slight rise is the ESI’s third weakest performance in a year and much less convincing than increases in October and November.
While the ESI ends the year significantly higher than the 22.4 level it registered in January at the start of the year, December’s weaker performance means the indicator failed to break back above the level it held before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.
The Dow Jones Economic Sentiment Indicator aims to predict the health of the U.S. economy by analyzing the broad coverage of 15 major daily newspapers in the U.S. During December, media coverage that included references to better-than-feared holiday retail sales was outweighed by articles referencing mixed or negative economic news including continuing double-digit unemployment and slower economic growth.
“The ESI’s significantly slower rate of improvement in December suggests the U.S.’s economic rebound could be starting to level off and that non-farm payrolls neither advanced nor declined by much during the month,” Dow Jones Newswires ‘Money Talks’ columnist Alen Mattich said.
The ESI represents one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching examinations of media coverage as an economic indicator.
The ESI’s back-testing to 1990 shows that the ESI clearly highlighted the risk that the U.S. economy was sliding into recession in 2001 and 2008 and suggests the indicator can help predict economic turning points as much as seven months in advance of other indicators.
Unlike some other indicators where 50 is a clear break-point between recession and recovery, the ESI needs to be read with reference to longer trends.
Based on the ESI’s performance since 1990, previous recoveries have been marked by substantial month-to-month gains, with a jump of three points seeming to be a sign of significant improvement. A drop below 50 marks the point at which there is a clear risk of a slowdown.
The Dow Jones Economic Sentiment Indicator is calculated using a proprietary algorithm through Dow Jones Insight, a media tracking and analysis tool. More information about the Economic Sentiment Indicator and its development is available at dowjones.com/esi.
Dow Jones Insight uses innovative text mining and analytic technologies to help organizations keep informed about relevant issues, news, conversations and trends emerging in mainstream, Web and social media.
Dow Jones Insight’s global content collection includes more than 25,000 news and information sources as well as blogs, message boards, and posts from YouTube and Twitter.
About Dow Jones
Dow Jones & Company is a News Corporation company. ( NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV; newscorp.com) Dow Jones is a leading provider of global business news and information services. Its Consumer Media Group publishes The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
Its Enterprise Media Group includes; Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence, Dow Jones Newswires, Dow Jones Factiva, Dow Jones Client Solutions, Dow Jones Indexes and Dow Jones Financial Information Services.
Its Local Media Group operates community-based information franchises. Dow Jones owns 50 percent of SmartMoney and provides news content to radio stations in the U.S.
The Dow Jones Economic Sentiment Indicator is provided for analysis purposes only and Dow Jones makes no representation that the indicator is a definitive predictor of sentiment or the health of the U.S. economy. This report does not in any way reflect an opinion of Dow Jones regarding the U.S. economy or the suitability of any investments.
Sometimes, it feels like terms we thought had some meaning really don’t apply as much anymore.
Take the term “social media,” as an example.
It’s like every SEO marketer decided that “social media,” was the ticket to a sweet consulting gig. Just look at Twitter. You find a lot of social media experts with tens of thousands of followers. Kind of feels like you are looking down a street filled with hucksters.
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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!
Social media once served as a term to help people understand the concepts that have risen over the past several years. It helped people understand the tools that can be used to gain a web presence. But the term took too broad of a meaning.
At some point, a nervous rush ensued. Everyone needed a social media strategy. In the process, the term and the rush for “social media” adoption became ripe for satire:
A More Holistic Approach
But that’s only part of the story. The other, more accurate story, reflects a trend toward a more holistic approach in the enterprise. Social media may only represent the tools we use but social computing reflects a deeper view of how the enterprise will adopt this new generation of lightweight technologies. We disagree that executives will continue to shun the term “social.” If they continue to do so, they will be swept out by a generation of far more modern managers.
Still, companies lack the capabilities and the discipline to develop operations that integrate lightweight applications into the enterprise. They need help. They use the new tools available but lack the experience for implementation. There is a need for more community managers who can help with the overall approach. These people are not “social media” managers. They use social media tools to help join a culture that is fragmented in part due to the “data silo” approach that has become predominant in the enterprise.
We spoke with the people behind two consulting companies about their approach to social computing in the enterprise: Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 and the Dachis Group.
Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0
Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 is a new consulting company started by Dion Hinchcliffe and Michael Krigsman. The enterprise, in their view, is still wary of social computing. They are primarily concerned about risk, control and trust.
To succeed with social computing, the enterprise has to work toward three major goals:
Address key business concerns
Demonstrate business value
Acquire social computing competency
Both Krigsman and Hinchcliffe are respected members of the Enterprise 2.0 community. Hinchliffe is the founder of Hinchliffe and Associates. Krigsman leads Asuret, a company that focuses on project intelligence and risk navigation. They work exclusively with Socialtext, led by Ross Mayfield. Socialtext predates the Enterprise 2.0 movement.
Their approach is a combination of Hinchliffe’s 20 years of experience as an enterprise architect and Krigsman’s long time work examining IT failure. Socialtext is their de-facto technology environment, which they chose after a review of about 70 companies.
The company begins its project by gathering intelligence, followed by tool integration, community management development and a degree of project intelligence to define the risks involved.
“We gather strategic intelligence to avoid the downsides and reduce project waste,” Krigsman said in an interview. “We leverage best of breed social tools and build social computing competency.”
Dachis sees the enterprise going through an age-old transformation. Traditional software is essentially adapting to a new age. They call their approach: “Social Business Design.”
Social Business Design, as they view it, is the process of creating socially calibrated and dynamic business systems, process and culture. That’s a mouth full but it reflects the enterprise demand for measured systems that show people are being productive and getting the work done.
Unlike Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0, Dachis is technology agnostic, partnering with vendors when it makes sense.
The Dachis approach puts a large emphasis on the need to focus on process, culture and technology. This means creating a plan for systems architecture, helping companies adapt to the cultural changes involved and all the aspects of the enterprise that need to be taken into consideration. This means understanding issues about governance and having a pretty keyed in measurement strategy.
Here’s their slide deck. It’s a long one but it moves along. Pretty good, overall:
Social media is still a term we use. But it has become so cliche that it is somewhat of a turn off. It’s important to distinguish that the people who have championed the cause for social computing are often deeply involved with the “social media” community. They are important people in the enterprise who should be sought for leadership in bringing the world of social computing to the ways we conduct business.
Social media sounds too much like buzz hype. We need to get down to business. Social computing is a good thing. But even better is the proof that these practices work so we may use tools that help get the work done.
I can’t believe it is 2010 – things have certainly changed so much in the last year and 2010 seems to be the dawn of a new era in technology. Thank you to all of our readers, even those of you who are new and those of you who have been with us for a while – you make this website worth doing. The level of support we receive from our community and Sony is outstanding. I’m so excited for the stories that this new year will bring, but it is also important to reflect back on what made news in 2009. According to Google Analytics, here are some of the biggest stories to hit Sony Insider in the last year –
The free Media Go software, announced at E3 2009, made it easier than ever to take your media with you wherever you go. Transfer music, photos, and videos from your PC to your Sony (PSP) or Sony Ericsson portable device, or import from your device to your PC. File conversion is hassle-free: Media Go automatically converts your media to the appropriate format for your device while maintaining the best possible quality. The latest version of the software is 1.3.
Alarm clocks, digital photo frames, and iPod/iPhone docks are usually bland and simple. Only very recently have we seen style truly grace these products. However, when one of my contacts forwarded me information about the upcoming ICF-CL75iP, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. This is probably the greatest looking fusion of all of the aforementioned devices that I’ve ever seen. This is the most advanced Dream Machine ever produced by Sony to date – it has a crisp 7 inch color WVGA (800 x 480) LCD, 1GB of built-in storage, SD/MS card slots, USB, and a retractable iPod/iPhone dock. It’s so keen I even got one for my Mother for Christmas.
Sony’s Contrast Flex OLED VAIO laptop is a super-thin laptop product concept. We were able to catch footage of its introduction video at Sony’s exhibit during CES 2009. We believe that Sony is assuming OLED will be the preferable choice of display for future laptop devices instead of what we currently use today. The Contrast Vaio laptop uses a foldable seamless OLED for the display and the keyboard, but as the videos show the keyboard can fade away and the whole thing can display something else. This concept has no restrictions on layout and size, and is extremely durable and shock resistant. Like the other Contrast product concepts, it is made of high performance flexible bioplastic. They also showed off flexible OLED Walkman and Reader concepts.
Content Transfer software provides an easy way to transfer music, video, photos, and podcasts to the Walkman player. Just drag & drop the files to the Content Transfer window and the Content Transfer software automatically sorts the files to the appropriate folders on the player. We covered the 1.1 update in this post, but in the last month the software was recently updated to 1.3.
Select Sony VAIO computer models that ship with Windows Vista Home Edition, Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate, purchased on or after June 26th 2009, and until January 31st 2010, qualify for a free upgrade to Windows 7. Certain models that ship with Windows XP Professional and include a Windows Vista Business Certificate of Authenticity (“COA”) also qualify for a free upgrade. The upgrade order will ship after October 22, 2009 and may take 7-10 business days for delivery. Orders will be processed in the order received and the End User will be notified of their order’s status after this date.
Out of nowhere, aafuss on our forums pointed out service manuals for the PRS-300 and PRS-600 Sony Reader devices before they were revealed. What was interesting at the time is the PRS-700 was no longer on sale at SonyStyle, signaling these devices were coming very soon. The manuals are fresh from the oven, as the creation date was July 2009 – the same month as our post. The storyline was rather big for Sony Insider, and forced Sony to announce the Readers ahead of schedule.
Sony unveiled the latest update to the A-Series Walkman line with some serious features. The new NW-A840 series, available in black and brown, simply is the most brilliant Walkman offering from Sony to date – it has all of the features people have been asking for in previous Walkmans while shedding what it needed to. In my opinion, this is the most stylish appearance I’ve seen in a personal media player – and it has a jaw-dropping 2.8 inch WQVGA OLED screen. This is also the thinnest Walkman ever created at only 7.2mm. However, it has only been available for sale in Japan, and worldwide release seems hazy at best. We’re not even sure its coming to CES anymore.
Internet retailer J&R leaked the full specifications and pricing of the Sony Reader PRS-300 and PRS-600. J&R accidentally put up the product pages earlier today, but deleted them soon thereafter hoping no one would catch it. Well, folks over at hi-pda managed to grab the text and we cleaned it up and the rest is history.
Sony Ericsson’s phone announcements in 2009 were the strongest they have had in recent memory. The Satio at one point was their most powerful phone ever, and we put it head to head with the iPhone 3G S in a detailed specs comparison. The North American market has been dominated by the iPhone 3G, and it is now even more powerful than before with the updated S version. Both phones have rich application environments – the iPhone with App Store, and the Satio with presumeably PlayNow, as well as millions of Symbian apps.
Believe it or not, a post about Oprah’s Word a Day summer sweepstakes was the top Sony Insider story of 2009 – it gave us the most traffic this year by a signifigant margin. The post was so attractive because we updated it daily with the word of the day, usually before it would air on television. One of the primary reasons we posted about it was the great number of Sony products included in the contest.
If you’re interested in getting more from meetings than a gaping sinkhole in your schedule—and who isn’t?—these tips from how Google handles meetings can help. Of great importance is focusing on data, not politics and grievances.
The folks over at Business Week interviewed Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president of search products, who is known for running a tight and effective meeting. She shared six great guidelines for holding an effective meeting including one of her long standing rules: “Don’t politic, use data.”
This idea can and should apply to meetings in organizations in which people feel as though the boss will give the green light to a design created by the person he or she likes the best, showing favoritism for the individual instead of the idea.
Mayer believes this mindset can demoralize employees, so she goes out of her way to make the approval process a science. Google chooses designs on a clearly defined set of metrics and how well they perform against those metrics. Designs are chosen based on merit and evidence, not personal relationships.
Mayer discourages using the phrase “I like” in design meetings, such as “I like the way the screen looks.” Instead, she encourages such comments as “The experimentation on the site shows that his design performed 10% better.” This works for Google, because it builds a culture driven by customer feedback data, not the internal politics that pervade so many of today’s corporations.
It’s far more effective to look at what the data says than it is to let a meeting turn into a whine-fest where your whole team is taken away from productive work to hear the less-than-happy members complain. Check out the rest of the article at Business Week to see some more of Mayer’s techniques, including holding office hours—a carryover from her days as a professor.
Have a strategy you use in your workplace for increasing the effectiveness of meetings? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
Economic statistics don’t get enough recognition for all of their hard work. So, I’ve decided to offer an “Economic Statistic of the Decade” Award. The three criteria are simple. First, we want to reward the economic statistic that best reflects the decade (both the good and the bad). Second, we want to recognize the economic statistic that turned in a surprising performance–that is, back in 2000, if someone had shown you a graph of the statistic over the next ten years, you would have said “no way”. Third, we want to reward economic statistics that are reliable and accurate representations of the actual economy.
In the 1990s, for example, the Economic Statistic of the Decade Award would have gone to U.S. productivity growth. The runner-ups would have been Chinese economic growth, followed by global tech spending.
For something I’m working on: we know that China is pursuing a mercantilist policy: keeping the renminbi weak through a combination of capital controls and intervention, leading to trade surpluses and capital exports in a country that might well be a natural capital importer. We also know, or should know, that this amounts to a beggar-thy-neighbor policy — or, more accurately, a beggar-everyone but yourself policy — when the world’s major economies are in a liquidity trap.
But how big is the impact? Here’s a quick back-of-the-envelope assessment.
As we wave goodbye to 2009 it is traditional to have a retrospective. Over the next few hours I will list 10 things which came to Windows Mobile users this year which made this year great.
Number 10 on the list is the death of proprietary ports, with 3.5 mm headphone jacks now becoming almost standard. We can have pretty high confidence most new handsets will come with standard ports now, meaning their use for media activities is much easier and more likely.
Unfortunately we do not have the music and media services built into our phones yet to take best advantage of this, but this is likely something else we will see coming to us in 2010, and in the mean time side-loading is still possible.
Do you appreciate the rise of standard headphone jacks? Let us know in the comments below.
… The adopted vocabulary standards for procedures are the applicable HIPAA code set required by law (i.e.,ICD-9-CM) or CPT-4. The candidate standards are the applicable HIPAA code set required by law (e.g.,ICD-10-CM) or CPT-4…
CPT. Fully owned by the AMA, CPT is a rough collection of work descriptions sometimes loosely related to procedures. It’s not a vocabulary, it’s not a classification, and it has no stable semantics.
The adoption of CPT as a healthcare “standard” is not the only sign of failure, but it is the most telling sign.
It’s New Year’s Eve and you’re stuck in front of a computer. Sorry, bub. You might as well turn your speakers on and zen out to the American Museum of Natural History’s The Known Universe video put to Exogenesis by Muse.
The somewhat boring, but also high-def, original video is after the jump if you want to burn even more of your day.
“It didn’t take long for Lang and Louie to fall in love.
They met in Calgary at a group dim sum gathering, knowing their mutual friend thought they should date.
They did a few weeks later, talking effortlessly for three hours at a cocktail bar, he recalled.
“The conversation never stopped and it was never awkward. It was at that moment I was like wow, she’s kind of amazing,” he said of their first date 18 months ago.
Lang was smitten by Louie, said her friend Robin Summerfield, the subject of Lang’s matchmaking.
After Lang and Louie were together for six weeks, Summerfield teased her friend about the new romance and asked whether she was in love.
“You know, I think I am,” she told Summerfield, a former Herald reporter.”
*******
Dear Michelle,
Like many others, I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you. And now I can only get to know you through the beautiful digital footprint you’ve left us. Your work ethics, deep dedication to journalism and high standard are what I will aspire to achieve when I do my own reporting.
This story is not nearly as interesting as I was led to believe. Some guy bought something in the online game Entropia Universe. He bought it with in-game currency—PED3.3 million, to be exact. It just so happens that that amount, PED3.3 million, can be converted at will to real life currency. At current conversion rates that equals approximately US$330,000. So if you want to say that the guy bought an in-game item for US$330,000, well, be my guest.
The item itself, the Crystal Palace Space Station, is some sort of ship or craft or something that other players can buy things from. So the buyer of the thingamajig can use it as an actual source of income.
You should know that the game isn’t merely a game, but a fully registered bank in Sweden, complete with all the protections afforded to other, “real” European Union-based banks.
Embedded is a video of Crystal Palace, which looks an awful lot like that spaceship from Phantasy Star Online.
A year-end thank-you note from Hulu CEO Jason Kilar offered some statistics to show us just how much the nearly three-year-old service has grown.
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Back in April, the service became one of the top three Internet video providers, alongside Google – which includes YouTube and Google Video – and Fox, according to comScore. Kilar includes a number of statistics in his note to show that the site has continued its climb in popularity during the rest of 2009.
“Monthly users of Hulu, as measured by comScore, grew to over 43 million, a 95 percent increase over this time last year.
Monthly streams, as measured by comScore, grew to 924 million, a 307 percent increase from this time last year.
Hulu’s content library doubled over the past year. We now offer over 14,000 hours of premium content, up from 5,600 hours at this time last year.”
The addition of Disney as a content partner last April surely provided a traffic boost, as the ABC owner brought television sensations like “Lost”, “Grey’s Anatomy” and other prime-time hits to the site.
A live video of Obama’s inauguration topped the list of embedded videos for 2009, while “Saturday Night Live”, “Family Guy”, “The Office”, “The Simpsons” and “Naruto Shippuden” were the most popular shows of the year.
But what was the overall winner for 2009 on Hulu, you might be wondering? A decidedly NSFW SNL short called “Motherlover”.
For those of you who still haven’t made the digital television switch but still want to watch, Hulu will be streaming the ball drop in Times Square tonight starting at 10 pm EST.
We know that EA and BioWare have a long-term plan for Dragon Age: Origins. Even at launch the developer stated that two years worth of of DLC are in the works, and we’ll be receiving our first major bit of it next week. But a rumor is circulating today that the plans may be even more ambitious than we realized, with a full packaged expansion planned for March.
Big Download Blog reports on a page from Eurogamer.cz, the Czech gaming site. According to the translated text, the expansion is titled “The Awakening,” and will come out on March 19. The suggested price is around 2/3 the price of the original game, which would probably translate to $30-40 U.S. dollars. It’s also said to be a full packaged product that would be found in stores, and while only the PC version is mentioned, we expect BioWare would similarly support the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. The original game is reported to be required, and it will raise the level cap while also creating an entirely new, shorter campaign with a new character. The report states that EA will make the announcement official in early January, so we may see it any day now.
We don’t usually see such specificity in a rumor, so it’s hard not to think Eurogamer is on to something. Origins was always meant to be the start of a lucrative RPG franchise — it’s even present in the title. Still, until we hear official word from EA, we’re going to categorize this strictly as a rumor. We’ll keep you posted when, and if, we get more details.
[Note: While this post is football-related, it translated to any sport… and I tie the story back to money… I promise]
I’ve always believed there is something we can learn from everyone. This past weekend professional sports organizations may have learned a lot from a 12-year-old young gentleman in the stands football game… and he didn’t have to say a word.
To understand where I’m going with this, let me set the scene a bit. The story starts with one player for the New England Patriots, Randy Moss. While no one has ever really doubted his talent, questions about his work ethic have followed him through his career. Two weeks ago he had one his worst games. A player on the opposing team said Moss “gives up a lot” and that he “laid it down during the game.” The game was so bad that it’s garnered a whole paragraph on his Wikipedia page. Almost every analyst opined on the subject (with a vast majority agreeing that Moss didn’t play hard) until it because one of the biggest stories of the NFL that week.
Moss, as you might expect, probably didn’t take it so well. He didn’t say anything, but instead let his coach and quarterback defend him. Most people ignored their biased testimonies. After all, the coach and quarterback are supposed to support their teammates. And that’s where the story stayed until the next game (last week).
In that game Moss didn’t set the world on fire by getting a lot of huge stats. However, when the Patriots needed him, he scored. After Moss’ third touchdown of the day (an unusually great day for any player in the NFL), the referees reviewed the video to make sure he crossed the goal line. While they were doing that, the Jumbotron caught a 12-year-old, Josiah Shumaker, wearing a Randy Moss mask in the stands. And here is a YouTube video of that interaction.
What you are seeing here is the young man performing Randy Moss’ signature touchdown celebration. He’s doing it so well that the crowd got excited and Randy mocks him with a real version of the celebration. Players on the sideline are laughing and all the talk of the previous week disappeared from everyone’s minds.
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a professional sports player interacting with a fan via a Jumbotron before, but the timing was impeccable. While Moss would have been in good spirits with his three touchdown day, anyway this is what really lifted his spirits. He admitted that his last performance “wasn’t too hot” and that having the fans and the stadium behind him meant a lot to him. Sometimes I forget that while these professional athletes are extremely talented, they are people with feelings too.
So now that I’ve got all the sappiness out of the way, let’s get to what you came here for… the tie-in with money. Professional sports is big business. If your Hall of Fame player isn’t performing, there is the potential that millions of dollars will be wasted. Now I’m sure this wasn’t staged (or am I?), but if they wanted to how much would have cost the Patriots to stage it? It could be done for under $100. If you own a sports team and have a struggling star, why not try something like this, right?
Following the lead of Consultancy Accenture, AT&T has terminated its relationship with Tiger Woods.
“We are ending our sponsorship agreement with Tiger Woods and wish him well in the future,” said AT&T spokesman Fletcher Cook, in an e-mailed statement to CNN.
While ending sponsorships has been the trend since Woods’ marital infidelity was brought to light, several organizations are retaining ties, including Gillette (though advertisements have been temporarily removed from airwaves), Nike, and Gatorade.
A year-end thank-you note from Hulu CEO Jason Kilar offered some statistics to show us just how much the nearly three-year-old service has grown.
Back in April, the service became one of the top three Internet video providers, alongside Google – which includes YouTube and Google Video – and Fox, according to comScore. Kilar includes a number of statistics in his note to show that the site has continued its climb in popularity during the rest of 2009.
Sponsor
“Monthly users of Hulu, as measured by comScore, grew to over 43 million, a 95 percent increase over this time last year.
Monthly streams, as measured by comScore, grew to 924 million, a 307 percent increase from this time last year.
Hulu’s content library doubled over the past year. We now offer over 14,000 hours of premium content, up from 5,600 hours at this time last year.”
The addition of Disney as a content partner last April surely provided a traffic boost, as the ABC owner brought television sensations like “Lost”, “Grey’s Anatomy” and other prime-time hits to the site.
A live video of Obama’s inauguration topped the list of embedded videos for 2009, while “Saturday Night Live”, “Family Guy”, “The Office”, “The Simpsons” and “Naruto Shippuden” were the most popular shows of the year.
But what was the overall winner for 2009 on Hulu, you might be wondering? A decidedly NSFW SNL short called “Motherlover”.
For those of you who still haven’t made the digital television switch but still want to watch, Hulu will be streaming the ball drop in Times Square tonight starting at 10 pm EST.
It’s no secret that we live in a world of moral panics — where new technologies are feared by those who don’t understand them, often leading to regulations that block their potential. For years now, a number of politicians have sought laws to ban social networks in schools, assuming that they are either bad or simply inappropriate for schools. While those laws have yet to pass, many schools already do ban access to social networks and other sites. I’ve never quite understood how this makes sense. Rather than training students to use those sites properly, now they’re seen as forbidden — which only makes them more attractive to students, while making it even clearer that students won’t be prepared to handle those sites properly. On top of that, as more powerful mobile phones become popular, students will easily bypass the school’s own network and access those sites on their own — and there will be nothing the schools can do about it.
So it’s nice to see a sensible opinion piece in Slate arguing that rather than ban or block social online services like Facebook and YouTube, schools should be embracing them and looking for ways to incorporate them into the learning process. There are a variety of strong arguments for why this makes sense, but two that stick out:
Students already like using these sites quite a bit. Using those sites to make other things more relevant and interesting seems like a good way to reach kids in a manner that they understand, and which doesn’t feel quite as much like “education,” but more like something fun that they want to do.
Using these kinds of free tools may be cheaper, easier and much more effective than a number of the super expensive e-learning tools out there, which would require a steep learning curve anyway. But incorporating lesson plans and info and assignments into the tools that students already use would be both cheaper and more likely to actually be used.
Of course, some will decry that these sites are automatically bad for kids — or that it makes no sense to waste time on such issues. But the fact is kids are going to use these sites no matter what. Ignoring that doesn’t change that. Banning the sites doesn’t change that. It just makes the activity more underground without any oversight or reasonable lessons. But incorporating the technology into the educational efforts could actually get a lot more attention. Yes, some of the examples in the Slate article seem pretty lame (and would be seen as such by the kids), but if done right, it really could add a lot more value to students’ educations.
I haven’t been on the forum for a looong time, but I had posted a thread about an embarrassing question awhile back. I was having trouble when I had the urge to go to the bathroom (#2). Sometimes I would feel light-headed and would get pale and feel like I was going to pass out. Other times I would feel nauseous, like I was going to throw up. My doctor kept telling me to treat it like a low blood sugar, but I every time I would test, my sugars were in the normal range. As soon as I would go to the bathroom, everything would return to normal in about 10-15 minutes. This has been happening now for almost 3 years!! About 6 months ago my blood test showed that my thyroid was off. The doctor said it was low. I didn’t think I had been experiencing any symptoms associated with low thyroid, the only unusual thing has been the bizarre bathroom problem. Well, the doctor listed a bunch of symptoms, including intolerance to cold and dry skin. Since it’s in the middle of winter here in Indiana, I thought my excessive dry scalp was due to the weather. And I’m ALWAYS cold, so I thought it was a personality thing…the doctor said it may be a thyroid thing. He suggested waiting until my next appointment three months later to see if my next blood test showed the same results. I just had my appointment on the 29th, and the results still showed low thyroid, so he prescribed Synthroid. He also asked if I’ve been tired…well, I sleep a lot, especially if my blood sugar is high (300 or so). I thought I was just tired because I haven’t been exercising like I should. I looked up some information about low thyroid and it mentioned decreased peristalsis (contraction of muscles that force food through the digestive tract). I think this weird pooping problem could be caused by slow movement of food through my system due to low thyroid!! I know there’s some type of vagus nerve thing going on, but I think I finally have some sort of explanation of why I have been feeling like passing out when I have to use the restroom. I also read that most people with a thyroid problem may never experience any symptoms at all. The only reason they know they have a problem is due to abnormal blood tests.
Has anyone experienced anything similar to what I have been going through for the past three years? I’ve read a little bit of info about Synthroid, but is there anything I should be aware of? It mentioned that it could effect blood sugar, but didn’t specify whether it may raise or lower it.
I was feeling a little down in the dumps about having to be reliant on this new medication, but I am also hoping that it will solve this embarrassing bathroom problem I’ve been having. I’ve only been taking the medication for a couple days, so I guess I’ll keep you posted about any improvements.:o
In what has become a Christmas tradition, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted a personal appeal for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this month. On the first day alone, the nonprofit raised $430,000 from 13,000 people. Today, Wales announced that Wikimedia reached its fundraising goals. In total, the foundation managed to raise $7.5 million. Last year, when Wales posted a similar appeal, the Wikimedia Foundation received $6.2 million from 125,000 donors.
Sponsor
Still No Ads
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia properties like Wikiquote or Wikibooks could easily find enough advertisers to finance these sites. In order to remain as independent and impartial as possible, however, the Wikimedia Foundation prefers to rely on donations from users.
It is worth noting, though, that the Wikipedia does have deals with some other companies like France Telecom’s Orange. These businesses license the site’s content and share advertising revenue with the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Wikimedia Foundation has fewer than 35 employees and needs roughly $10 million per year to operate. About 340 million users access Wikipedia per month. According to Wales, this represents “almost a third of the Internet-connected world.”
The media’s coverage of mixed economic news led to a marginal rise in the Dow Jones Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) in December. The ESI rose to 38.7, up only minimally from 38.3 in November.
Sometimes, it feels like terms we thought had some meaning really don’t apply as much anymore.
If you’re interested in getting more from meetings than a gaping sinkhole in your schedule—and who isn’t?—these tips from how Google handles meetings can help. Of great importance is focusing on data, not politics and grievances.
As we wave goodbye to 2009 it is traditional to have a retrospective. Over the next few hours I will list 10 things which came to Windows Mobile users this year which made this year great.
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In what has become a Christmas tradition, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted a 
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia properties like Wikiquote or Wikibooks could easily find enough advertisers to finance these sites. In order to remain as independent and impartial as possible, however, the Wikimedia Foundation prefers to rely on donations from users.