Archive for September 30th, 2008

They just don’t get it … but who are "they" ?

September 30, 2008

Excerpted from The Washington Post, “They Just Don’t Get It”, by Steven Pearlstein, September 30, 2008

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The basic problem is that too many people don’t understand the seriousness of the [financial and economic] situation.

Americans fail to understand that they are facing the real prospect of a decade of little or no economic growth because of the bursting of a credit bubble that they helped create and that now threatens to bring down the global financial system.

Politicians worry less about preventing a financial meltdown than about ideology, partisan posturing and teaching people a lesson.

Financiers have yet to own up publicly to their own greed, arrogance and incompetence. And leaders of foreign governments still think that this is an American problem and that they have no need to mount similar rescue efforts in their own countries.

In the coming weeks and months, all of these people will come to understand how deep the hole really is and how we’re all in it together.

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Restoring real stability to financial markets will require the kind of systemic approach and extraordinary government interventions that the public has refused to authorize and finance.

In better times, the public might have put aside its reluctance in response to the strong and unified recommendation of political and business leaders.

But it is a measure of how little trust remains in both Washington and Wall Street that voters are willing to risk a serious hit to their wealth and income rather than follow their lead.

Edit by DAF

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Full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/29/AR2008092902762.html

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Posted in Government & Politics, Mortgage Crisis | Leave a Comment »

Mr. Romney, please call your office …

September 30, 2008

I didn’t see the Sarah Palin pick coming.  But, I thought it was a masterful coup that added energy and ‘authenticity’ to McCain’s campaign.  I still like that she’s a real person who has a strong value system and a record of achievements.

But, the economy has become the issue.  With McCain and Obama flaunting their economic ignorance with naive talking points,  I find myself wishing McCain had gone boring with Mitt Romney.  He’s the only one of the current batch of politicos who has any idea how the economy works. 

Just my opinion.

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Posted in Government & Politics | Leave a Comment »

Offshore drilling ban to lapse … (I’ll believe it when I see it)

September 30, 2008

Excerpted from CNN Money: “Democrats allow drilling ban to lapse”, September 23, 2008

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The Interior Department estimates there are 18 billion barrels of recoverable oil beneath coastal waters now off-limits.

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Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a month-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.

Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey told reporters that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.

Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.

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Just last week, the House passed legislation to open waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to oil and gas drilling but only 50 or more miles out to sea and only if a state agrees to energy development off its shore.

Republicans called that effort a sham that would have left almost 90% of offshore reserves effectively off-limits.

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Full article:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/23/news/economy/offshore_drilling.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes

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The Numerati – Drilling through the Data

September 30, 2008

Book review excerpted from WSJ: “Drilling Through Data”, September 15, 2008

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The Numerati, Stephen Baker, (Houghton Mifflin

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The world is buried in data, great banks and drifts of the stuff. In recent years a new technology has emerged: computer programs that will drill through it all to pick out patterns and trends — information that may be useful to marketers, politicians, employers, doctors, matchmakers or national-security analysts.

Such programs are extraordinarily sophisticated, and their creators — the “Numerati” — need to be very clever indeed. Using “data mining,” they seek out veins of useful ore in the mountains of facts that computers accumulate every day.

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In “The Numerati,” Stephen Baker offers a highly readable and fascinating account of the number-driven world we now live in.

He shows us, for instance, how political consultants, mining databases that track consumer and “lifestyle” preferences, sort us into tribes by behavioral proxy. Cat owner? Likely Democrat. NRA member? Probably Republican. Mailings and phone calls can then be targeted more accurately.

Health professionals, especially when treating older patients, are now monitoring such things as weight, body temperature and pulse by having a computer follow data streams from sensors on clothing or even from sensor-laden “magic carpets” laid around the house. Disturbing patterns prompt the computer to signal a problem.

The Numerati are taking over dating services, too. How do you find that special one in a million? By mining the data of the million. How do you improve your own chances of being found? By the same techniques that companies use to show up first in a Google inquiry — “search engine optimization,” now a flourishing industry.

The Numerati are even mining the output of bloggers, those stream-of-consciousness online diarists and self-promoters. “What makes the blog world especially valuable to marketers,” Mr. Baker writes, is “its unfiltered immediacy.” What do consumers think of your new product? What desires are still not satisfied by products of this kind? You can commission a poll or wait for the sales figures to come in . . . or you can read the blogs. Better yet, you can hire Numerati to write programs that will read them for you, since there are now more than 20 million bloggers in the U.S. alone.

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Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB122143747437734337.html

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Facebook’s Hidden Politics

September 30, 2008

Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal “Facebook Political Ads Test Limits” September 15, 2008 

Political parties and interest groups have long cherry-picked news stories that promote their agenda to feature in campaign ads. But some new ads popping up on Facebook take that tactic to a new level.

“AP Says: Palin Lied,” reads one ad, accompanied by an unflattering photo of the vice presidential candidate. Another ad — accompanied by the same photo — reads, “Washington Post breaks ANOTHER Palin scandal. Charging tax payers for her sleeping at home”…

Clicking on the ads takes visitors straight to a story on the Web sites of those publications…

But none of the publications cited in the ads bought them — or even was aware of them. The buyer — though never identified anywhere on the ads or on the pages that you land on after clicking on them — is the liberal group MoveOn.org. It’s the latest example of fuzziness about who’s behind what when it comes to political ads online…

Facebook says the ads comply with its policies…With Facebook’s self-service advertising system, anybody can log on to the site and create an ad. The site allows advertisers to select the text for the ad as well as a picture and the Web site to point consumers to. Most ads are bought through a cost-per-click model, so advertisers only pay if a person clicks on the ad.

Advertisers can pick specific groups of people who will see their ad, and they bid a certain amount to have their ads shown to target groups.

Edit by SAC

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Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB122143365240034005.html

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Macy’s Gets a Makeover

September 30, 2008

Excerpted from Fortune, “Macy’s Quest for the Fountain of Youth”, by Suzanne Kapner, September 24, 2008

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After years of losing ground to the likes of Abercrombie & Fitch in the battle for young and hip shoppers, Macy’s is considering an overhaul of its flagship Herald Square store to lure the under twenty crowd.

It entails relocating junior apparel from the fourth floor to the basement, now known as The Cellar, which would create a club-like atmosphere in the basement, complete with dim lighting and pulsating music – it could be a key part of a strategy to reverse a prolonged sales slump at the department shore giant.

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Department stores have for years been losing ground to specialty retailers, which is one reason they are called aging dinosaurs. But the name goes beyond semantics. As department stores fail to attract younger shoppers, their customer base is literally growing older.

Marshal Cohen, the chief industry analyst for market research firm the NPD Group, estimates that department stores have lost 8 percent of their market share since 2003. He attributes a good portion of that decline to the migration of teens and young adults to specialty retailers (Abercrombie, Urban Outfitters, J. Crew, etc.).

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By giving teens a separate entrance and their own place to hang out – similar to creating a rec room in the basement – Macy’s is hoping kids will feel less self conscious about shopping where their parents shop.

But should the Herald Square store find success with its subterranean experiment, Macy’s may have difficulty rolling the idea to its other 850 stores nationwide, many of which do not have basements.

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Going after the youth market has other risks, notably an alienation of core, older customers. Gap lost its mainstay thirtysomething shopper when it tried to appeal to a younger generation earlier this decade and has been in a tailspin ever since.

Edit by DAF

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Full article:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/24/news/companies/kapner_macys.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008092413

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Posted in Retailing | Leave a Comment »

India’s Educom: computers to the classroom

September 30, 2008

Excerpted from  Forbes: “Lesson Plans: Educomp is cashing in by bringing computers to the classroom”,  September 29, 2008

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India is pouring billions more into education each year in a rush to feed its booming economy with well-prepared workers. That spells big opportunities for education businesses … that provide computer-aided lessons in schools. They’re using technology to make education more available–and more interesting–to students across the country. But the company doing the best in this market is Educomp Solutions.

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Educomp’s main business is developing and licensing digital lessons, which are uploaded onto servers provided to schools. It also trains teachers (75,000 just in the last quarter), provides vocational training to students with courses such as accounting and marketing, and offers online and in-person tutoring. “We are all about how the education sector can use information technology,” says Shantanu Prakash, the company’s 43-year-old founder and managing director.

In 2005 it began opening private schools with not-for-profit educational trusts, providing the computers, the digital lessons, the books and sometimes the land and building. It aims to start 150 schools in all over the next three years.

Educomp’s big money-maker is Smart Class, a range of interactive digital lessons with animation and graphics that’s marketed mainly to private schools because they have deeper pockets than public schools.

The multimedia lessons–it offers 16,000 so far–are based on the different curricula in place across the country and use 12 of the country’s languages. Lessons feature video images that students can rotate to see from different angles, explaining hard-to-visualize concepts such as the splitting of an atom or the structure of human DNA. Educomp has 400 people developing lessons at three sites, in the New Delhi suburbs of Noida and Gurgaon and in Bangalore.

At one of the private schools it helps run, the PSBB Millennium School in Chennai, seventh-grader Shreya Sreekumar peers into her laptop on a recent morning as her teacher walks her and her 38 classmates through a lesson on the human respiratory system. As they study brightly colored pictures of a larynx and lungs, a potentially dull biology class suddenly becomes much more engaging. “It’s a fun way of learning,” she says. Once the class is done, the teacher sends the homework assignment wirelessly to each student’s laptop.

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Educomp is expanding abroad. It entered the U.S. market last November by picking up a 51% stake–for $24.5 million–in an e-learning company called Learning.com, which reaches 2.5 million students in more than 2,000 school districts across the U.S.

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By the Numbers Education in India

$40 bil Size of the private education market.

$68 bil Projected size of the private education market by 2012.

8.9% Share of a middle-class Indian’s monthly budget spent on education.

Source: CLSA.

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Full article;
http://www.forbes.com/global/2008/0929/047.html?partner=alerts

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Posted in Education - Academics | Leave a Comment »