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During our time on this planet, we humans haven’t lent a hand to just anyone. Instead, we have usually saved our solicitousness for our own kind. And although over millennia the boundaries separating “us” from “them” have widened—from only kith and kin to entire neighborhoods and nations—the tendency has stayed the same: We help our own. Yet a surprising new experiment shows just how easily this human bias can be transformed into altruism. “The connections between affiliation to the group and prosocial behavior are so fundamental that, even in infancy, a mere hint of affiliation is sufficient to increase helping,” write coauthors Harriet Over, a doctoral student in psychology at Cardiff University in Wales, and Malinda Carpenter, a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. For the study, a research assistant first showed each 18- month-old infant one of four possible sets of eight photographs. The photographs in all four sets featured a common household object (e.g., a teapot, book, or shoe) in the foreground. But each set had a different cue—a prime—in its background: two dolls facing each other (the affiliation prime), two dolls facing apart, one doll alone, or an inanimate object.…

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy: Every polluting city pollutes in its own way. Yet until recently, just how and whence Los Angeles, Bangkok, and eight other global cities exhaled their climatec-hanging vapors was a topic shrouded in mystery. Now, a 10- city comparison of greenhouse gas emissions per capita is showing metropolises “exactly where their emissions are coming from,” says Christopher Kennedy, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author. The research “could also help cities learn from each other,” he adds. Aside from the usual finding that North American cities are the heaviest breathers, Kennedy and his team reveal that each urban area has a distinct emissions profi e. (See these profiles on the graph below.) Mile-high Denver and temperate Toronto burn lots of fossil fuels to generate electricity for their businesses and industries, as well as to stay warm during their frostier months. At the same time, hydropower keeps Geneva’s electricity- related emissions low. Yet cold winters drive up Geneva’s heating oil-induced effluvia, as they do for New York and Prague. But New York spares the air many of its transportation-related fumes with high population density and good public transit, as…

The Dow Chemical Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. got theirs. So did ConocoPhillips Co., International Paper Co., Weyerhaeuser Co., and Monsanto Co. Between 2004 and 2006, these companies received resolutions from shareholders pressing them to take better care of the environment. And then between 2006 and 2007, these businesses indeed made at least one eco-friendly move: They shared data with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a London-based NGO that compiles and publicizes the largest database of corporate greenhouse gas emissions in the world. These corporations’ tales are part of a larger trend, report Erin M. Reid and Michael W. Toff el of Harvard Business School. “We find that if a [Standard & Poor’s (S&P)] 500 company had a shareholder resolution in its recent past,” says Toffel, “it was more likely to disclose to the CDP.” The researchers also find that shareholder resolutions have a spillover effect: If one firm gets an environmental proposal from a stockholder, the rest of the firms in its industry become more likely to comply with the CDP. “Most of these resolutions initially lose, and lose big,” notes Toff el. “Managers don’t like to be told how to behave by shareholder activists.” But within a few…

As wealthier nations age, nonprofits are retooling their operations to accommodate an older volunteer workforce. But they would be remiss if they didn’t also look for help at the other end of the life span, reports Charlene S. Shannon, an expert in recreation and leisure studies at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. She documents how “younger youth”—children between the ages of 8 and 12—are an energetic, useful, yet largely overlooked pool of volunteer labor. Interviewing younger youth and executive directors at Boys & Girls Clubs in Atlantic Canada, Shannon finds that the younger set’s needs and strengths are different from those of their slightly older counterparts. For instance, the difficulty that these small volunteers most frequently cite is that their assigned tasks are physically challenging. Dealing with rude people—both peers and older people—is also particularly taxing for them. But as legions of cookie-peddling Girls Scouts can attest, younger youth are particularly adept at fundraising. They are also well suited for assisting adults in tasks that require minimal responsibility, such as stuffing envelopes and tidying up after events. Helping seniors is also a younger-youth bailiwick. Recruiting 8- to 12-year-olds may be easier than coaxing adolescents and adults to volunteer,…

In an area outside Hyderabad, India, between the suburbs and the countryside, a young woman—we’ll call her Shanti—fetches water daily from the always-open local borehole that is about 300 feet from her home. She uses a 3-gallon plastic container that she can easily carry on her head. Shanti and her husband rely on the free water for their drinking and washing, and though they’ve heard that it’s not as safe as water from the Naandi Foundation-run community treatment plant, they still use it. Shanti’s family has been drinking the local water for generations, and although it periodically makes her and her family sick, she has no plans to stop using it. Shanti has many reasons not to use the water from the Naandi treatment center, but they’re not the reasons one might think. The center is within easy walking distance of her home—roughly a third of a mile. It is also well known and affordable (roughly 10 rupees, or 20 cents, for 5 gallons). Being able to pay the small fee has even become a status symbol for some villagers. Habit isn’t a factor, either. Shanti is forgoing the safer water because of a series of flaws in the overall…

If you’re cooking for a smaller gathering this Thanksgiving, Trader Joe’s pre-stuffed turkey breasts are just perfect.  They can easily feed 6 people and make a gorgeous, impressive presentation with cranberry-jeweled stuffing in the center.

Grab this turkey, add aside of vegetables, and dinner is done!  If you go this route, we demand that you sear the outside first.  Do not just toss it in the oven like the package instructions say, or you’ll end up with a dried-out hunk of meat.  Repeat: Do not just follow the package instructions!  I tried this the first time.  I was on autopilot just following instructions, and before I knew it, I had a seriously dried-out turkey.  The only way to salvage it was to dice it up and make soup with it.

As I stood there scratching my head, wondering what went wrong, I realized I had forgotten my cardinal rule of roasting when there’s no bone or skin to protect meat: sear first!  Searing the outside forms a protective layer that locks juices in and keeps meat from drying out.  It also gives the outside a mouthwatering golden color that you can’t get from simply baking.  So please, I beg you to take a few extra minutes to sear the outside before baking.

Look for pre-stuffed turkey breast in the raw meat section of the store.  It’s a great dinner option for an intimate gathering.

An excellent post yesterday from Daniel J Gerstle on the War and Peace blog offers important — and highly personal — background on the tragic story of a Somali judge’s recent assassination.

Judge Sheikh Mohamad Abdi Aware was shot and killed outside his mosque last week, allegedly by separatist leaders or pirates angry with him for handing down harsh sentences to pirates and criminal kingpins.

Daniel writes about the time he spent in Somalia conducting the first review of juvenile justice in the country got the UN. He writes that he struggled to come to grips with a weak, fledgling court system that was torn between traditional, Islamic and state law. His post makes clear the incredible courage of people like Judge Aware to stand up to violent factions when in an attempt to establish the rule of law in a war-torn land. Daniel writes:

Judge Aware’s surviving colleagues have near their reach the reigns of law for northeastern Somalia. With success there, chances are better to bring greater rule of law to the south. But their number, those who can equally satisfy not only the state but also the Islamic and traditional leadership, which requires gravitas, are dwindling.

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As you hopefully know, back in 1999, the RIAA had a Congressional staffer named Mitch Glazier slip four words into a totally unrelated bill on satellite retransmission of broadcast TV, literally in the middle of the night, that effectively changed the way copyrights worked on songs by major label artists. It effectively took much of the control out of the hands of the artists and handed it right to the labels. Remember that the next time the record labels claim they’re representing the best interests of artists. The use of four simple words, buried deep within the bill, which no one other than the RIAA knew about (seriously, those who voted on it later said they had no idea), turned songs recorded by artists signed to record deals to works made for hire. That meant that those artists could not reclaim the copyrights to their songs later on via a “termination” right, as any other content creator could. Glazier, the staffer who slipped this into the bill, ended up going to work for the RIAA just three months after putting this text into the bill. He was apparently hired with a $500,000 salary. Not a bad payoff for changing a key component of copyright law in the middle of the night when no one’s looking.

Luckily, soon after this passed a few people did notice, leading to a big uproar from artists, and an eventual backtracking from Congress, who never did believe the RIAA’s line that this “change” just “clarified existing law” rather than changed it entirely.

But, it’s important to remember all of this when discussing termination rights for music. Back in October, we had discussed how the songs of many top musicians were quickly approaching those termination rights, and some of the major record labels stood to lose the copyrights on some of their biggest hit albums. Wired recently ran a similar article about this “ticking time bomb,” and I wasn’t going to post it, because I wasn’t sure it added much new, until reader Mesanna pointed out one little factoid down at the bottom:

The second option is to re-record sound recordings in order to create new sound recording copyrights, which would reset the countdown clock at 35 years for copyright grant termination. Eveline characterized the labels’ conversations with creators going something like, “Okay, you have the old mono masters if you want — but these digital remasters are ours.”

Labels already file new copyrights for remasters. For example, Sony Music filed a new copyright for the remastered version of Ben Folds Five’s Whatever and Ever Amen album, and when Omega Record Group remastered a 1991 Christmas recording, the basis of its new copyright claim was “New Matter: sound recording remixed and remastered to fully utilize the sonic potential of the compact disc medium.”

Now, of course that sounds ridiculous, to hear that record labels can get a new copyright on just remastering a work… but, that sounds an awful lot like the argument made by Bluebeat.com, concerning its “psycho-acoustic simulation” re-recordings of famous songs, that enabled it to claim a new copyright. Now, the record labels are crying foul about this, and the vast majority of copyright law experts say that Bluebeat’s claim has no chance at all. But, if that’s the case, then the record labels own attempts to get new copyrights on remastered albums to avoid the termination rights might also be in jeopardy. It seems like any argument that is made against Bluebeat can soon be used against the labels as well if they really do try to claim copyright on remastered albums.

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As mentioned in yesterday’s theme review post, RIM recently released BlackBerry Theme Studio, an application which allows anyone to create new BlackBerry themes. While we’ll always appreciate the work of the professional designers who create vibrant premium themes, we also know that many people have an idea for the perfect theme in their heads. I know I do. There have been a few themes that have come close to that, but none have been the perfect Joe Theme. If you’ve been longing for your own perfect theme, and you have some time on your hands, you can now give it a try.

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National Kidney Foundation Marketing/Public Relations Spring Internship

Description of Organization:
The National Kidney Foundation Serving Virginia, a major voluntary health organization, seeks to prevent kidney and urinary tract diseases, improve the health and well being of individuals and families affected by these diseases, and increase the availability of all organs for transplantation.

Intern Responsibilities:

• Writing and distributing press releases for programs and events.
• Creating flyers, brochures and mailers for marketing and community education campaigns.
• Assist in the development and implementation of various fund-raising projects.
• Participating in direct marketing/advertising campaigns.
• Compiling and analyzing marketing data to gauge the effectiveness of the marketing program.
• Data entry and database management.
• Other duties as assigned.

Intern Qualifications:

• College Junior or Senior, Graduate Student.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office, knowledge of Adobe creative suite preferred.
• Excellent writing/communications skills.
• Ability to learn new software quickly.
• Ability to work on deadline.
• Ability to work alone as well as part of a team.

When offered (fall, spring and/or summer semesters.):
Available all semesters

Paid/unpaid/stipend:
Unpaid

Who to Contact:
Amy Capistran
Regional Project Manager
1742 East Parham Road
Richmond, VA 23228
Phone: 804-288-8342
Fax: 804-282-7835
[email protected]

What’s it like to perform a processor upgrade on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers? In this video, Al Enger from Cray, Inc. walks through the upgrade process of the Kraken supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which holds the number three spot in the new Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Enger is upgrading Kraken’s quad-core AMD Opteron chips to Opterons with six cores. This video runs about 4 minutes.

For more coverage of information about supercomputing, check out our High Performance Computing Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Today, policy and business leaders are reaching a consensus that industry must address rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly in the data center. Leading enterprises are now turning to the practical challenge of determining how, how much, and at what cost to reduce emissions. In a recent white paper from IDC many companies are learning that their data center offers a means to both abate GHG and reduce costs with the right incremental capital investments.

The process of improving information technology and data center efficiency not only reduces GHG emissions but also reduces cost for the enterprise. This means that the savings or business value derived from improvements far outstrips the incremental capital costs of “greening” the datacenter. Green IT means business improvement. Firms that rank highest among the “Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World,” such as Amazon, Toyota, and Nike, have realized that focusing on limiting energy calories in the datacenter and elsewhere pays profitability dividends on the financial side. IDC research indicates that companies reducing their metric tons of carbon per datacenter workload by a factor of 55% also incurred 35% less cost per user session on a server.

Mozilla seems to have hit a sweet spot with Personas, the theme engine add-on for Firefox and Thunderbird. While the browser had customization options before and themes support from the early stages, most people weren’t using them, either because they found it complicated or found the selection of themes was rather lacking. In just several months though, 10 million people have customized their browsers with Personas and the number of available designs is staggering.

“Since Personas was launched earlier this year, over 10 million people around the globe have chosen to personalize their Firefox by downloading Personas. Nearly 35,000 designs were contributed from artists at all levels of experience from all parts of the world (over 1,000 designs / week). Nearly 40 affinity brands, including Harry Potter, Bob Marley, Lady Gaga, and Greenpeace have added their content to the gallery. Localization community has diligently translated the add-on into over 25 languages; Personas website will be localized by the end of the year,” Mozilla’s Suneel Gupta and Myk Melez listed some of the team’s achievements.

The Mozilla Labs team just released the latest version of the popular add-on, Personas 1.4 which brought several updates and enhancements mostly related to the user experience. With so many designs it’s g… (read more)

Sprint have begun sending out their first ‘over the air’ update for their HTC Hero handset. Before Hero owners get too excited, the update is just a maintenance and not the highly anticipated Android 2.0 Eclair update.

Weighing in at 3748377 bytes, the OTA update is reported to fix a number of SMS related issues which impacted battery usage, along with a fix to enable the device to function properly with DST.

If you’re a Sprint HTC Hero owner and haven’t yet received the update, then you can initiate the OTA transfer by going to Settings -> About -> System Updates -> then hit Firmware Update, and follow the prompts.

If you’ve noticed any other fixes, or changes after installing the update, then please let us know in the HTC Hero forum!

If you’re looking for more info on the new Verizon Android phones, then be sure to check out Droid Forums & Droid Eris Forums

Sprint Release HTC Hero OTA Update 1.56.651.2

At the Interop conference yesterday I heard a familiar refrain: "IT is the problem." The epithet was issued by a cloud computing guru, but you could replace "cloud computing" with nearly any emerging technology and hear the same thing. Enterprise IT just doesn’t adopt new technologies as fast as many consultants and analysts would wish.

In this case, the argument was doubly specious because the cloud consultant: 1) accused IT managers of trying to subvert the business to keep their jobs (impugning motives is rarely a winning argument); and 2) accused IT managers of dragging their feet due to irrational security fears. Now, I have seen some poor decisions made in the name of security, but a careful assessment of enterprise data safety and business continuity in the face of still-emerging cloud models seems pretty sensible. Ironically, a customer panel preceding the consultants’ session included an anecdote where a cloud customer lost service for two hours because another customer mis-behaved in what was supposed to be a nicely-walled environment.

The other arena where IT sometimes plays villain is among Enterprise 2.0 evangelists. Thankfully, this appears to be changing. In my experience, IT teams frequently have significant experience with — and substantial enthusiasm for — social computing. For every case where IT is holding up internal social computing initiatives, I can point you to several cases where IT is trying to push the business side to adopt these technologies more effectively. When IT fails here, it is often because they assume, incorrectly, that their non-tech peers will adopt social tools along familiar patterns (which almost by definition they won’t).

Remember that IT teams are frequently more interested in emerging technologies than you know. But they are also held accountable for some old-school requirements….little stuff like: security, reliability, performance, continuity, cost-effectiveness, regulatory compliance, and the like. If you want your IT group to be more creative, then you also need to give them the freedom to experiment, too.

The US isn’t the only country to have its two largest wireless carriers in the middle of a legal spat as Canada’s TELUS has filed suit against Rogers Wireless. The reason for the lawsuit has to do with Rogers’ claim to “Canada’s most reliable network”, one that is “two times faster than any other.” According to TELUS, such claims became invalid as of November 5th when its very own 21Mbps HSPA network was launched. Looking to resolve the matter out of court, the Burnaby, BC-based company asked Rogers to immediately cease all reliability and speed claims. Rogers did not and one week later the lawsuit was born.

As it stands today, Rogers is refusing to back down from its claims citing independent studies dating back to 2007 which consistently show its networks superior performance. The problem with the position taken by Rogers is it puts TELUS at an unfair disadvantage as its new network has yet to undergo such third-party testing. On the other hand, the Rogers network does include an EDGE network, something TELUS does not have, which one could argue creates a fail-safe of sorts thus lending credence Rogers’ claimed reliability. As for what it hopes to achieve with the lawsuit, TELUS is asking that Rogers admit it disregarded the standards set forth in the Competition Act, stop all ads claiming its network to be the fastest and most reliable and, as always, pay for damages incurred.

Bell, who shares its network with TELUS, is not involved in the lawsuit.

Thanks, Tom!

Read

I usually find Larry Magid’s columns pretty reasonable, so I’m a bit surprised to see him calling for a special “news tax” to fund failing newspapers. Most of the column is a decent enough explanation of how the newspapers are losing subscribers and are having trouble making as much money as they used to. He even notes (as so few in this debate do) that subscriber revenue to newspapers has never really been about funding the news operations, and has always been a very small piece of the revenue puzzle. And he suggests, as we have many times, that it’s quite unlikely that a paywall solution will work.

But, right towards the end, he writes the following:

Maybe we need to find another model? I realize there would be a lot of objections to using tax money to finance journalism, but I wonder if we should take a look at the British model that finances the BBC’s TV, radio and online programming with a $237 tax on whatever device you use to watch TV, be it a computer, personal video recorder, mobile phone or TV set. In Britain, according to the British government’s TV licensing Web site, “watching TV without a valid license is a criminal offence.”

I’m quite sure that criminalizing unlicensed Web surfing or TV viewing would be even more unpopular with Americans than mandatory health insurance. But unless media companies can find another way to stay in business, we may very well see some serious proposals along these lines.

Magid is, certainly, not the first person to call for government funding of newspapers, but he does little to actually explore the idea — such as looking at the recent report talking about how as more government money goes to funding newspaper activities, the coverage of gov’t corruption drops. On top of that, there are serious practical issues here. The BBC setup, involves funding a single national operation, not many different newspapers (which is what the rest of Magid’s piece is about). It seems odd that he would effectively be suggesting that we wipe out local newspapers in favor of a gov’t funded national news organization.

And, of course, there are all sorts of questions about whether or not this is even needed. Certainly, many newspapers are struggling, though in many cases it’s not due to trouble funding operations, but due to the massive debt loads they took on a few years back when management stupidly thought that they were invincible to market changes. At the same time, we’re seeing new and innovative startups hiring journalists and doing good work. Shouldn’t we let the system work itself out before we suddenly decide to have the government intervene?

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AOL is already looking ahead of the upcoming split from Time Warner and is making plans to spin-off some non-essential proprieties to allow it to focus more on its new direction, moving away from services and more towards content. The rumor now is that it’s looking to shed its ICQ instant messaging service and has put a price tag of about $300 million on the property.

According to sources close to the matter, cited by BoomTown, AOL has put investment bankers Morgan Stanley and Allen & Co. to work on preparing the IM unit for sale and managing the perspective talks. It looks like AOL didn’t have any immediate plans to sell ICQ, but interest from a couple of companies outside of the US, which probably sensed an opportunity, determined it to put things in motion.

ICQ has about 50 million unique monthly users and is the most popular IM services in several countries, though mostly in smaller markets. In the US, it is virtually unheard of, while the company’s other IM service, AIM, is among the top three services along with Microsoft Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. The ICQ unit is profitable, although not exactly a big revenue earner, enough to raise the attention of several players with interest in the countries where the service is more popular.

AOL is about to become an independent company and… (read more)

HedoneDesign have prepared a new theme designed for OS 5, called GreenTech, which was made using the latest BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0. GreenTech features an easy-on-the-eyes green color, with large time, battery and signal icons.

Because it was developed using the Theme Studio 5.0, this theme is compatible with all the latest devices including Storm2, Storm, Tour Bold 9700, 8900 and 9000. On the other hand, popular but older devices like the 8330 aren’t compatible.

GreenTech is available for $3.99 until November 23rd (regularly $7.99).

© BlackBerry Cool for BlackBerry Cool, 2009