My good friend Nick Aster has been doing an MBA with a difference, one that combines business with sustainability, at the Presidio World College. They are shortly having open days for their MBA in Sustainable Management.
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Part of a democracy is to prevent election of the undemocratic which happened disastrously in Algeria. In December the Associated Press ran this: Key among its [Iraq’s] parties is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, a group closely allied to Iran and led by Abdel Aziz al-Hakim… Al-Hakim’s prominence on the list and his close relations with Iran give ammunition to many secular and non-Shiites to attack his coalition, saying Iraq’s political future will mirror Iran’s Shiite-run establishment if he and his supporters gain power. Mustafa Alani: “The nightmare scenario in the region is the election of an Iranian-influenced Shiite government in Iraq will lead to the creation of a ‘Super Iran’” The UIA have two thirds of the votes counted so far. CTV.ca | Iraq Shiite win may bring ‘Super Iran’: critics
Tom Foremski on what would happen if someone created a treasure hunt with a large cash prize awarded to a single click of an unpublicised adwords ad. A subsequent clicking frenzy could drain advertisers’ accounts, prompting them to ask for a refund. This hypothetical idea is part of a more serious problem – pay-per-perfomance advertising is open to fraud – when you click something, money drains out of an account – this doesn’t happen with TV, print or radio ads. See Adbombing. In the same way that companies like Paypal spent a considerable proportion of their resources dealing with fraud, so will Google. If Google succeeds then its anti-fraud measures will be a competitive edge. If it fails there will be a problem. The moral to all this is that Google’s business model landed on their laps via Scott Banister at Idealab, it is a new model and its weaknesses…
There was an ad on my site today that read: Iraq Visiting Iraq? Compare hotel prices, reviews, maps travel.yahoo.com There is one genuine looking review from an aid worker, where the Palestine Intl. Hotel in Baghdad, gets one star: “Nice swimming pool, otherwise a dump Service and food were terrible, bed was uncomfortable, dirty. The pool, however, was clean and very nice.”
“As present world temperatures are already 0.7C above the pre-industrial level, the process is well under way… when the temperature moves up to 2C above the pre-industrial level, expected in the middle of this century – within the lifetime of many people alive today – that serious effects start to come thick and fast… when the temperature moves up to the 3C level, expected in the early part of the second half of the century, these effects will become critical. There is likely to be irreversible damage to the Amazon rainforest, leading to its collapse… There will be a rapid increase in populations exposed to hunger, with up to 5.5 billion people living in regions with large losses in crop production, while another 3 billion people will have increased risk of water shortages… Above the 3C raised level, which may be after 2070, the effects will be catastrophic: the Arctic…
Alternative travel: Gridskipper – How to go on an urban safari if your’re not an SUV driver. Hard and edgy travel guide for people who prefer alcohol to bucolic. Alternative software: Lifehacker – Wonkette meets Gizmodo, hackette driven guide to stringing together all those useful software bits and bobs into something more useful – softly softly approach to give late adopters the early adopter scoop.
PFK Fish News | Deep sea fish in hoax tsunami email “An email containing photographs of bizarre-looking deep sea fish reportedly washed up on Thailand’s Phuket beach after the tsunami actually contains images of fish collected during a study undertaken in 2003.” Nonetheless the fish are deeply weird and interesting, check them out.
On a day when the government is preaching the values of listening to the people are they listening to the people who know, when it comes to the environment? There is an additional kind of democracy, the democracy of ideas, the principal by which superstition or ideology or agenda is avoided by considering evidence. Current evidence points overwhelmingly to the notion that Global warming looks real, but the evidence is being ignored, like so many ‘just a theory’ stickers peppered out by brainwashed zealots. Bryan Lawrence quotes Science magazine on climate change: There were 982 peer reviewed papers indexed by ISI with keywords climate change in the last ten years, till 2003. 75% dealt with the immediate threat of climate change. Of these, NONE refuted the idea that climate change is real. [NB, I was under the impression that the term ‘climate change’, like ‘death tax’ instead of ‘estate tax’…
Whatever your opinion of the war, lets hope today is as peaceful as possible in Iraq.
Continuing on my anti-CSS rant – 3 columns, with fixed-width left and right and a fluid center column, are ofter referred to as the ‘holy grail’. The problem is that this is an obsolete solution, when people increasingly have massive screens where any fluidity breaks the design if people auto-expand windows – which they do. Mike Golding breaks the mold and argues the case very well for fixed width CSS layout: notestips.com :: The benefits of a fixed width design
Tables may suck, but CSS is no improvement. Yet web designers who have never used page layout tools for offline printing, or object based CAD software are still brainwashed by it. I just came accross this classic: BlueRobot “Many a talented web designer has struggled with CSS-based centering. Though CSS vertical centering eludes us, two techniques for horizontal centering are BlueRobot approved. Take your pick” First one: “Unfortunately, IE5/Win does not respond to this method – a shortcoming of that browser, not the technique” Fair enough, but then why recommend it (This is still one of the largest browser versions in use). Second one: #Content { position:absolute; left:50%; width:500px; margin-top:50px; margin-left:-266px; padding:15px; border:1px dashed #333; background-color:#eee; } All this to avoid ‘align=center’.
What happens when you have a product that is designed for the masses but remains with the minority? Nobody could ever figure out how to program a video recorder, but Tivo the king of DVRs fixed that – and so much more. Tivo created a really simple user experience, right down to the design of the remote. One click recording and wishlists and automated suggested recording. Surely a DVR like this is must have at a time when people are shelling out 5 times what they used to for their TV experience just to hang a flat screen TV on the wall? And Tivo is not new, it predates plasma screens and DVDs, by all accounts, DVRs should be ubiquitous. The problem can’t just be that DVRs are a threat to traditional business models. MP3 players are now commonplace having first appeared well after. I suspect that the main problem…