Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
The good news about the recession
Topic: Society
7:40 am EST, Jan 18, 2008
The world is running away from us. The volume of global trade in merchandise has been increasing rapidly. And it's not just the United States importing goods from China. It's China importing natural resources from everywhere and building infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, sub-Saharan Africa buying oil from the Persian Gulf, Dubai investors purchasing Indian real estate, Indian builders buying German engineering products and services, and German engineers buying toys made in China. With each passing day, an increasing number of transactions in the global marketplace do not involve the United States. We're still a powerful engine. But the world's economy now has a set of auxiliary motors.
The characterization of Americans as nativists incapable of dealing with foreigners is a caricature. But compared with the growing ranks of sophisticated, well-capitalized competitors in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, many American companies simply haven't committed to being aggressive players in the global economy. Which is why this odd recession could function as a wake-up call for Americans to get passports, buy some Berlitz tapes, and start thinking of foreign markets not simply as a place to source cheap goods or raise expensive capital, but as the new home market.
Governments and regional authorities often express the belief that the key to prosperity and economic expansion is related to the ability of countries to sustain regional clusters of competitiveness and innovation. The book reviews the most important conceptual approaches to the analysis of the emergence, growth and evolution of clusters of innovation. Drawing from the different experiences of industrial districts and high-tech regions such as Silicon Valley, Boston's biotech region, and Hsinchu-Taipei, the contributions in this book offer a broad interpretative framework and policy implications for the creation and strengthening of competitive clusters.
Themes include:
* the wide variety of existing clusters and the diversity in their emergence and growth; * the international mobility of factors and demand linkages; * the role of different network types and the social setting; * the accumulation of capabilities in key large actors and the importance of spinoffs and new firm formation; * the role of different learning regimes and sectoral specificities; * the importance of social networks, labour mobility, and face-to-face contacts as vehicles of knowledge spillovers.
Broad implications are drawn for the design of policies to encourage successful economic clusters in developed and developing clusters.
The new Eighth Edition of the Music Business Handbook and Career Guide maintains the tradition of this classic text as the most comprehensive, up-to-date guide to the $100 billion music industry. This new Eighth Edition expands on hot-button music business issues such as digital downloads, piracy, and record company transformations. Thoroughly revised, the Eighth Edition shares a particular emphasis on online music and its impact on the rest of the industry. The Eighth Edition also includes complete coverage of all aspects of the music industry, including songwriting, publishing, licensing, artist management, promotion, retailing, media, and much more.
New to This Edition
* Highlights the impact of online music, the iPod revolution, digital downloads, and cellular ring tones on the music industry * Features complete sections on entrepreneurial ventures and careers in music, including specific advice on getting started in the music business * Includes a revised Instructor's Manual on CD offering new in-the-classroom tips on how to best use the classic text as both a core and supplemental resource
This updated Eighth Edition of a bestseller is thorough in scope and ideal as the core textbook in courses such as Introduction to the Music Business, Music and Media, and survey courses. This book can also be used for more specialized courses on the record industry, music merchandising, music careers, artist management, music and the law, arts administration, and music in popular culture. Music business newcomers and professionals alike will find the new edition a valuable resource, whatever their specialty within the field.
Overall, terrorist cells around the world have become noticeably more skilled at avoiding detection, European counterterrorism officials and analysts said in interviews. For instance, operatives now commonly use Skype and other Internet telephone services, which are difficult to trace or bug.
Writing a book, short story or research paper is about more than hammering away at the keys until it's done. Research, scrawling fragmentary ideas that don't seem to fit anywhere yet, collecting faded photos from old newspapers, shuffling index cards to find that elusive structure - most writing software is only fired up after much of the hard work is already done. Enter Scrivener: writing software that stays with you from that first, unformed idea all the way through to the first - or even final - draft. Outline and structure your ideas. Take notes. Storyboard your masterpiece using a powerful virtual corkboard. View research while you write. Track themes using keywords. Dynamically combine multiple scenes into a single text just to see how they fit. Scrivener has already been enthusiastically adopted by best-selling novelists and novices alike - whatever you write, grow your ideas in style.
Anyone who has ever considered technology and its relation to humanity has most likely heard the name Marshall McLuhan. A careful student of media, a prolific lecturer and author, and the coiner of such phrases as “global village” and “the medium is the message,” McLuhan’s career merits a freshly creative and accessible examination as technology speeds ahead and forces us to reconsider our relationship with it.
Everyman’s McLuhan does just that. W. Terrence Gordon, McLuhan’s official biographer, has deciphered and distilled McLuhan’s career; his words are accompanied by colorful and innovative illustrations that apply both McLuhan’s and Gordon’s ideas to the realities of 21st century technology and media. Everyman’s McLuhan furthers a dialogue that was important when McLuhan was alive, but is even more relevant today as the line blurs between humans and the technologies we use.
At any rate, if Jobs' vision of Apple is to make an increasingly large number of devices on which we can watch Zoolander, I find myself much less enthusiastic about that vision or that world.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft risk assessment saying meat and milk from most (*) cloned animals or their offspring is safe for consumers to eat. The agency is expected to approve the sale of products from cloned livestock in 2008.
