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Though cancer hasn’t been completely cured, it’s clear that treatments for the disease have improved over the past two decades. A yearly report from the American Cancer Society has shown that the death rate from cancer in the U.S. is declining among all Americans and for the most common types of cancer.

The report, published recently in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, shows that the death rate from all cancers combined has been falling since the early 1990. From 2000 to 2009, combined cancer death rates have fallen an average of 1.8% among men and 1.4% among women. Black men and black women saw the largest declines in cancer deaths from 2000 to 2009, though their cancer death rates from 2005 to 2009 were still highest when compared to other racial groups.

Though death rates for cancers such as lung cancer , breast cancer, and colon cancer are declining, the rate of diagnoses for some cancers is increasing. The rate of new cases of pancreas, kidney, thyroid, liver, melanoma, and myeloma cancers have all increased in men from 2000 to 2009. For women, rates of new cases of thyroid, melanoma, kidney, pancreas, liver, leukemia, and uterus cancers increased during the same period. The report points out that excess weight and lack of physical activity are risk factors for many of these cancers.

“The continuing drop in cancer mortality over the past two decades is reason to cheer,” said John Seffrin, CEO of the American Cancer Society. “The challenge we now face is how to continue those gains in the face of new obstacles, like obesity and HPV infections. We must face these hurdles head on, without distraction, and without delay, by expanding access to proven strategies to prevent and control cancer.”

A special section of the report highlighted trends related to human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated cancers. From 2000 to 2009, HPV-associated oropharyngeal (throat) cancer rates increased among white men and women, while anal cancer rates among all men and women increased. Rates of vulva cancer were up among women, though cervical cancer rates declined among all women except Native Americans. The report shows that fewer than one-third of girls aged 13 to 17 had received all 3 recommended doses of the HPV vaccine. Girls in the Southern U.S., those who live in poverty, and those who are hispanic were less likely to get all three doses.

“While this report shows that we are making progress in the fight against cancer on some fronts, we still have much work to do, particularly when it comes to preventing cancer,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “For example, vaccinating against HPV can prevent cervical cancer, but, tragically, far too many girls are growing into adulthood vulnerable to cervical cancer because they are not vaccinated.”

It’s good advice for anyone to check their sharing settings on any app before they use it – unless people want every high score, game achievement, or check-in to appear on their connected Twitter and Facebook feeds.

This advice is is paramount to public officials who already face accusations of ineffectiveness.

Move over, cop eating a donut joke. Say hello to the cop who can’t stop playing Fruit Ninja joke.

Early Sunday morning, the official Twitter account for the Dallas Police Department tweeted that someone in the department had just sliced 38 fruit in Fruit Ninja! Congrats?

The tweet was quickly deleted, but plenty of users retweeted it (with additional commentary):

Dallas PD later tweeted an apology, blaming in all on the kids:

Protect and slice, Dallas PD.

[via BuzzFeed]

Ashton Kutcher is not the only “Dude, Where’s My Car?” star making headlines today (the actor portraying Steve Jobs in the upcoming “jOBS” talked about being hospitalized for two days because of a fruitarian diet and tweeted an intriguing split image of himself and the real Steve Jobs).

Seann William Scott, who in addition to playing opposite Kutcher in the cult hit, is best known as Stifler form the American Pie films, has broken off his engagement to model Lindsay Frimodt, as confirmed by his rep to US Weekly (to set your soul at ease, the publication says the split was “amicable”). The two had been engaged at least since last March.

Prior to his engagement to Frimodt, Scott had reportedly been linked to Mad Men’s January Jones and Sin City’s Jaime King.

Seann William Scott can be seen in Movie 43, which opened on Friday. Here’s the red band trailer:

Seventeen percent of Davos attendees are female this year, and Sheryl Sandberg was one of them. Her explanation for the dearth of women in leadership positions is that they don’t “lean in,” also the title of her upcoming book, due out in March. “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” she writes.

It’s sad that so influential a woman couldn’t see — and seize — an opportunity to influence the business world to become more gender balanced. She could have used her position as one of the most powerful women in America today to argue to the men at Davos — 83% of the attendees — that women represent an enormous opportunity for business. That they are the majority of the educated talent on the planet, and the majority of consumers and end-users in an ever-widening array of sectors, including her own. That gender balanced leadership teams correlate to superior corporate returns.

Instead, she does what too many successful women before her have done: blaming other women for not trying hard enough. But women in the US now represent the majority of college graduates, the majority of MAs and the majority of PhDs. How much harder do you want them to “lean in”?

It hasn’t proven as natural as we all thought for women to break into the leadership ranks of the corporate world. All the companies I work for have learned that gender balance is a result of highly proactive management pushing, not a complacent declaration that outsiders can succeed in the existing system by trying harder.

Sandberg does not serve other women well by pretending that companies are a meritocracy that just requires individual effort. She herself was sponsored and propelled, like almost every successful woman I have ever met, by a powerful man, in her case Larry Summers.

It’s tough to lead externally on this subject if you can’t make progress internally in your own company. Sandberg is the only woman on Facebook’s Executive Team, and the only woman on the company’s board (where she was added months after the board’s formation), despite the fact that women represent the majority of Facebook users (57%).

Nick Kristof wonders in his New York Times column if she isn’t “blaming the victim.” She is. Unfortunately, her argument carries clout. Every resistant man on the planet will be able to quote her. Women must simply become more ambitious, more assertive, more… male. Then maybe we can promote them.

In the meantime, the most gender balanced companies on the planet are mostly led by men, who thankfully seem to believe more in reaching out to women than Sandberg does. This is what smart women really need. Companies and leaders who believe in them and give them a seat at the table, even if they don’t bang on it.

Apple’s role as moralistic gatekeeper of its App Store is well known: co-founder Steve Jobs famously called it Apple’s “moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone.” And when it comes to third-party apps that violate App Store rules of this nature, like making it easy to search for any pornographic content, Apple is pretty quick to take those apps down. We saw this just last week with the high-profile example of 500px. But it’s not clear how consistently Apple is willing to enforce those rules when one of those apps in violation is from a trusted partner company.

Twitter’s recent relaunch of Vine — an app that lets users upload short, looping videos and share them in tweets — has attracted a bunch of attention for the platform’s ability to use the short videos for pornographic content. And there are plenty of examples. See these recent headlines:

• Vine has a porn problem because of course it does
• Only a few days old, Twitter’s Vine becomes a porn hangout

So far, Apple has not only let it slide, it featured the new Vine app in the App Store as an Editor’s Choice last Friday. There are plenty of appropriate uses of Vine, and it seems most are using the service without violating Apple’s rules. But the situation Apple is facing with Vine shows the perils of trying to enforce a set of rules that are basically impossible to apply consistently across an App Store of nearly 800,000 apps.

The situation leads raises two questions: How different does Apple treat its partners versus regular developers? And shouldn’t Apple care more about Vine displaying porn, since Twitter is integrated into both iOS and OS X?

I’ve reached out to Apple for comment about Vine and will update this story if I hear back.

You may not know this, but certain citrus flavors of Gatorade contains an ingredient called brominated vegetable oil. The bromine chemical in the ingredient is somewhat controversial as it’s used in flame retardants. As such, it’s illegal to use as a food additive in most countries except for the United States and Canada. Some companies, however, are beginning to voluntarily remove the ingredient from their products.

Reuters reports that PepsiCo will be removing BVO from its citrus flavored Gatorade drinks in the coming months. Many people are attributing the change to a petition started by a 15-year-old girl named Sarah Kavanagh from Mississippi. Kavanagh’s petition on Change.org had received more than 200,000 signatures before PepsiCo announced the change.

Speaking to Reuters, a spokesperson for Gatorade said that the change wasn’t the direct result from any one petition. The company says that it had planned to remove the ingredient for some time now, but the public announcement just happened to come as soon as Kavanagh’s petition went viral.

That being said, Kavanagh is still celebrating the victory that she shares with numerous food safety watchdog groups around the nation. One in particular, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told Reuters that it applauds “PepsiCo for doing the responsible thing and voluntary getting [BVO] out of Gatorade.”

Gatorade may be ridding itself of BVO, but numerous other citrus soft drinks include the controversial ingredient. The removal from Gatorade may convince soft-drink manufacturers to remove it from their other products though.

It seems obvious that you shouldn’t put your audience to sleep, doesn’t it? It should also be obvious to people who deliver dull presentations or talk in circles at dinner parties — but consider how many boring speakers you’ve had to endure.

The most engaging communicators avoid trite expressions, whether in conversation or in writing. They use strong, simple words. Think of Winston Churchill’s famous phrase blood, toil, tears, and sweat. And remember what George Washington said when questioned about the fallen cherry tree: not “It was accomplished by utilizing a small, sharp-edged implement,” but “I used my little hatchet.”

When you write e-mails, reports, letters, and other documents, here’s how to keep your readers alert and responsive:

Use personal pronouns skillfully. Don’t overuse I (try not to begin paragraphs or successive sentences with it), but do lean heavily on we, our, you, and your. Those are friendly words that pull readers into a document.

Use contractions. Many writers have a morbid fear of contractions, having been taught in school to avoid them. But you won’t be breaking any real rules if you use them — and they counteract stuffiness, a major cause of poor writing. Relax. If you’d say something as a contraction, then write it that way.

Avoid passive voice. Don’t write “The closing documents were prepared by Sue”; instead, write “Sue prepared the closing documents.” This guideline is hardly absolute — sometimes passive voice is the most natural way to say what you’re saying. But if you develop a strong habit of using active voice, you’ll largely prevent convoluted, backward-sounding sentences in your writing.

How do you identify passive voice? It’s invariably a be-verb or get, plus a past-tense verb. Some examples:

• is + delivered
• are + finished
• was + awarded
• were + praised
• be + served
• got + promoted

Vary the length and structure of your sentences. Monotony, as Cicero once said, is in all things the mother of boredom. It’s true of syntax no less than it’s true of eating or anything else. Sameness cloys. So you want short sentences and long; main clauses and subordinate ones. You want variety.

Avoid alphabet soup. Readers find acronyms tiresome, especially ones they’re not familiar with. Use them judiciously. It may be convenient to refer to COGS instead of spelling out “cost of goods sold.” But if you also throw in acronyms such as ABC (“activity-based costing”), EBITDA (“earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization”), and VBM (“value-based management”), only the accountants in your audience will follow you — you’ll lose everyone else. Small wonder, too. People don’t want to master your arcane vocabulary to get what you’re saying.

Surely you’ve had this experience as a reader: you encounter an acronym (a long one if you’re particularly unlucky) and can’t connect it with anything you’ve read in the document so far. You find yourself scanning backward through the text, hoping to find the first appearance of that acronym or else words that might fit it. By the time you find it (or give up trying), you’ve lost the writer’s train of thought. Never put your own readers through that.

Stick to words when you can. Acronyms make writing easier but reading harder. Your shortcut is the reader’s hindrance.

This is the first post in Bryan A. Garner’s blog series on business writing. The series draws on advice in Garner’s new book, the HBR Guide to Better Business Writing.

… Milo carefully said nothing when Major —— de Coverley stepped into the mess hall with his fierce and austere dignity the day he returned and found his way blocked by a wall of officers waiting in line to sign loyalty oaths. At the far end of the food counter, a group of men who had arrived earlier were pledging allegiance to the flag, with trays of food balanced in one hand, in order to be allowed to take seats at the table. Already at the tables, a group that had arrived still earlier was singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in order that they might use the salt and pepper and ketchup there. The hubub began to subside slowly as Major —— de Coverley paused in the doorway with a frown of puzzled disapproval, as though viewing something bizarre. He started forward in a straight line, and the wall of officers before him parted like the Red Sea. Glancing neither left nor right, he strode indomitably up to the steam counter and, in a clear, full-bodied voice that was gruff with age and resonant with ancient eminence and authority, said:

“Gimme eat”.

Instead of eat, Corporal Snark gave Major —— de Coverley a loyalty oath to sign. Major —— de Coverley swept it away with mighty displeasure the moment he recognized what it was, his good eye flaring up blindingly with fiery disdain and his enormous old corrugated face darkening in mountainous wrath.

“Gimme eat, I said”, he ordered loudly in harsh tones that rumbled ominously through the silent tent like claps of distant thunder.

Corporal Snark turned pale and began to tremble. He glanced toward Milo pleadingly for guidance. For several terrible seconds there was not a sound. Then Milo nodded.

“Give him eat”, he said.

Corporal Snark began giving Major —— de Coverley eat. Major —— de Coverley turned from the counter with his tray full and came to a stop. His eyes fell on the groups of other officers gazing at him in mute appeal, and, with righteous belligerence, he roared:

“Give everybody eat!”

“Give everybody eat!” Milo echoed with joyful relief, and the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade came to an end.

— from Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

This weekend it became illegal for U.S. residents to jailbreak their smartphones. The penalty for this violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996 (DMCA) is “first time offenders may be fined up to $500,000, imprisoned for five years, or both. For repeat offenders, the maximum penalty increases to a fine of $1,000,000, imprisonment for up to 10 years, or both”.

This is a larger penalty, I’ll point out, than the one for turning my un-jailbroken smart phone into an explosive device, though to be fair the ATF can throw an extra penalty on top for “brandishing“.

There is some question among readers whether “jailbreaking” or “unlocking” is what’s illegal here and there is certainly some overlap in the two terms. When I wanted to make my original iPhone work on the T-Mobile network rather than the AT&T network, for example, the way it was done back then was called “jailbreaking”, which explicitly enabled “unlocking”, for it was only by unlocking (enabled in that case by jailbreaking) that I was able to switch from one GSM network to another.

Maybe times have changed and I am now using the wrong term, but I think these disagreements about terminology are mainly pedantic excuses not to consider the underlying fact that the U.S. Government is messing with my innate right to do whatever I damn well please with what’s long paid for and sitting in my junk drawer.

Jailbreaking has actually been illegal since 1996 when there were no smartphones, but those doing it enjoyed an exemption allowed by the Librarian of Congress, whom I have never thought of as either a law enforcement official nor possibly the biggest jerk in the U. S. Government, but I’m rethinking that today.

This is stupid and represents exactly the type of government nobody needs. It is also a perfect issue to deal with through civil disobedience.

I never even considered jailbreaking my five year-old iPhone 3 but this week I’m going to do it — and I suggest you do, too.

I haven’t decided yet whether to do it at the AT&T Store, the Apple Store, or in the middle of the Reading Room at the Library of Congress, but I’m going to do it.

If 10,000 people publicly jailbreak that old iPhone sitting in a drawer the legal system will temporarily grind to a halt and this stupid law will grind with it.

Reprinted with permission

Google has updated its Flight Search tool to let users search for regions. Now, you can search for places in addition to just airports. Google made the announcement on its ITA Software blog. ITA Software is, of course, what powers the Flight Search feature.

“Let’s say you want to take your family to Hawaii for spring break, but you’re not sure which of the islands sounds most appealing,” says Google software engineer Peter Balsiger. “There is now a way to quickly and easily search for a broader set of destination information. In this case, instead of checking prices to Kailua-Kona or Kahului, you could type ‘Hawaii’ into Flight Search. Live prices would then appear on the map, so you can quickly compare the cost of the different options.”

“Whether you’re planning a trip on your desktop, tablet or phone, you can use Flight Search to search for countries, states, islands and even continents from any U.S. or Canadian origin,” he adds.

Balsiger encourages users to try searches like “Australia,” “Europe” or “Florida”.

Last month, Google upgraded Flight Search with a handful of new features, including Flight Explorer, which lets you browse flights by trip length, number of stops, airline, duration, outbound times and return times. The feature is still under the “experimental” label.

Also in December, MileWise began letting its users search with its ITA Software QPX pricing and shopping technology on their iPhones.

Last week we told you all about how BlackBerry World will not only be home to the great apps and games for BlackBerry 10, but for music and video content as well. Today we’ve released more details on some of the great media partners you can expect to see in BlackBerry World. Here’s more information from the release!

The new BlackBerry World will include an extensive catalog of songs as well as movies and TV shows, with most movies coming to the store the same day they are released on DVD, and next day availability of many current TV series. The competitive offering will feature content from all major studios, music labels and top local broadcast networks.

The video download and rental section in BlackBerry World will initially be available in the US, UK and Canada. Varying by region and distributor, customers will have access to movies from the following studios and independents: 20th Century Fox, Entertainment One (eOne), Lionsgate, MGM, National Film Board of Canada, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (US), Starz Digital Media, STUDIOCANAL, The Walt Disney Studios, Universal Pictures (UK), Warner Bros. Customers will also have access to TV shows from the following broadcasters and studios: ABC Studios, BBC Worldwide, CBC/Radio-Canada, CBS, DHX Media, ITV, National Geographic, NBCUniversal (UK), Nelvana, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (US), Starz Digital Media, Twentieth Century Fox Television, Univision Communications Inc, and Warner Bros.

With a great lineup of media partners lined up, we’re more excited for BlackBerry 10 than ever. Let us know what shows, bands and movies you’re looking forward to seeing in BlackBerry World.

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Every BlackBerry 10 detail, update, and feature, as soon as it’s released: BlackBerry.com/BlackBerry10. Test out BlackBerry 10 features hands-on, watch exclusive video interviews with the minds behind BlackBerry 10, and receive product and carrier updates straight to your inbox. Sign up today!

We’ve all seen Ashton Kutcher’s uncanny resemblance to a young Steve Jobs, with his tall frame, medium-length brown hair, and beard. Though we don’t know how all of the other parts of the performance will fall into place (we’ve only seen one short clip), we can all agree that we won’t have to suspend our disbelief that much when it comes to looks.

Now, thanks to a tweet from Kutcher himself, we finally know that made-up old Ashton Kutcher also looks like older Steve Jobs.

Check out the side-by-side:

jOBS premiered at Sundance last Friday. It will be released to a worldwide audience on April 19th.

A new study has shown that “triggers” for migraine with aura may not be as strongly associated with migraines as is commonly thought. Such triggers, including flashing lights and exercise, are often avoided by patients who suffer frequent migraines.

“People with migraine with aura are told to avoid possible triggers, which may lead them to avoid a wide range of suspected factors,” said Dr. Jes Olesen, author of the study at the University of Copenhagen and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology. “Yet the most commonly reported triggers are stress, bright light, emotional influences and physical effort, which can be difficult to avoid and potentially detrimental, if people avoid all physical activity.”

The study, published recently in the journal Neurology, looked at 27 people with migraine with aura who reported that a migraine attack had been triggered by flickering light or vigorous exercise. The patients exercised for one hour, either biking or running, and reached at least 80% of their max heart rate. The were also exposed to flashing lights for 30 to 40 minutes. After their sessions, patients were observed for three hours and told to report any migraine symptoms.

“Our study suggests that if a person is exposed to a suspected trigger for three months and does not have a migraine attack, they no longer have to worry about avoiding that trigger,” said Olesen.

Only 11% of the patients reported a migraine with aura after their trigger exposure, and another 11% experienced a migraine without aura. None of the patients had a migraine with aura following light exposure alone.

“Perhaps rather than triggers, these behaviors are a brain-driven response to the early phases of the migraine itself,” said Dr. Peter Goadsby of the University of California, San Francisco in an accompanying editorial. “Maybe people are driven to exercise as an early symptom and the association with light is simply the sensitivity to light that occurs with the attack itself?”

Lyatiss believes the cloud needs to evolve to Application Defined Networking. The company took its first step toward that vision with the beta release of CloudWeaver, a tool that brings compute and network together, and allows a customer to orchestrate it all from one tool. CloudWeaver works atop of Amazon Web Services with support for additional services to come down the line.

So what is CloudWeaver, and what is Application Defined Networking, for that matter? Lyatiss feels it has found something lacking in the market: cloud orchestration and visibility that reaches deep into the network. The network is often hidden to cloud infrastructure, particularly with public cloud, and latency issues are becoming critical for cloud customers. As developers build increasingly sophisticated and constantly changing applications, monitoring and troubleshooting an infrastructure based on a “black box network” becomes a challenge. Application Defined Networking looks to connect the network to the cloud, through an intuitive orchestration of cloud networking.

Addressing the Limitations of SDN

Software Defined Networking (SDN) defines a new architecture for the “network machine” and is the first step in trying to address these issues. But Lyatiss feels that SDN solutions only partially fulfill the need for agile networking and don’t solve the problems that application administrators experience in the cloud. SDN is not sufficient to address the predictability and performance issues encountered in current cloud applications, nor can it meet the need for infrastructure differentiation and software control in this scenario.

Instead, Lyatiss asserts, the cloud industry will have to evolve to Application Defined Networking (ADN) that orchestrates application flows. ADN accelerates and streamlines the movement of data throughout the entire virtual infrastructure of each application. ADN gives the application the ability to adapt its networking environment using APIs, so that application delivery and performance across public and private cloud networks are optimized, without compromising on application portability or security.

“It’s a top down approach, and the goal is to serve the application,” said Pascale Vicat-Blanc, CEO of Lyatiss. “In the cloud, there are immediate needs that have to be covered. ADN answers these needs – this gives customers greater visibility of the network. This is related to SLAs in the cloud.”

Focus on Infrastructure, Not the Application

An application developer can’t see the latency constraints in the cloud, said Vicat-Blanc. With Lyatiss, “you can build the communication graph of the application. You also get the knowledge of how, the application performance management.” The difference between Application Performance Management and Application Defined Networking is that you’re not instrumenting the application, you’re instrumenting the infrastructure. CloudWeaver shares the communication patterns and correlates them.

The company started in France, and has a history of helping high demanding applications get the best of networks. Headquarted in Silicon Valley, the team consists of more than 20 people and is expected to double this year.

How Cloudweaver Works

First the Cloudweaver application runs a discovery. A customer provides his or her Amazon credentials, and in a few minutes, a network topology map is created.  ”This is the first time a customer has seen a visual representation of what their AWS infrastructure looks like,” said Ankit Agarwal, VP of product at Lyatiss.

A flow map is created, which is a heat map showing the network path and points of latency. For public cloud, this is deep insight into the network. CloudWeaver analyzes the data, the latency and throughput information, usage analysis, and has bottleneck detection. It shows usage statistics, allows the setting of user defined thresholds, and orchestrates it all – moving, changing and cloning nodes as needed. It has built in network services for integration, reconfiguring network resources. “It’s a very tight coupling of the network and the instances,” said Agarwal. “I need to be able to perform solo actions and network actions. I need to perform  network actions like creating a load balancer. :ater, you’ll be able to secure other network services for security, VPN.”

A CloudWeaver customer can see the region and availability zones. If the customer clicks on a node, information comes up, for more information, a customer can SSH into the node. CloudWeaver can helps fix the following:

• Unpredictable latencies and uneven user experiences. 
• Potentially disastrous cascading effects from bottlenecks, failures and cloud outages.
• Poor performance and lack of isolation from a large number of users.
• Wasted capacity resulting from over-provisioned infrastructure.
• Increased networking complexity, making it almost unmanageable.
• Spiraling costs from lack of visibility in resource interactions.

Several use cases were provided. The first is in staging, allowing customers to anticipate high loads. Customers are using CloudWeaver to test with specific configurations and  topologies to identify weakest point of infrastructure and remediate. “It’s difficult to plan in advance without seeing and imitating these situations,” said Agarwal.

The other use is for planning and programming. The company gave a customer example of a social gaming company using CloudWeaver. The company provides a platform for games, and can need to scale from 500,000 to 2 million users for a few hours. It’s critical for the company to anticipate activity and get the right metrics of trends in real time. They use them for accessing the capacity they need, and like the graphical user interface.

CloudWeaver can also be used as a staging environment to demonstrate potential scenarios to management. This helps save time and money, because the user doesn’t have to oversize the infrastructure. CloudWeaver is delivered in a SaaS model, and has an intuitive GUI. It has a RESTful API and SDN-SDK for easy integration.

“This is a very cohesive orchestration that brings compute and network together, and you do it all from one tool,” said Agarwal. “Customers need awareness and intelligence of application flow,” said Vicat-Blanc

The World Economic Forum at Davos is known for a lot of things: its idyllic mountain setting, its overstuffed buffet of discourse and debate, its wide array of business leaders, politicians and policy-makers, plus its celebrity-studded parties and unmistakable undercurrent of exclusivity and elitism. I returned to Davos this year after a few years’ break, and saw all of that in full force.

A few newer trends stood out: a wider discussion of the threats to capitalism than I’d seen in the past; a good deal of fear and blame-mongering around the state of the global economy and some leavening optimism around technology and innovation. But the thing that struck me most clearly at Davos this year wasn’t about the content of the discussion; it was about the style.

Presenters and panelists alike fretted, enthused and expressed like mad, vividly sharing their fears, hopes and feelings about the state of the world. They were emoting all over the place. Emoting, according to the Free Dictionary, is ‘to express emotion, especially in an excessive or theatrical manner.’ I saw a lot of it.

Emoting isn’t unique to Davos, of course. It is a global trend (and Davos is better at picking up on trends than at almost anything else). It is hard to peg exactly when the emoting trend picked up steam. Perhaps it is rooted in the talk-show confessionals and reality show explosion of the past two decades. Or perhaps the massive growth of online content has created a context in which the mere expressions of ideas cannot break through the clutter unless accompanied by the emotional detritus of sobbing YouTube videos and sad-face emoticons.

Personally, I blame it on President Bubba. Bill Clinton made it acceptable and even cool for a guy, the most powerful man in the world, to emote. Emoting became, under Clinton, the mark of a caring leader and a powerful public speaker. Think of the scene in Primary Colors when John Travolta, playing presidential candidate Governor Jack Stanton, a proxy for Bill Clinton, spent hours in a Krispy Kreme donut shop emoting with the clerk and assorted other patrons. It was the peak advertisement for emoting-as-leadership.

Emoting is often confused with empathizing — ‘identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives.’ Clinton famously felt our pain and, to the extent that he did feel it, that’s empathy. But the words “I feel your pain” can have another meaning too: that is, I feel pain because I have to deal with the presence of someone who is in pain. That’s not empathy; that’s emoting.

The difference is important. Empathy is pretty much an unalloyed good. It opens us up to others and it makes us more mindful, more thoughtful, more kind. Empathy is not self-indulgent. Emoting, on the other hand, is most often a cry out for someone else to empathize with you. Feel my pain, please!

Over the past decade, I have noticed more and more emoting by members of governance bodies — boards and governing councils, for example. When management comes forward with a recommended initiative or investment, members of the governing body respond not with thoughtful critique and advice but by emoting: ‘this makes me nervous,’ ‘I worry about the employees,’ ‘this could create uproar in the capital markets.’ Simply emoting is now considered useful and appropriate behavior. There is no need to think about how to overcome the fretting; emoting is the only job. Such behavior sends a clear signal to management: “You have produced an unpleasant emotion and made me uncomfortable, which I have signaled by emoting. Now, it is your job to make me comfortable. Please don’t make me emote again.”

This was a dominant current at Davos. Lots and lots of emoting — about inequality, instability, inequity, inefficiency, inhumanity, insufficiency, etc. I think it provides comfort, but in an odd sort of way. The Davos crowd includes many power-brokers, world leaders and economic titans. Getting a chance to emote together in a big group is probably a relief from the day-to-day life of running an unruly world.

The big question to me is: Is that as good as it gets? Could a group like this, rather than mainly emoting to one another, focus more on creating breakthrough strategies for moving the world forward? Maybe I have strategy too much on the brain these days, but I tend to think that in the absence of a sense of strategy, problems feel overwhelming — and feeling overwhelmed leads to emoting. If on a number of the issues worrying the Davos participants there was a focus on where to play and how to win, I suspect emoting would decline and strategic breakthrough would blossom.

RIM will be launching BlackBerry 10 to the public later this week. It could very well succeed, but it must become more than an enterprise device if it’s going to do so. RIM’s latest move may very well just make it an attractive consumer device as well.

The BlackBerry World for BlackBerry 10 will feature a large selection of media when it launches later this week. RIM announced that the store will feature the latest movies, TV shows and music for consumers who want to check out their media on the go.

To make things even sweeter, RIM announced that it would be getting films same day as the DVD release, and TV shows the day after broadcast. The move helps BlackBerry 10 be more attractive to the regular consumer that may have moved away from BlackBerry after it fell behind Android and iOS in media content availability.

“Music and video content is an integral part of a rich mobile experience. People want easy and convenient access to their favorite music, movies and TV shows wherever they are,” said Frank Boulben, Chief Marketing Officer at Research In Motion. “RIM is committed to working with content providers to bring the best, most up-to-date content to our customers with BlackBerry 10, and to make it easy for them to get what they want.”

Video downloads and rentals will initially be available only to customers in the U.S., UK and Canada. Films and TV shows from pretty much every distributor will be available, including independent labels.

As for music, there will be plenty of content from all the major and independent labels. Unlike visual media, music on BlackBerry 10 will be available in 18 countries at launch. These include Canada, U.S., UK, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, South Africa, Spin, Australia, India, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.

I was a little worried at first as RIM was only showing off enterprise features with BlackBerry 10. Granted, the company’s most important customers come from the enterprise market, but it needs to appeal to consumers to really get a foothold in the mobile industry again. This latest move is a big step in appealing to those who want more than just enhanced security and job contacts on their mobile devices.

Rate cuts are still coming thick and fast in emerging markets — in some cases because of falling inflation and in others to deter the gush of speculative international capital.

Arguably the biggest event in emerging markets is tomorrow’s Reserve Bank of India (RBI) meeting which is expected to yield an interest rate cut for the first time in nine months.

India’s inflation, while still sticky, eased last month to a three-year low of around 7 percent. And a quarter point rate cut to 7.75 percent will in effect be a nod from the RBI to the government’s recent reform efforts.  In anticipation of a rate cut, Indian 10-year bond yields have dropped 50 basis points since the start of the year.  But the RBI, probably the world’s most hawkish central bank at present, has warned that markets need not expect a 50 bps cut or even a sustained rate-cutting campaign. Governor Duvvuri Subbarao said last week inflation still remains too high for comfort, while on Monday the RBI said in a quarterly report that more reform was needed to make the central bank turn its focus on growth.

In Colombia, the  BanRep is likely to cut rates later today for the fifth time in seven months. Growth slowed to 2.1 percent in the third quarter, considerably below forecasts, while inflation in December was 2.4 percent, well below the midpoint of the target range.  Then there is the matter of the peso which has risen to the 1750 per dollar level that has triggered intervention in the past. Many analysts therefore reckon currency strength will be the main driver for the central bank’s decision later today. From that angle too, a cut looks logical.
According to Bank of America/Merrill Lynch:

We expect Banrep to compromise by cutting, and maintaining FX intervention unaltered, presenting the cut as a policy that tackles both deceleration and appreciation….another cut at Monday’s meeting would seem to be a safe bet.

A quarter point rate cut is also a given in Hungary tomorrow. That will bring the total easing since August to 100 bps.  A central bank board dominated by government appointees, dismal economic growth indicators and last month’s fall in inflation all add up to further monetary easing.  The board is clearly divided — Governor Andras Simor has said the current inflation levels do not justify a rate cut but he is likely to be outvoted by the government nominees who dominate the central bank board. Analysts at Goldman Sachs note that a weaker forint (it is down more than 2 percent to the euro since the start of January) is complicating the picture but they do not expect it to stop the central bank from cutting:

We think that the MPC will look through the recent weakening of the forint and some widening of bond yields. But the sell-off may give it some food for thought about the impact that a more accommodative stance under the new management may have on the forint, financial stability, and growth.

Israel today and Malaysia on Thursday are expected to keep interest rates unchanged. Given the weak numbers from Israel recently, the risks to interest rates are to the downside but analysts note that the bank cut rates in December and does not typically change rates in two consecutive months.

 

 

Hey everyone, can you believe that people are using a new video-sharing app to share porn videos? An app that makes it easy to record quick clips and share them on Twitter? People? The internet? Porn? Crazy.

Sarcasm aside, Twitter’s new 6-second video app Vine is already full of porn. And that’s potentially a huge problem for Twitter and Vine.

First off, let’s make it clear that having NSFW content on Vine isn’t really a problem on its own. Besides the slip up of showing a girl using a sex toy as an “Editor’s pick” earlier today, Vine makes it fairly difficult to simply stumble upon a giant cache of 6-second porn.

The home feed of editor picks is (usually) SFW, and the explore feature doesn’t consists of any hand-picked NSFW categories. On the Vine app, they suggest hashtags like #pets, #food, #fashion – but no #penis #porn or #ass. Sure, you can search for those latter hashtags within the app – and you’ll definitely find what you’re looking for. But then again, you’re actively looking for it at that point.

And Vine even has a mechanism for putting another layer between your eyes and some random person’s junk. If a video is tagged as inappropriate, Vine will throw up a warning screen that users must tap through to access the NSFW content. “WARNING: This post may contain sensitive content,” reads the message.

Also, if you want to see just how much of a non-issue the porn thing is on Vine right now, check out Vinepeek. That single-purpose site provides an unmoderated stream of the latest Vine videos. I watched it for quite some time and I saw no porn. Literally, zero NSFW videos. Plenty of dogs, babies, more dogs, and food – but no penises, no vaginas, no boobs, no butts.

Plus, there’s no ban on nudity in Vine’s ToS. There are bans on impersonation, spam, abuse, harassment, copyright infringement – but no porn ban. Being that Vine is a Twitter product, this should come as no surprise.

And as far as Vine porn existing outside the app’s walls (let’s say on Twitter), the fact remains that you’re probably only going to see Vine porn if you’re looking for it (for the most part). At least no more than you’re likely to see porn on Twitter anyway, seeing as to how Twitter is one of the few social networks that doesn’t ban nudity in posts.

If you follow people who like to post 6-second porn, you’re going to see 6-second porn. If you search “vine #nsfw” or “wine #porn” on Twitter, you’re going to find what you’re looking for. It’s a simple as that.

But though porn shouldn’t be considered a “problem” for Vine on that level – it could be a problem in another way. A really, really, huge problem.

Last week, Apple yanked photo-sharing app 500px from its App Store.

“The app was removed from the App Store for featuring pornographic images and material, a clear violation of our guidelines. We also received customer complaints about possible child pornography. We’ve asked the developer to put safeguards in place to prevent pornographic images and material in their app,” said Apple.

As you’re probably well aware, Apple is really serious on the no porn thing among apps it approves for its App Store. Yeah, it’s ludicrous at times. They essentially just banned an app for letting users search for adult content. It’s a good thing that an app like Google Chrome or even Apple’s Safari doesn’t allow people to find porn.

For Vine, this should be a bit troubling. Maybe the content safeguard screen will be enough to assuage Apple’s concerns. Maybe not. You can find images of boobs all over Twitter, but not only has the Twitter app remained in Apple’s good graces for years, but Twitter has been integrated into iOS.

It’s possible that Apple will leave Vine alone, at least for the time being. But if Vine becomes an app that primarily caters to 6-second porn (as in it becomes to majority, not the exception), it’s going to have a hard time hanging around the App Store.

Actor Ashton Kutcher, who plays the role of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in the film jOBS, told reporters after the film’s Sundance premiere, that he was hospitalized for two days before the movie started shooting. He reportedly said (via TV Guide) that he had adopted the “fruitarian diet” that Jobs was known to have lived on (as documented in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs), and that it led to him spending two days in the hospital.

Last week, the first clip from the film hit the web. In case you missed it, you can see it again here. It features Kutcher and co-star Josh Gad, who plays Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, discussing Wozniak’s operating system, planting the seeds (pun semi-intended) for what would become Apple.

It should be noted that the real Wozniak has already made comments about the scene saying it didn’t happen that way, but it is, after all, a movie.

The film itself has received mixed reviews so far, but that’s to be expected from any film, let alone any film documenting the life of the controversial Steve Jobs.

Kutcher and Gad are set to appear at MacWorld/iWorld this week to talk about their experiences playing Jobs and Wozniak respectively. My guess is that we’ll hear more about Kutcher’s diet and hospitalization when that happens. They’ll speak on the main stage on Thursday.

jOBS hits theaters on April 19.

When I urge managers in a company to make open innovation part of their innovation strategy, they get it conceptually. They see that a solution coming from outside is more likely to be a dramatic leap versus an incremental one—simply because it came from a mind not narrowed by conventional thinking. They understand that the infusion of fresh ideas can also open their own R&D engineers and technologists to new and different possibilities and cause them to push their thinking further. At a minimum, they agree that better solutions tend to emerge when there are more options to consider in the first place.

A recent project we did for FVA, a branch of the German trade association VDMA for companies that provide drive-train systems and components, bears this out. Every year, FVA conducts an industry-wide technology search to identify new and emerging solutions, and it shares the results as a service to its member companies. Although the search has been productive, members within the FVA leadership circle wanted to see if there was a better search process that would unearth more solutions and potentially create more value. A vice president of the group had been to a presentation on Open Innovation and was intrigued by the concept. And although he seriously doubted it could work in a field as specialized as drive-train technology, he was willing to find out. FVA commissioned Aachen University to manage a selection process and trial study, and the selection committee found us at NineSigma most suitable to conduct a series of technology searches.

These technology searches took the form of requests for proposals (RFPs) seeking solutions to four different technological needs: 1) durable, non-lubricated gear materials; 2) extra-fine micro particle removal from lubricated mechanisms; 3) translational research in bio-similar particle capture and 4) low-friction hard surfaces. We distributed the RFPs worldwide, within and outside the industry. The results were measured in two ways: How many solutions were submitted by new sources versus known sources? And how many of the solutions submitted were new to the industry versus already familiar to industry engineers?

In all four areas, the new solution providers far outnumbered the known ones. For example, 33 new providers and only 2 known ones addressed the low-friction hard surfaces problem. The new solutions swamped the familiar ones, as well. For example, for the durable, non-lubricated gear materials problem, the search yielded 16 new solutions versus 6 known.

For the kind of manager who believes it’s a waste of money to go looking for smart ideas from “the crowd,” this is the kind of evidence that challenges the skepticism. Moreover, when we talk to companies about how they should connect with innovators outside their business, we encourage them to solicit ideas both from unrelated AND adjacent industries.

I’m convinced this focus on both unrelated and adjacent industries produces the best yield of viable solutions. At the same time, however, I’ve come to recognize a danger in the approach. When it comes time to harvest the actual value of an innovation, everything depends on how well the solution has been implemented across all steps of the value chain—and the more ideal a solution appears to be right out of the box, the more its discoverers might be inclined to think value will materialize automatically. In other words, if a solution seems like it isn’t too much of a stretch, you might be fooled into thinking it will be simple to put into place and start benefitting from immediately.

Think again. Even the most obviously applicable solution has to clear three big barriers to uptake:

It wasn’t invented here.
First, whatever solution your open innovation search yields, it is something that by definition was “not invented here.” And just as biological organisms have antibodies whose job it is to combat intruding organisms, every company has human versions of antibodies who make it their business to fend off foreign ideas. Rather than being expressed directly, this usually comes in the form of challenges like, “Do they really understand our issue?” Or: “the technology is close, but not quite developed enough.” Or, my personal favorite: “Yes, it’s exciting and I think it might actually be more applicable to so and so’s program…”

It might not actually work.
Consider, however, that not all the antibodies are acting out of mindless prejudice; some may be reacting reasonably to heightened risk. Before you completely discount their worries, think about whether there might be something to them. Because solutions found in other industries are often more mature, they can look like a convenient shortcut. They’re more fully developed, further along the R&D timeline, and often easier to modify for your application. However, even mature solutions should undergo rigorous evaluation and testing. This sounds obvious. The common pitfall, however, is that the company doesn’t invest the time and effort into creating and performing the kind of test that will show whether or not the solution will really hold up when it goes into production.
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The change is disruptive.
Even when testing does prove the solution’s viability, integrating it won’t be painless because the organization will need to adjust its current processes to accommodate it. It is basic change management wisdom that any alteration of work routine is more naturally cursed for the disruption it causes than celebrated for the better outcome it will eventually yield. Managers know this means they must manage expectations and shift mindsets to appreciate the case for change. But again, all this is more likely to be forgotten in the excitement of discovering an already existing solution in an adjacent space.

None of this is insurmountable, of course. It doesn’t even require much beyond the usual carrots and sticks that managers use to bring about any kind of change. Engineers and technologists are as eager for fame and reward as anyone and there’s nothing like the recognition from above to affect behavior. So recognition should be given equally to people who unearth solutions that succeed in market, whether they attracted them from outside or developed them in-house. (The days of celebrating only the inventor-genius who gets the patent should really be over.) And most everyone responds when they are made more aware of competitive pressures. Open innovation offers the appealing prospect of finding ways to leapfrog over competitors still relying on solutions produced entirely within the industry.

Open innovation is an approach every company should consider. Having more technologies to choose from always increases the chances of finding one that has the potential to not only fit the bill, but truly advance the end-product above and beyond the competition’s capabilities. But here’s what most people don’t understand, or they don’t understand soon enough: A plan to switch to any new solution that doesn’t include tactics for overcoming internal barriers to adoption is no better than a plan for failure.

Whether news sites should or shouldn’t use the Facebook comment plug-in or Facebook identity seems to have been a recurring theme in the last few days.

The Nieman Journalism Lab called it a “movement”, which seems quite a grand term for two sites announcing similar but different things on the same day, but both Politico and TechCrunch are opting to move their commenting systems away from Facebook. At the very same time, waves were being created in the UK as the newly-relaunched Manchester Evening News shifted to a commenting system that required users to have a Facebook account. At the heart of all this is the old canard — would forcing users to comment with something closer to their real identity reduce instances of trolling?

It seems to me that what Politico and TechCrunch have in common is a stubborn belief that the quality of debate underneath their articles would improve if only they could find the right commenting platform.

At Politico, Dylan Byers is putting his faith in technology:

“Disqus gives you the ability to up-vote and down-vote comments and thread responses. By default, high quality comments will filter to the top, and poor quality ones will not show up on the page.”

A view immediately debunked in the first comment left on the piece, where Adrian Lowe pointed out:

“That’s if people actually vote for them. And if people are trolling in voting, then low quality comments will be seen at the top. So, ‘by default’ high quality comments will not necessarily rise to the top.”

You only have to look at the green and red arrows on the MailOnline site to see how sometimes it is the scum that rises, not the cream.

TechCrunch’s attitude to their below-the-line contributors was made clear by the image they chose to accompany their announcement: “I miss you asshole”

They seem to be ascribing the behavior of their users to the platform they employ, not to the way they are goaded into commenting by the articles they write. As my ex-colleague Meg Pickard says:

“If you write a provocative article, you can expect people to be provoked.”

The Manchester Evening News move is in the opposite direction, hoping that a shift to using Facebook identity will improve the commenting experience on the site. There’s no doubt that restricting people to only using Facebook identities will exclude some users, but David Higgerson wrote an eloquent personal blog post about the shift: “Much ado about Facebook”.

“Most of the people who have complained…seem to come from a starting point that news websites should allow free-for-all comments on all stories, and that the ‘community’ can say what it likes under any name it likes. I don’t see it like that.”

My own experience with using the Facebook comments plug-in under news content was within the Guardian Facebook app.

I had rather hoped that by opening two commenting threads underneath each article — one on Facebook, and one on the Guardian site — we’d be able to prove once and for all whether one or other led to better interaction. In the end, it appeared that actually the tone set early on in a comment thread looked like it influenced comments much more than anything intrinsic about the format or identity system used.

There’s no doubt that software design and features do influence community behaviors, but not as much as decent community management and personal engagement from journalists does. In 2011 my friend Mary Hamilton wrote a very thorough blog post looking at the responsibility of news organizations to not just provide a commenting space, but to also participate and join in that space:

“If you don’t set examples of good behavior, or reward [commenters], or empower the regular visitors to police their community by telling them the rules, your community will make its own rules, and chances are you won’t like them.”

She described switching tech platforms in search of an answer to bad community problems as akin to “laying Astroturf over an unkempt, unmaintained garden because you don’t like the color of the wildflowers.”

She also said:

“The news industry can’t simply automate away its duty to respond to users. Small publishers and bloggers for the most part understand this, and — more crucially — so do our users. These are human beings at the other end of the internet, talking in our spaces, and we need to start treating them that way.”

Still, the golden rule of newspaper website comment systems is “Don’t be a dick” — and no technology choice can enforce that.

This was first posted at Martin’s personal blog, Currybet.

Martin is principal consultant at Emblem, which provides user experience design and training services. He was previously UX Lead at The Guardian, which included working directly with Facebook on the news organization’s Facebook app. Martin also currently provides some design and consultancy services to Trinity Mirror, publisher of the Manchester Evening News.

Guardian News and Media Ltd., the parent company of the Guardian newspaper, is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media