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POPSTop 10 Small Business Trends for 2010 In the 80s rescession, Charles Handy came of up the term "portfolio person" to describe how people would make a living. I have been advocating homeworking and the importance of the local economy (and local currencies) since then, too. As a content analyst, I have been advocating "analytical tool" for (self signifying) "data driven decisions" for even longer. And we are still a small business. But it looks like the opportunity to become a big business might be presenting itself. The data seems to be pointing that way (along with our order book).
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POPSBarack Obama and the Exhausted Presidency
the brains behind the Chicago machine " put these doubts to rest in the op-ed that he published on Christmas Eve in The Washington Post, warning that, if the Democrats did not plot “a more centrist course,” they would “risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.” Barack Obama has thus far led a charmed life " prep school in Hawaii, Occidental College, Columbia University, Harvard Law School, the Illinois State Senate, the U. S. Senate, the Presidency. He did lose a race for a Congressional seat. But, otherwise, to all appearances, he has never even stumbled. Events consistently broke in his favor. He has never really been tested " until now. And, of course, now he finds himself in over his head. American presidents put aside personal pique and pay close attention to protocol. They do not bow to queens, kings, and emperors; they do not warmly embrace dictators and thugs; and they do not direct gratuitous insults at
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POPSMichele Bachmann: Welfare Queen Bachmann’s financial disclosure forms indicate that her personal stake in the family farm is worth up to $250,000. They also show that she has been earning income from the farm business, and that the income grew in just a few years from $2,000 to as much as $50,000 for 2008. This has provided her with a second government-subsidized income to go with her job as a government-paid congresswoman who makes $174,000 per year (in addition to having top-notch government medical benefits). “If she has an interest in a farm getting federal subsidy payments, she is benefiting from them,”
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POPSI Won't 'Vigorously' Back Obama Re-election Bid: Howard Dean SCARBOROUGH: "Not vigorously." Boy, I can almost feel the confetti falling on my head here! My two cents: the MSM has largely been portraying Dean as a principled progressive opponent of ObamaCare. I say that good old personal spite might also be motivating Doc Dean. Remember that it was the very same Robert Gibbs who, during the 2003 Dem presidential primary campaign, was behind a TV ad showing OBL (Osama bin Laden) and suggesting Dean was incapable of protecting American's national security. PBO (Barak 0bama) has also hurt Dean's feelings, snubbing him for the HHS Secretary post which many Dems felt was his due. "Mark Finkelstein is a NewsBusters contributing editor and host of Right Angle
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POPSClimateGate: A Criminal Offense (or two) Jones, Briffa and Mann should be prosecuted as a warning to others who would pervert science as a method to promote a political agenda. However, there is little probability that the Crown Prosecution Service will charge the alleged miscreants. It is more likely that they will be awarded Knighthoods. And those like Monbiot who colluded in all of this will say, “We did not know”. Monbiot has repeatedly vilified those of us who have been championing the cause of science against the unfounded climate scare. He is not alone in such behaviour. Climate realists and our work have been vilified and smeared. Entire web sites have been established to tell lies about us. Publication of our scientific work has been inhibited, and personal attacks have been the norm: JoNova http://bit.ly/8MvOMq
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POPSA New Type of "Scientist" "That these scientists feel the public doesn't have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them." This may be the collapse of global warming. Time to sell Al Gore short.
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POPSCoerciveCare Bill Passes House 220-215, Sat Night Mandatory health care insurance reform bill passes House. Socialist Security 2.0. Never mind that half the population opposed this. And the "public option" is not optional--it is now mandated that you must buy health insurance. How is it that the Federal government can force you to buy something? Private property rights are trampled, the government thinks it can tell you to buy something or face jail and/or tax penalties. This also then means every American's private and personal health information will be put into a data-base system, the end of privacy. Your health care, and body, will belong to the Collectivist Society now and the Government , which will no doubt link this to your National ID Card (REAL ID and PASS ID system) --increasing the Electronic Leash on "free" Americans.
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POPSIs the Economy Recovering? The Curious Case of 1920 vs. 1929 The basic questions we need to ask here are: 1. Why do economies recover? 2. Are we recovering? Q. Why do economies recover? A. They recover because bad investments made during the bubble are liquidated, valuable capital is no longer being wasted on them, new capital is formed from savings, and profitable enterprises attract new capital to expand. Low real interest rates caused by increased savings encourage borrowing, manufacturers use the capital to make new machines, producers of consumer goods buy them, cash goes through the system, consumers see things are getting better, more consumer goods are produced, and consumers buy them. It has to happen this way or the recovery will fail. The difficult part of a recovery is ugly. Bankrupt firms need to fail so that valuable capital resources are not wasted on their continuing activities. This means that unemployment rises (10.2% now) and business bankruptcies are high. Trillions of dollars of asset values are wiped out.
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POPSThe pocket spy: will your smartphone rat you out? More: Sports Tracker also recorded what time I normally leave the house in the morning and when I return from work. "If I wanted more information, then I could just stalk you," says Neil Buck, a senior analyst at DiskLabs.… "Out of context, an individual piece of information such as an SMS is almost meaningless," says Jones. "But when you have a large volume of information - a person's diary for the year, his emails, the plans he's building - and you start to put them together, you can make some interesting discoveries."
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POPSPersonas In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.
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POPSUK has 1% of world's population but 20% of its CCTV cameras
An old article but still pretty accurate. you cannot move in London without being seen by at least 3 cameras at any one point. It is the definition of a police state, the police also have sub-machine guns, (H&K MP5k's for anyone interested) while you can be arrested for carrying a penknife if its blade is more than an inch long, because of the laws now concerning blades and knives. as well as the other tricks like LRADs (not new) which are now common place around the world. All backed by by ignorant and dangerous attitudes of the police. Again as always don't take my word for it look it up. The report says: "It is not entirely absurd to imagine that supermarkets' loyalty card data might one day be used by the Government to identify people who ignored advice to eat healthily or who drank too much, so that they could be given a lower priority for NHS treatment". "We have supermarkets collecting data on our shopping habits and also offering life insurance services"
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POPSOklahoma Abortion Law: Details To Be Publicly Posted Online This defense is questionable. Feminists For Choice argues, "In reviewing the actual text of the law, the first 8 questions that will be asked and reported could easily be used to identify any member of a smaller community." The Center For Reproductive Rights, former state Rep. Wanda Jo Stapleton (D-Okla.), and Okla. resident Lora Joyce David have filed a lawsuit to prevent this contentious abortion bill from going into effect, on the grounds that it violates the state's constitution.
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POPSGoogle targeted in e-mail scam Other addresses include Comcast and Earthlink accounts. It is not clear whether the new list was part of the same phishing attack that collected the Hotmail addresses or a separate scam. "Our guidance to customers is to exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments and links from both known and unknown sources, and that they install and regularly update their anti-virus software." security expert Graham Cluley of Sophos advised users to change their passwords as soon as possible. "I'd also recommend that people change the password on any other site where they use it," he said. About 40% of people had the same password for every website they used, he added.
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POPSConnected by Threads Much of the explicit personal information that we deliberately keep private is still available implicitly in the public data trail.
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POPS The Sell-Phone Revolution Already, mobile services use area codes, Zip Codes, and even Global Positioning System (GPS) data to return results for nearby businesses in response to a search for, say, coffee shops. The next step is to serve an ad for a steaming cup of java on a mobile Web page just as the cell-phone Web surfer is passing a Starbucks (SBUX ). Within five years, online ad networks such as TACODA and Specific Media Inc. plan to apply behavioral techniques"using surfing data"to target ads to broadband-enabled digital television. It's not hard to imagine the day when multiple TVs tuned to the same channel in the same household will serve up different ads. "There is no question behavioral targeting will be a major component of television," says Dave Morgan, TACODA's founder and chairman. Read full article >>> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_17/b4031097.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories
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POPSA Free Utility that Really Does Speed Up Firefox I tested it out on my personal laptop and it worked like a charm. After running SpeedyFox my version, of Firefox definitely loads quicker. However I was unable to assess whether there was any improvement in dealing with browsing history or with cookies - I'm not even sure how I would go about measuring that. But the improvement in loading speed alone more than justifies the use of the product. I should say that my version of Firefox was an excellent candidate for improvement as my profile was very old. Users with newer profiles are unlikely to see the same sort of improvement I experienced. Usage of SpeedyFox couldn't be simpler. The program doesn't require installing so all you need do is download and run the executable. You will then see the following screen. Unless you are using the portable version of Firefox you will normally just accept the default setting for your profile. Then click the " Speed Up My Firefox" button and you're done.
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POPSFacebook Hands Personal ID To Tracking Sites I'm not the slightest bit surprised. There was always something a bit peculiar about this model. Don't think the uses for this info are limited to just advertising. Think employment and credit/insurance applications.
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POPSObama White House Has Secret Plan To Harvest Personal Data From Social Networking Websites Other troubling issues include: extremely broad secrecy terms preventing the vendor from disclosing to the public or the media what information is being captured and archived (page 7, “Restriction Against Disclosure”) wholesale capturing of comments by non-White House staff on publicly accessible sites capturing of content of any type (text, graphics, audio, or video) capturing of comments by both Obama critics and supporters, with no restriction as to how the White House would use the information. ] This is the third controversy involving the White House internet operations in less than a month. First, Obama’s New Media operation asked supporters to send information about critics of the White House health care effort to a White House email. This provoked a storm of criticism and the White House retreated. Then large number of people complained of getting email spam from the White House supporting the President’s health care position.
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POPSPrivacy?? - I Hope So Privacy on the internet is a serious issue and I'm happy to see that somebody is taking it SERIOUSLY!!! - Don't know about you, but I don't want my info complied and sorted like a lab rat.
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POPSOn Facebook, MySpace? Obama's got your e-mail
In fact, according to the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, federal agencies have negotiated agreements and contracts with social networking sites like Google, YouTube, SlideShare, Facebook, AddThis, Blist, Flickr and VIMEO to collect information on visitors for federal websites. All of these private companies are known to have agreements with federal agencies, but the public has never seen them. In public comments submitted to the Office of Management and Budget, EPIC notes it has obtained documents that show federal agencies have negotiated these contracts with the private sector in violation of "existing statutory privacy rights." Those agencies include: Department of Defense, Department of the Treasury, and the National Security Agency. There are suspicions the White House is already involved. According to Obama "technology czar" Vivek Kundra, the "compelling need" driving this major policy reversal is the administration's desire to create "more open" government
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POPSObama Administration Sued Over Healthcare Enemies List Nevertheless, say the two groups filing suit, the information collection effort continues under another name and is part of an "unlawful pattern and practice to collect and maintain information" on the exercise of free speech, which "continues in violation of the Privacy Act and First Amendment even if the Defendants terminate a particular information-collection component due to negative publicity." "My hate mail started shortly after the White House issued the 'fishy' request," said Kathryn Serkes, AAPS' Director of Policy and Public Affairs. "We were quite visible and vocal before then, so it doesn't seem like a coincidence. Who did they share their data with? With whom might they share it?" In the suit, the groups are demanding the White House remove all information already collected, and further, be prohibited from collecting any personal data in the future. Follow the Thomas Jefferson Street blog on Twitter. https://twitter.com/tjsblog
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