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2011-07-27T20:06:00.000+05:30

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PayPal Email ID PP247

Dear valued PayPal Customer,

2011-07-26T22:42:00.000+05:30

Dear valued PayPal® Customer,

Due to recent fraudulent transactions, we have issued the following security requirements.

It has come to our attention that 98% of all fraudulent transactions are caused by members using stolen credit cards to purchase or sell non existant items. Thus we require our members to add a Debit/Check card to their billing records as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. Your Debit/Check card will only be used to identify you. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and renew your records you will not run into any future problems with the PayPal® service. However, failure to confirm your records will result in your account suspension.

We are requesting this information to verify and protect your identity. Federal regulations require all financial institutions to obtain, verify, and record identification from all persons opening new accounts or obtaining ongoing payment services. This is in order to prevent the use of the U.S. banking system in terrorist and other illegal activity. For these reasons, PayPal® will utilize services provided by various credit reporting agencies to verify the information you submit to us.

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Dear valued PayPal® Customer,

2011-07-22T21:37:00.000+05:30

Dear valued PayPal® Customer,

Due to recent fraudulent transactions, we have issued the following security requirements.

It has come to our attention that 98% of all fraudulent transactions are caused by members using stolen credit cards to purchase or sell non existant items. Thus we require our members to add a Debit/Check card to their billing records as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. Your Debit/Check card will only be used to identify you. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and renew your records you will not run into any future problems with the PayPal® service. However, failure to confirm your records will result in your account suspension.

We are requesting this information to verify and protect your identity. Federal regulations require all financial institutions to obtain, verify, and record identification from all persons opening new accounts or obtaining ongoing payment services. This is in order to prevent the use of the U.S. banking system in terrorist and other illegal activity. For these reasons, PayPal® will utilize services provided by various credit reporting agencies to verify the information you submit to us.

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Dear valued PayPal® Customer,

2011-07-22T20:17:00.000+05:30

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Obama’s Young Mother Abroad - NYTimes.com

2011-04-22T11:11:00.000+05:30

The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elastic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.

The president's mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama's life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In "Dreams From My Father," the memoir that helped power Obama's political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama's presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for coverage as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marxist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.

The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those, as I learned over the course of two and a half years of research, travel and nearly 200 interviews. To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy's name who grew up in the years before the women's movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.

Obama placed the ghost of his absent father at the center of his lyrical account of his life. At times, he has seemed to say more about the grandparents who helped raise him than about his mother. Yet she shaped him, to a degree Obama has seemed increasingly to acknowledge. In the preface to the 2004 edition of "Dreams From My Father," issued nine years after the first edition and nine years after Dunham's death, Obama folded in a revealing admission: had he known his mother would not survive her illness, he might have written a different book — "less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life."

Dunham, for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much — painfully, wistfully — to close friends. But she would not have been inclined to overstate her case. As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, "If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life."

Ann Dunham, who jettisoned the name Stanley upon emerging from childhood, was just 17 years old in the fall of 1960 when she became pregnant with the child of a charismatic Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama, a fellow student at the University of Hawaii who was more than six years her senior. She dropped out of school, married him and gave birth shortly before their union ended. In the aftermath, she met Lolo Soetoro, an amiable, easygoing, tennis-playing graduate student from the Indonesian island of Java. They married in 1964, after Ann's divorce came through, but their early life together was upended by forces beyond their control. On Sept. 30, 1965, six Indonesian army generals and one lieutenant were kidnapped and killed in Jakarta, in what the army characterized as an attempted coup planned by the Communist Party. Students studying abroad, including Lolo, whose studies were sponsored by the government, were soon summoned home. A year later, in 1967, Ann graduated with a degree in anthropology, gathered up her 6-year-old child and moved to Indonesia to join her husband.

The four years that followed were formative for mother and son — and are a subject of curiosity and an object of speculation for many Americans today. These were years in which Ann lived closely with the young Obama, who at the time was called Barry; she impressed upon him her values and, consciously and unconsciously, shaped his emerging understanding of the world. She made choices about her own life too, setting an example that in some ways Obama would eventually embrace, while in other ways intentionally leaving it behind.

The white woman and her half-African son made quite a pair traveling in Indonesia together. Elizabeth Bryant, an American who lived in the city of Yogyakarta at the time, remembers a lunch held at another expatriate's house that Ann and Barry attended. Ann arrived in a long skirt made of Indonesian fabric — not, Bryant noticed, a look that other American women in Indonesia seemed to favor. Ann instructed Barry to shake hands, then to sit on the sofa and turn his attention to an English-language workbook she brought along. Ann, who had been in Indonesia for nearly four years, talked about whether to go back to Hawaii. "She said, 'What would you do?' " Bryant recalled when I spoke to her nearly 40 years later. "I said, 'I could live here as long as two years, then would go back to Hawaii.' She said, 'Why?' I said it was hard living, it took a toll on your body, there were no doctors, it was not healthy. She didn't agree with me."

Over lunch, Barry, who was 9 at the time, sat at the dining table and listened intently but did not speak. When he asked to be excused, Ann directed him to ask the hostess for permission. Permission granted, he got down on the floor and played with Bryant's son, who was 13 months old. After lunch, the group took a walk, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction. They ducked behind a wall and shouted racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodge ball "with unseen players," Bryant said. Ann did not react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. "No, he's O.K.," Ann said. "He's used to it."

"We were floored that she'd bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks," Bryant said. At the same time, she admired Ann for teaching her boy to be fearless. A child in Indonesia needed to be raised that way — for self-preservation, Bryant decided. Ann also seemed to be teaching Barry respect. He had all the politeness that Indonesian children displayed toward their parents. He seemed to be learning Indonesian ways.

"I think this is one reason he's so halus," Bryant said of the president, using the Indonesian adjective that means "polite, refined, or courteous," referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese. "He has the manners of Asians and the ways of Americans — being halus, being patient, calm, a good listener. If you're not a good listener in Indonesia, you'd better leave."

Indonesia was still in a state of shock when Ann arrived in 1967 for the first of three extended periods of residence that would eventually add up to the majority of her adult life. The details of the attempted coup and countercoup remain in dispute even today, as do the particulars of the carnage that followed. But it is known that neighbors turned on neighbors. According to Adrian Vickers, the author of "A History of Modern Indonesia," militias went door to door in villages, abducting suspects, raping women, even targeting children. "The best way to prove you were not a Communist was to join in the killings," Vickers writes. Bill Collier, a friend of Ann's who arrived in Indonesia in 1968 and spent 15 years doing social and economic surveys in villages, told me that researchers were told by people living near brackish waterways that they had been unable to eat the fish because of decaying corpses in the water. Many Indonesians chose never to speak about what had happened.

The Jakarta that greeted Ann Soetoro and her son was a tapestry of villages — low-rise and sprawling — interwoven with wooded areas, paddy fields and marshland. Narrow alleys disappeared into warrens of tile-roofed houses in the rambling urban hamlets called kampungs. Squatter colonies lined the canals, which served as public baths, laundry facilities and sewers, all in one. During the long rainy season from November through March, canals overflowed, saturating cardboard shanties and flooding much of the city. Residents traveled mostly on foot or by bicycle or bicycle-propelled rickshaws called becaks. Power outages were common. There were so few working phones that it was said that half the cars on the streets were ferrying messages from one office to the next. "Secretaries would spend hours just dialing and redialing phone numbers trying to get through," Halimah Brugger, an American who moved there in 1968, told me. Westerners were rare, black people even rarer. Western women got a lot of attention. "I remember creating quite a sensation just being pedaled down the street in a becak, wearing a short skirt," Brugger said. Letters from the United States took weeks to reach their destination. Foreigners endured all manner of gastrointestinal upsets. Deworming was de rigueur.

Yet the city had a magical charm. People who were children in Jakarta in that period, including Barack Obama, reminisce about the sound of the Muslim call to prayer in the days before public-address systems, and the signature sounds called out by street vendors wheeling their carts through the kampungs. Tea was still served on the veranda of the old Hotel des Indes. Ceiling fans turned languidly in the midafternoon heat, and kerosene lamps flickered in the houses lining the narrow alleys at night. For anyone of no interest to government security forces, life was simple. For a foreigner, it was possible to arrive in Indonesia in 1967 largely ignorant of the horror of just two years before. "I was quite naïve about the whole thing," Brugger said. "It was all over then. I never felt the slightest bit endangered." Years later, many people would look back on the late 1960s and early 1970s as a honeymoon period, Vickers writes. Restrictions on the press eased, a youth culture flowered, literary and cultural life thrived. It was, some later commented, Indonesia's Prague Spring.

When Ann arrived, Lolo was in the army. His salary was low. On her first night in Indonesia, Ann complained later to a colleague, Lolo served her white rice and dendeng celeng — dried, jerked wild boar, which Indonesians hunted in the forests when food was scarce. But when Lolo completed his military service, his brother-in-law Trisulo used his contacts as a vice president at the Indonesian oilcompany Pertamina to help Lolo get a job in the Jakarta office of the Union Oil Company of California. By the early 1970s, Lolo and Ann had moved into a rented house in Matraman, a middle-class area of Jakarta. The house was a pavilyun, an annex on the grounds of a bigger main house. It had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a library and a terrace. Like the households of other Indonesians who could afford it, it had a sizable domestic staff. Two female servants shared a bedroom; two men — a cook and a houseboy — slept mostly on the floor of the house or in the garden. The staff freed Ann from domestic obligations to a degree that would have been almost impossible in the United States. There were people to clean the house, prepare meals, buy groceries and look after her children — enabling her to work, pursue her interests and come and go as she wanted. The domestic staff made it possible, too, for Ann and Lolo to cultivate their own professional and social circles, which did not necessarily overlap.

By January 1968, Ann had gone to work as the assistant to the American director of Lembaga Indonesia-Amerika, a binational organization financed by the United States Information Service and housed at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She supervised a small group of Indonesians who taught English classes for Indonesian government employees and businessmen being sent by U.S.A.I.D. to the United States for graduate studies. It would be an understatement to say she disliked the job. "I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Djakarta for 2 horrible years," she wrote to a friend. As Obama describes the job in his memoir, "The Indonesian businessmen weren't much interested in the niceties of the English language, and several made passes at her." Occasionally, she took Barry to work. Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who worked as the office manager at the time, told me, "Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the color of his skin."

Joked with him — or about him? I asked.

"With and about him," Sigit said, with no evident embarrassment.

Two years later, at 27, Ann was hired to start an English-language business-communications department in one of the few private nonprofit management-training schools in the country. The school, called the Institute for Management Education and Development, was started several years earlier by a Dutch Jesuit priest with the intention of helping to build an Indonesian elite. Ann trained the teachers, developed the curriculum and taught top executives. In return, she received not just a paycheck but also a share of the revenue from the program. She also became a popular teacher. Ann's classes "could be a riot of laughter from beginning to end. She had a great sense of humor," said Leonard Kibble, who taught part time at the institute in the early 1970s. Some of the laughter involved Ann's still-incomplete mastery of the Indonesian language. In one slip that Kibble said Ann delighted in recounting, she tried to tell a student that he would "get a promotion" if he learned English. Instead of using the phrase naik pangkat, she said naik pantat. The word naik means to "go up, rise, or mount"; pangkat means "rank" or "position." Pantat means "buttocks."

That same year, on Aug. 15, 1970, shortly after Barry's ninth birthday and during what would turn out to be the only visit by her mother, Madelyn Dunham, to Indonesia, Ann gave birth to Maya Kassandra Soetoro at Saint Carolus Hospital, a Catholic hospital thought by Westerners at that time to be the best in Jakarta. When Halimah Brugger gave birth in the same hospital two years later, she told me, the doctor delivered her baby without the luxury of a stethoscope, gloves or gown. "When the baby was born, the doctor asked my husband for his handkerchief," Brugger said. "Then she stuffed it in my mouth and gave me 11 stitches without any anesthesia." Ann tried out three different names for her new daughter, all of them Sanskrit, before settling on Maya Kassandra. The name was important to Ann, Maya told me; she wanted "beautiful names." Stanley, the name Ann felt burdened with as a child, was not on the list.

In Indonesia, Ann was a striking figure who did not go unnoticed. "Maybe just her presence — the way she carried herself," said Halimah Bellows, whom Ann hired in the spring of 1971. She dressed simply, with little or no makeup, and wore her hair long, held back by a headband. By Javanese standards, she was, as Felina Pramono, an Indonesian colleague, put it, "a bit sturdy for a woman." She had strong opinions — and rarely softened them to please others.

"She used to tear me apart," says Kay Ikranagara, one of Ann's closest friends, in a tone that sounded almost fond. Ann told her she needed to be bolder and stronger. She made fun of her inadequacy in the kitchen. She told her she should give her housekeeper explicit instructions, not simply let her do whatever she wanted. "With everybody she was like that: she would tell them what was wrong with them," Ikranagara said. Family members were not spared. "She was very scathing about the traditional Indonesian wife role," Ikranagara recalled. "She would tell Maya not to be such a wimp. She didn't like this passive Indonesian female caricature. She would tell me not to fall into that."

Ikranagara was the daughter of a development economist from the University of California who taught at the University of Indonesia in the late 1950s. She lived in Jakarta as a teenager, studied anthropology and linguistics in the 1960s at Berkeley and then returned to Jakarta, where she met her husband. She met Ann while teaching part time at the management school and writing her dissertation in linguistics. They had a lot in common: Indonesian husbands, degrees in anthropology, babies born in the same month, opinions shaped by the 1960s. They were less conscious than others of the boundaries between cultures, Ikranagara told me, and they rejected what they saw as the previous generation's hypocrisy on the subject of race. "We had all the same attitudes," she said. "When we met people who worked for the oil companies or the embassy, they belonged to a different culture than Ann and I. We felt they didn't mix with Indonesians, they were part of an insular American culture." Servants seemed to be the only Indonesians those Americans knew.

But by the early 1970s, Lolo's new job had plunged him deeply into the oil-company culture. Foreign businesses in Indonesia were required to hire and train Indonesian partners. The exercise struck some people as a sham: companies would hire an Indonesian director, pay him well and give him little or nothing to do. Trisulo, Lolo's brother-in-law, told me he did not recall the exact nature of Lolo's job with Union Oil. His son, Sonny Trisulo, said it may have been "government relations." Whatever it was, Lolo's job included socializing with oil-company executives and their wives. He joined the Indonesian Petroleum Club, a private watering hole in Central Jakarta for oil-company people and their families, which offered swimming, tennis and dining. Ann was expected to socialize, too. Any failure to do so reflected badly on Lolo. "It's the society that asks it," Ikranagara said. "Your husband is supposed to show up at social functions with you at his side, dressed in a kain andkebaya," a costume consisting of a traditional, tightly fitted, long-sleeved blouse and a length of unstitched cloth wound around the lower part of the body. "You're supposed to sit with the women and talk about your children and your servants."

Ann begged off. "She didn't understand these folks — the idea of living an expatriate life that was so completely divorced from the world around you, that involves hiding yourself away in these protective cells of existence," Maya said. "That was peculiar to her, and she was bored by it." Ann complained to her friend Bill Collier that all those middle-aged white Americans talked about inane things. Lolo, she told Collier, "was becoming more American all the time." Occasionally, the young Obama would overhear Lolo and Ann arguing in their bedroom about Ann's refusal to attend his oil-company dinners, at which, he writes in "Dreams From My Father," "American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo's back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore-drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother's voice would rise to almost a shout.

" 'They are not my people.' "

The relationship between Ann and Lolo appears to have begun deteriorating even before Lolo took the oil-company job. As Obama describes it, something happened between them when Lolo was called back to Jakarta during the time of unrest in Indonesia and they spent a year apart. In Hawaii, Lolo was full of life, regaling Ann with stories from his childhood, confiding his plans to return to his country and teach at the university. Now he barely spoke to her. Some nights, he would sleep with a pistol under his pillow; other nights, she would hear him "wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets." Ann's loneliness was a constant, Obama writes, "like a shortness of breath."

Ann had pieced together some of what happened in Indonesia in 1965 and afterward from fragmentary information that people let slip. Her new Indonesian friends talked to her about corruption in government agencies, police and military shakedowns, the power of the president's entourage. Lolo would not talk about any of it. According to Obama, a cousin of Lolo's finally explained to Ann what happened when her husband returned from Hawaii. Upon arriving in Jakarta, he was taken away for questioning and told he had been conscripted and would be sent to the jungles of New Guinea for a year. It could have been worse: students returning from Soviet-bloc countries were jailed or even vanished. Obama writes that Ann concluded that "power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he'd escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn't his own." In response, Lolo made his peace with power, "learned the wisdom of forgetting; just as his brother-in-law had done, making millions as a high official in the national oil company."

Lolo had disappointed Ann, but her refusal to conform to his culture's expectations apparently angered him as well. "She didn't know, as little I knew, how Indonesian men change when suddenly their family is around," Renske Heringa, a Dutch anthropologist and close friend of Ann's in the 1980s who herself married a man who was half Indonesian, told me. "And how Indonesian men like women to be easy and open abroad, but when you get to Indonesia, the parents are there, the family is there, you have to behave. You have to be the little wife. As a wife, you were not supposed to make yourself visible besides being beautiful. By the time I knew Ann, she was a hefty woman. She didn't care about getting dressed, wearing jewelry, the way Indonesian women do. That was not her style. He expected her to do it. That is one reason she didn't stick it out. She absolutely refused to. I understand why he couldn't accept it."

One morning in January 2009, at the offices of the management school for which Ann had worked, I met a man in his late 50s named Saman. Like some Javanese, he went by a single name. Speaking in Bahasa Indonesia, with Ann's former assistant Felina Pramono translating, he told me that he worked as a houseboy for Lolo and Ann in the early 1970s. One of seven children from a family of farmers, Saman moved to Jakarta as a teenager to find work. When he worked for Ann and Lolo, his duties included gardening; taking care of a pet turtle, dog, rabbit and bird; and taking Barry to school by bicycle or becak. Ann and Lolo paid Saman well and treated all four members of the household staff equally, he said. He remembered Lolo as stern and Ann as kindhearted.

Ann would finish teaching at 9 in the evening and sometimes not return home until midnight, Saman said. She seemed barely to sleep. She would stay up, typing and correcting Barry's homework, then get up again before dawn. On one occasion, Saman said: "She got home late with a student, but the student didn't see her home properly. So he dropped her near the house, and Soetoro got very mad because of that." An argument ensued, which Saman overheard. "He said: 'I've warned you many times. Why are you still doing this?' " Saman recalled. Whether Lolo's worry was infidelity or simply what others might think is unclear from Saman's story. After the argument, he said, Ann appeared in the house with a towel pressed to her face and blood running from her nose. It is difficult to know what to make of the nearly 40-year-old recollection. No one else I interviewed suggested there was ever violence between Ann and Lolo, a man many people described as patient and sweet-tempered.

When one fellow teacher, an Indonesian man whom Ann befriended, asked about her husband in 1968 or 1969, she told him grimly: "I'm never asked. I'm told." Reflecting on her marriage some years later, Ann told another Indonesian friend, Yang Suwan, resignedly: "Don't you know that you don't argue and you don't discuss with a Javanese person? Because problems don't exist with Javanese people. Time will solve problems."

With her children, Ann made a point of being more physically affectionate than her mother had been with her, she told one friend. She was cuddly and would say, "I love you," according to Maya, a hundred times a day. She was playful — making pottery, weaving decorations, doing art projects that stretched across the room. "I think that we benefited a great deal from her focus when we were with her, when she was beside us," Maya told me. "So that made the absences hurt a little less." Where her children were involved, Ann was easily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She preferred humor to harping, but she was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. She wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation, to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.

"If you want to grow into a human being," Obama remembers her saying, "you're going to need some values." When necessary, Ann was, according to two accounts, not unwilling to reinforce her message. "She talked about disciplining Barry, including spanking him for things where he richly deserved a spanking," said Don Johnston, who worked with Ann in the early 1990s, sometimes traveling with her in Indonesia and living in the same house. Saman said that when Barry failed to finish homework sent from Hawaii by his grandmother, Ann "would call him into his room and would spank him with his father's military belt." President Obama, through a spokeswoman, said his mother never resorted to physical discipline.

One evening in the house in Matraman, Saman said, he and Barry were preparing to go to sleep. They often slept in the same place — sometimes in the bunk bed in Barry's room, sometimes on the dining-room floor or in the garden. On this occasion, Barry, who was 8 or 9 at the time, asked Saman to turn out the light. When Saman did not do it, he said, Barry hit him in the chest. When he did not react, Barry hit him harder, and Saman struck him back. Barry began to cry loudly, attracting Ann's attention. According to Saman, Ann did not respond. She seemed to realize that Barry had been in the wrong. Otherwise, Saman would not have struck him.

"We were not permitted to be rude, we were not permitted to be mean, we were not permitted to be arrogant," Maya told me. "We had to have a certain humility and broad-mindedness. We had to study. . . . If we said something unkind about someone, she would try to talk about their point of view. Or, 'How would you feel?' Sort of compelling us ever toward empathy and those kinds of things and not allowing us to be selfish. That was constant, steady, daily."

It was clear to many that Ann believed Barry, in particular, was unusually gifted. She would boast about his brains, his achievements, how brave he was. Benji Bennington, a friend of Ann's from Hawaii, told me, "Sometimes when she talked about Barack, she'd say, 'Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.' I remember her saying that." Samardal Manan, who taught with Ann in Jakarta, remembered Ann saying something similar — that Barry could be, or perhaps wanted to be, the first black president.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" Lolo asked Barry one evening, according to Saman.

"Oh, prime minister," Barry answered.

What mattered as much as anything to Ann, as a parent, was her children's education. But that was not simple. Indonesian schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inadequate; there were not enough of them, the government controlled the curriculum, teachers were poorly trained. Westerners sent their children to the Jakarta International School, but it was expensive and difficult to get into. Obama attended two Indonesian schools, one Catholic and one Muslim. The experience cannot have failed to have left a mark. The Javanese, especially the Central Javanese, place an enormous emphasis on self-control. Even to sneeze was to exhibit an untoward lack of self-control, said Michael Dove, who got to know Ann when they were both anthropologists working in Java in the 1980s. "You demonstrate an inner strength by not betraying emotion, not speaking loudly, not moving jerkily," he said. Self-control is inculcated through a culture of teasing, Kay Ikranagara told me. Her husband, known only as Ikranagara, said, "People tease about skin color all the time." If a child allows the teasing to bother him, he is teased more. If he ignores it, it stops. "Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool," Kay told me. "If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win."

With time, Ann's thinking about Barack's future changed. "She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia," he wrote in his memoir. "It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared with other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere."

In early 1971, Ann told Barry that he would be returning to Hawaii. He would live with his grandparents in Honolulu and attend Punahou School, a respected prep school within walking distance of the Dunhams' apartment. "She said that she and Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon — a year, tops — and that she'd try to make it there for Christmas," he wrote in "Dreams From My Father." Ann's uncle Charles Payne told me he suspected that her mother, Madelyn, played a part in the decision. "Madelyn always had a great concern about Barack getting a good education," he said. "I think that was her defense against his racial mixture — that education was the solution to whatever problems that would bring."

As Obama later described his send-off, an Indonesian co-pilot who was a friend of Ann's escorted him to the plane "as she and Lolo and my new sister, Maya, stood by at the gate."

Ann uprooted Barry, at age 6, and transplanted him to Jakarta. Now she was uprooting him again, at barely 10, and sending him back, alone. She would follow him to Hawaii only to leave him again, less than three years later.

When we spoke last July, Obama recalled those serial displacements. "I think that was harder on a 10-year-old boy than he'd care to admit at the time," Obama said, sitting in a chair in the Oval Office and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. "When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, 'This is my choice, my decision.' But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see — you know what? — that would be hard on a kid."

He spoke about his mother with fondness, humor and a degree of candor that I had not expected. There was also in his tone at times a hint of gentle forbearance. Perhaps it was the tone of someone whose patience had been tested, by a person he loved, to the point where he had stepped back to a safer distance. Or perhaps it was the knowingness of a grown child seeing his parent as irredeemably human.

"She was a very strong person in her own way," Obama said, when I asked about Ann's limitations as a mother. "Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent — the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, 'Well, it'll all work out, and it'll be fine.' But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother. . . . Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were."

But he did not, he said, hold his mother's choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents "as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings." He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give — "a sense of unconditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely."

Janny Scott (jannyscott@gmail.com), a reporter for The New York Times, went on leave in 2008 to write "A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother," from which her article in this issue is adapted. Editor: Lauren Kern (l.kern-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

The scientist who studies scientists—An interview with Harry Collins

2011-04-14T21:42:00.001+05:30

Sent to you by mchunkat via Google Reader:

The scientist who studies scientists—An interview with Harry Collins

via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker on 14/04/11

Who watches the watchmen?

Harry Collins. That's who.

A professor of social sciences at Cardiff University in Great Britain, Collins has spent his career studying other scientists.

In particular, Collins has spent more than 35 years following scientists who work in the field of gravitational wave physics. That's how I found out about him, during a dinner in February with several gravitational wave physicists who work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They kept talking about "our sociologist", who attended their meetings, took notes during their debates, and generally seemed to observe and record their behavior the way Jane Goodall did with chimpanzees.

I was immediately intrigued, but Collins work turned out to be a lot more fascinating than I'd even guessed. What he does isn't simple ethnography, or even real-time recording of science history. Instead, Collins uses his observations of gravitational wave physicists and their internal culture to better understand how science, as a human endeavor, works—how researchers go about learning new information, how we use science as a tool to arrive at truth, and what happens when scientists disagree with one another.

In the process, he's become one of the world's leading experts on decision-making, how science and politics work together, and even the nature of expertise, itself.

Maggie Koerth-Baker: You're a social scientist who studies scientists. How common is that job?

Harry Collins: There's quite a big field called the sociology of science. There's a professional society with 700-to-1000 members. What there aren't many of are sociologists studying the physical sciences. Lots study the biological sciences, but these days only two or three of us do research on physical sciences—I might even be the last one apart from one of my Ph.D. students.

Really, though, I'm a sociologist of knowledge, and just happen to study science to see knowledge being formed.

Nowadays I also do something a bit different. About 10 years ago, I started to worry that it was difficult to use what we were doing to help policy makers make policy. I wanted to see how we could use science and technology to make policy before consensus formed in the scientific community. I decided to switch from studying the making of truth to studying the nature of expertise.

MKB: The nature of expertise is a really interesting subject to me. In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, I saw a lot of problems and misinformation arising from journalists speaking to scientists as if they were experts in everything, rather than experts in one specific field. For instance, somebody interviewing a nuclear engineer and asking them questions that were better suited to a health physicist. From your perspective, do you think the public has a tendency to think of scientific expertise in too broad of terms? And, if so, is that a problem?

HC: People do tend to think of scientists as general "experts". I think you're spot on. One of the things we point out is that scientists are only experts in very, very narrow domains—like crevasses. And as soon as they're out of their expertise crevasse a scientist is no better off than anyone else.

You can't just wheel on any scientist. That's no good. But at the same time, if you take any particular domain, there are sometimes people who are experts that have no qualifications, but do have experience in the practical domain—they count as experts too. That widens the area to certain small groups of unqualified experts—experience-based experts without qualifications.

Thirdly, there are what we call 'interactional experts'. These are people who have learned about the domain by long and hard immersion in the discourse—the spoken language, but without practicing. So our theory narrows the domain of expertise to just those who know about a specific kind of problem—that rules out most scientists, just leaving a few—but it also widens the domain to include experience-based experts who may have no qualifications and a few interactional experts who have no practical experience but long immersion in the discourse.

In our book from 2007 called Rethinking Expertise you'll find what we call the Periodic Table of Expertises, where we try to classify every kind of expert. It has about 10 or 12 categories. The key, as far as we are concerned, is being connected and immersed in what counts as the body of experts for that domain. We're looking at the extent to which different groups are immersed in the knowledge in one way or another.

MKB: By learning about concepts like expertise, is this how you distinguish what you do from the work of science historians? It seems like there's some overlap, now that you've been following the development of this one particular field of physics for almost 40 years.

HC: I wrote this great big book called Gravity's Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves in 2004. But one thing I said in the preface is that this isn't history. By that, I meant that historians have certain professional standards, such as long footnotes that give an exact source reference for every statement, and that's not what I do. Most of my evidence is from talking to people and learning about the culture by immersion—I try to gain interactional expertise.

There isn't an archive I can refer people back to full of snatches of conversation that they can listen to; my kind of evidence is gone almost as quickly as it comes—the talk happens and then it's happened. Professional historians would feel a bit edgy about what I do because they feel they have to reference everything, but I'm not writing professional historian's history; I am reporting events as they unfold and the way a new culture is born and changes.

MKB: Tell me a little about why you think the sociology of science is important. One aspect you've written about that I found interesting was the way that your work helps clarify the process of science as something that isn't divine. An exceptional human endeavor, sure. But a human endeavor. How does sociology provide that clarity?

HC: It's a matter of professional roles again. It's the job of scientist to do their best with experiments and theory and so on, but a sociologist must distance themselves from time-to-time and take a different perspective. I just finished a book manuscript about a controversy in science, and one thing I point out is that it was not settled by calculation-based decisions.

When it comes time to pick sides, the scientists had to make something like 25 different choices, to figure out which side they were on, and the answers couldn't be calculated from pure data. Instead, it was choosing among philosophical options or traditions or, just the sociology of the thing.

MKB: This field you've chosen to study—gravitational wave physics—is particularly interesting because it contains a lot of legitimate debate internally, and has been, especially 30 or 40 years ago, the subject of a lot of outside skepticism. The physicists have this thing that they are quite certain must exist—gravitational radiation emitted by exploding or colliding stars many light years away from us—but we've not yet been able to build detectors that are sensitive enough to find direct evidence of these gravitational waves.

As you've studied this field, what have you learned about the way a weird theory becomes an accepted reality? I'm particularly interested in this because a lot of laypeople have picked up the idea that the scientific establishment doesn't have room for truly paradigm-changing discoveries, and actively tries to suppress them. How does what you've seen with gravitational waves contradict or support that idea?

HC: I think I have more evidence about resistance to radical change from the way my own recent work has been received than from what I've seen happening among the physicists I study.

I've certainly seen strong bias against the new kind of work on expertise that I started on 10 years ago. There were four or five years where I couldn't get papers published because we took a different line to what had gone before, looking at the nature of expertise and who is an expert rather than just being critical of the way scientists makes truth. There was an element within sociology that really wanted to democratize science—make everyone as good as everyone else when it came to making technological decisions—and they thought of what we did as elitist. Our program is hugely successful now, but it is very hard to get something going if it is radically new.

There are also structural reasons why it's difficult to do something truly new. There's tremendous demand on grants and on publication outlets. Demand really outstrips supply. Hugely. Much more so than when I first started my career. Today, if you want to get anywhere with a grant or getting a paper published you need three good referee reports. The trouble is that if you're a bit unusual, you'll always get one referee who says, "It's no good." And you only need one bad report to scuttle everything. There's a huge conservatism built into the process that wasn't there when I first started my career. That's the case with sociology, anyway.

I think it's much easier to get published in physics than in the social sciences and humanities. Rejection rates are much lower in the physical sciences. Physicists don't mind incorrect papers because they think that, over time, any incorrect results will be shown to be incorrect. Social scientists, in contrast, are a lot more political.

That is not to say that physical scientists are saints; I have seen cases of too fierce negative refereeing in physics too.

MKB: What is scientific consensus? In a lot of ways, that seems like the question you're really studying.

HC: The surprising thing for somebody who comes from the history book or schoolbook version of science is that scientific consensus turns out to be a lot like other kinds of consensus. Of course, you have theories and evidence. But at the heart of it there's usually a point where decisions are made in a much more commonsensical or philosophical way.

MKB: What about climate change? How does your idea of consensus-building play out here?

HC: I think a problem like climate change is where our kind of analysis of expertise plays its part. If there's a consensus among experts, and you think you can trust these people, and they're working with integrity and trying to argue that opposition are wrong using the normal ways of arguing in science—rather than political suppression—then you should base policies on the consensus even if you can't be sure that consensus is the truth.

And no-one can be sure about the truth except in the very long term. Uniform consensus can take half a century to form in science, and policy needs to work faster than that. You have to make policy with something less than perfection. Sometimes experts will be wrong, but what else are you going to do? Will you just ask your mum, or flip a coin?

I have a name for this approach and it's "elective modernism"—choosing the methods of science. Really it's about making a choice about the kind of society you want to live in. Do we really want to make decisions on technological issues by popular vote? For instance, if a woman is pregnant and HIV positive, should she get access to anti-retroviral drugs even though there are blogs that tell us these drugs are dangerous? The South African case shows that you have to go with the scientific consensus even though there will often be small numbers of active and energetic critics of that consensus. You can make that decision based on emotion, or on current scientific consensus. Which would would you rather live with?

MKB: You wrote a book called Gravity's Ghost: Scientific Discovery in the Twenty-first Century about a 2007 event in the gravitational physics field, where two separate gravitational wave detectors in different places turned up signals that could have been evidence of a gravitational wave. The signals turned out to be a test of the system, but I'm curious about what you, and the physicists, learned. Why is that event so important?

HC: It's important to me. It was probably much more important to me that to the scientists. In 2007, I was able to watch the scientists struggling over what to make of the first bit of data coming in on the new generation of gravitational wave detectors. From this process, they learned how to do data analysis better ... and they learned how hard it's going to be to convince themselves that they've seen evidence of a gravitational wave when they've really seen it. But as soon as the learned that it was not a real signal it lost most of its importance. To me, however, the lessons about how scientists argue and make knowledge are lasting, not ephemeral.

MKB: The researchers I spoke with at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee told me a little about a live debate you were present for, where physicists were arguing over the way they analyze data from the LIGO detectors. If I recall correctly, there had been a measurement that looked like it could be a gravitational wave. Researchers had figured out it was an airplane, instead, but they couldn't just say in the paper, "This was later found to be a passing airplane." And it turned into a really heated argument. Do you recall the incident I'm talking about? I'm curious about how a sociologist sees an argument like that.

HC: The physicists—they're very good these guys, and they have a lot of integrity. They make very careful rules for themselves so they can't massage their statistics post hoc—so you can't dredge out the result you want from the data you have. They impose a very strict rule: You decide how you're going to do the analysis before you "open the box", by which, they mean, before you see the data. You make all your decisions before you open the box and then you can never change anything.

In the case of the "Airplane Event" they followed procedure, but afterwards they found out that it was an airplane. According to the rule, though, they had to leave the airplane in the data. Of course, according to common sense you'd just take it out. The official rules did not include rules for their own application.

The Airplane Event led to some really violent arguments, with people determined that one side or the other was right. When they decided to take the airplane data out, somebody actually resigned from the whole gravity wave business in protest. It's a wonderful illustration of how science is made by common sense, and not just by calculation. And it can't be made just by calculation. There are things you can't anticipate that will force you to break your own rules.

MKB: You write that your position is to remain neutral on the science. You're there to study the scientists. That makes sense. But how, after 40 years of following this one field, can you possibly not have picked sides on certain issues?

HC: You're quite right. It is more complicated. In the new book, I really did struggle to maintain my neutrality. I've gone a bit native. If you're a good sociologist, you're aware of that, though. And you've got to learn how to step back from it. It's a complete fallacy that you have to stay neutral all the time. You can have opinions, just so long as you retain the ability to step back from those opinions when the time comes to analyse rather than understand the science. If opinions were killer, then you could never do sociology of own society. The trick is to know when to allow your opinion free reign and when to distance yourself from it.

Read More: Harry Collins has lots of great resources on his Cardiff University website. You can find out more about the nature of expertise, and about his specific studies within the field of gravitational wave physics.

Image: Some rights reserved by Orin Zebest

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Is Sugar Toxic?

2011-04-14T08:41:00.000+05:30

Photo Illustration by Kenji Aoki for The New York Times

By GARY TAUBES

Published: April 13, 2011

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On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth," which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Talk to Gary Taubes About Sugar

Join a conversation with the author, who will be answering selected reader questions during the coming days on the Well blog.

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What the average American consumes in added sugars:

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High-Fructose Corn Syrup Consumption

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Sugar Consumption

Times Topic: Sugar

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Kenji Aoki for The New York Times

Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.

The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig's impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a "toxin" or a "poison," terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely "evil." And by "sugar," Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig's help what he calls "the most demonized additive known to man."

It doesn't hurt Lustig's cause that he is a compelling public speaker. His critics argue that what makes him compelling is his practice of taking suggestive evidence and insisting that it's incontrovertible. Lustig certainly doesn't dabble in shades of gray. Sugar is not just an empty calorie, he says; its effect on us is much more insidious. "It's not about the calories," he says. "It has nothing to do with the calories. It's a poison by itself."

If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.

The number of viewers Lustig has attracted suggests that people are paying attention to his argument. When I set out to interview public health authorities and researchers for this article, they would often initiate the interview with some variation of the comment "surely you've spoken to Robert Lustig," not because Lustig has done any of the key research on sugar himself, which he hasn't, but because he's willing to insist publicly and unambiguously, when most researchers are not, that sugar is a toxic substance that people abuse. In Lustig's view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that's killing us.

This brings us to the salient question: Can sugar possibly be as bad as Lustig says it is?

It's one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It's entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there's no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.

If I didn't buy this argument myself, I wouldn't be writing about it here. And I also have a disclaimer to acknowledge. I've spent much of the last decade doing journalistic research on diet and chronic disease — some of the more contrarian findings, on dietary fat, appeared in this magazine —– and I have come to conclusions similar to Lustig's.

The history of the debate over the health effects of sugar has gone on far longer than you might imagine. It is littered with erroneous statements and conclusions because even the supposed authorities had no true understanding of what they were talking about. They didn't know, quite literally, what they meant by the word "sugar" and therefore what the implications were.

So let's start by clarifying a few issues, beginning with Lustig's use of the word "sugar" to mean both sucrose — beet and cane sugar, whether white or brown — and high-fructose corn syrup. This is a critical point, particularly because high-fructose corn syrup has indeed become "the flashpoint for everybody's distrust of processed foods," says Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist and the author of "Food Politics."

This development is recent and borders on humorous. In the early 1980s, high-fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in sodas and other products in part because refined sugar then had the reputation as a generally noxious nutrient. ("Villain in Disguise?" asked a headline in this paper in 1977, before answering in the affirmative.) High-fructose corn syrup was portrayed by the food industry as a healthful alternative, and that's how the public perceived it. It was also cheaper than sugar, which didn't hurt its commercial prospects. Now the tide is rolling the other way, and refined sugar is making a commercial comeback as the supposedly healthful alternative to this noxious corn-syrup stuff. "Industry after industry is replacing their product with sucrose and advertising it as such — 'No High-Fructose Corn Syrup,' " Nestle notes.

But marketing aside, the two sweeteners are effectively identical in their biological effects. "High-fructose corn syrup, sugar — no difference," is how Lustig put it in a lecture that I attended in San Francisco last December. "The point is they're each bad — equally bad, equally poisonous."

Refined sugar (that is, sucrose) is made up of a molecule of the carbohydrate glucose, bonded to a molecule of the carbohydrate fructose — a 50-50 mixture of the two. The fructose, which is almost twice as sweet as glucose, is what distinguishes sugar from other carbohydrate-rich foods like bread or potatoes that break down upon digestion to glucose alone. The more fructose in a substance, the sweeter it will be. High-fructose corn syrup, as it is most commonly consumed, is 55 percent fructose, and the remaining 45 percent is nearly all glucose. It was first marketed in the late 1970s and was created to be indistinguishable from refined sugar when used in soft drinks. Because each of these sugars ends up as glucose and fructose in our guts, our bodies react the same way to both, and the physiological effects are identical. In a 2010 review of the relevant science, Luc Tappy, a researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who is considered by biochemists who study fructose to be the world's foremost authority on the subject, said there was "not the single hint" that H.F.C.S. was more deleterious than other sources of sugar.

The question, then, isn't whether high-fructose corn syrup is worse than sugar; it's what do they do to us, and how do they do it? The conventional wisdom has long been that the worst that can be said about sugars of any kind is that they cause tooth decay and represent "empty calories" that we eat in excess because they taste so good.

By this logic, sugar-sweetened beverages (or H.F.C.S.-sweetened beverages, as the Sugar Association prefers they are called) are bad for us not because there's anything particularly toxic about the sugar they contain but just because people consume too many of them.

Those organizations that now advise us to cut down on our sugar consumption — the Department of Agriculture, for instance, in its recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans, or the American Heart Association in guidelines released in September 2009 (of which Lustig was a co-author) — do so for this reason. Refined sugar and H.F.C.S. don't come with any protein, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants or fiber, and so they either displace other more nutritious elements of our diet or are eaten over and above what we need to sustain our weight, and this is why we get fatter.

Whether the empty-calories argument is true, it's certainly convenient. It allows everyone to assign blame for obesity and, by extension, diabetes — two conditions so intimately linked that some authorities have taken to calling them "diabesity" — to overeating of all foods, or underexercising, because a calorie is a calorie. "This isn't about demonizing any industry," as Michelle Obama said about her Let's Move program to combat the epidemic of childhood obesity. Instead it's about getting us — or our children — to move more and eat less, reduce our portion sizes, cut back on snacks.

Lustig's argument, however, is not about the consumption of empty calories — and biochemists have made the same case previously, though not so publicly. It is that sugar has unique characteristics, specifically in the way the human body metabolizes the fructose in it, that may make it singularly harmful, at least if consumed in sufficient quantities.

The phrase Lustig uses when he describes this concept is "isocaloric but not isometabolic." This means we can eat 100 calories of glucose (from a potato or bread or other starch) or 100 calories of sugar (half glucose and half fructose), and they will be metabolized differently and have a different effect on the body. The calories are the same, but the metabolic consequences are quite different.

The fructose component of sugar and H.F.C.S. is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body. Consuming sugar (fructose and glucose) means more work for the liver than if you consumed the same number of calories of starch (glucose). And if you take that sugar in liquid form — soda or fruit juices — the fructose and glucose will hit the liver more quickly than if you consume them, say, in an apple (or several apples, to get what researchers would call the equivalent dose of sugar). The speed with which the liver has to do its work will also affect how it metabolizes the fructose and glucose.

In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it's clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers.

If what happens in laboratory rodents also happens in humans, and if we are eating enough sugar to make it happen, then we are in trouble.

The last time an agency of the federal government looked into the question of sugar and health in any detail was in 2005, in a report by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academies. The authors of the report acknowledged that plenty of evidence suggested that sugar could increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes — even raising LDL cholesterol, known as the "bad cholesterol"—– but did not consider the research to be definitive. There was enough ambiguity, they concluded, that they couldn't even set an upper limit on how much sugar constitutes too much. Referring back to the 2005 report, an Institute of Medicine report released last fall reiterated, "There is a lack of scientific agreement about the amount of sugars that can be consumed in a healthy diet." This was the same conclusion that the Food and Drug Administration came to when it last assessed the sugar question, back in 1986. The F.D.A. report was perceived as an exoneration of sugar, and that perception influenced the treatment of sugar in the landmark reports on diet and health that came after.

The Sugar Association and the Corn Refiners Association have also portrayed the 1986 F.D.A. report as clearing sugar of nutritional crimes, but what it concluded was actually something else entirely. To be precise, the F.D.A. reviewers said that other than its contribution to calories, "no conclusive evidence on sugars demonstrates a hazard to the general public when sugars are consumed at the levels that are now current." This is another way of saying that the evidence by no means refuted the kinds of claims that Lustig is making now and other researchers were making then, just that it wasn't definitive or unambiguous.

What we have to keep in mind, says Walter Glinsmann, the F.D.A. administrator who was the primary author on the 1986 report and who now is an adviser to the Corn Refiners Association, is that sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be toxic, as Lustig argues, but so might any substance if it's consumed in ways or in quantities that are unnatural for humans. The question is always at what dose does a substance go from being harmless to harmful? How much do we have to consume before this happens?

When Glinsmann and his F.D.A. co-authors decided no conclusive evidence demonstrated harm at the levels of sugar then being consumed, they estimated those levels at 40 pounds per person per year beyond what we might get naturally in fruits and vegetables — 40 pounds per person per year of "added sugars" as nutritionists now call them. This is 200 calories per day of sugar, which is less than the amount in a can and a half of Coca-Cola or two cups of apple juice. If that's indeed all we consume, most nutritionists today would be delighted, including Lustig.

But 40 pounds per year happened to be 35 pounds less than what Department of Agriculture analysts said we were consuming at the time — 75 pounds per person per year — and the U.S.D.A. estimates are typically considered to be the most reliable. By the early 2000s, according to the U.S.D.A., we had increased our consumption to more than 90 pounds per person per year.

That this increase happened to coincide with the current epidemics of obesity and diabetes is one reason that it's tempting to blame sugars — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup — for the problem. In 1980, roughly one in seven Americans was obese, and almost six million were diabetic, and the obesity rates, at least, hadn't changed significantly in the 20 years previously. By the early 2000s, when sugar consumption peaked, one in every three Americans was obese, and 14 million were diabetic.

This correlation between sugar consumption and diabetes is what defense attorneys call circumstantial evidence. It's more compelling than it otherwise might be, though, because the last time sugar consumption jumped markedly in this country, it was also associated with a diabetes epidemic.

In the early 20th century, many of the leading authorities on diabetes in North America and Europe (including Frederick Banting, who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin) suspected that sugar causes diabetes based on the observation that the disease was rare in populations that didn't consume refined sugar and widespread in those that did. In 1924, Haven Emerson, director of the institute of public health at Columbia University, reported that diabetes deaths in New York City had increased as much as 15-fold since the Civil War years, and that deaths increased as much as fourfold in some U.S. cities between 1900 and 1920 alone. This coincided, he noted, with an equally significant increase in sugar consumption — almost doubling from 1890 to the early 1920s — with the birth and subsequent growth of the candy and soft-drink industries.

Emerson's argument was countered by Elliott Joslin, a leading authority on diabetes, and Joslin won out. But his argument was fundamentally flawed. Simply put, it went like this: The Japanese eat lots of rice, and Japanese diabetics are few and far between; rice is mostly carbohydrate, which suggests that sugar, also a carbohydrate, does not cause diabetes. But sugar and rice are not identical merely because they're both carbohydrates. Joslin could not know at the time that the fructose content of sugar affects how we metabolize it.

Joslin was also unaware that the Japanese ate little sugar. In the early 1960s, the Japanese were eating as little sugar as Americans were a century earlier, maybe less, which means that the Japanese experience could have been used to support the idea that sugar causes diabetes. Still, with Joslin arguing in edition after edition of his seminal textbook that sugar played no role in diabetes, it eventually took on the aura of undisputed truth.

Until Lustig came along, the last time an academic forcefully put forward the sugar-as-toxin thesis was in the 1970s, when John Yudkin, a leading authority on nutrition in the United Kingdom, published a polemic on sugar called "Sweet and Dangerous." Through the 1960s Yudkin did a series of experiments feeding sugar and starch to rodents, chickens, rabbits, pigs and college students. He found that the sugar invariably raised blood levels of triglycerides (a technical term for fat), which was then, as now, considered a risk factor for heart disease. Sugar also raised insulin levels in Yudkin's experiments, which linked sugar directly to type 2 diabetes. Few in the medical community took Yudkin's ideas seriously, largely because he was also arguing that dietary fat and saturated fat were harmless. This set Yudkin's sugar hypothesis directly against the growing acceptance of the idea, prominent to this day, that dietary fat was the cause of heart disease, a notion championed by the University of Minnesota nutritionist Ancel Keys.

A common assumption at the time was that if one hypothesis was right, then the other was most likely wrong. Either fat caused heart disease by raising cholesterol, or sugar did by raising triglycerides. "The theory that diets high in sugar are an important cause of atherosclerosis and heart disease does not have wide support among experts in the field, who say that fats and cholesterol are the more likely culprits," as Jane E. Brody wrote in The Times in 1977.

At the time, many of the key observations cited to argue that dietary fat caused heart disease actually support the sugar theory as well. During the Korean War, pathologists doing autopsies on American soldiers killed in battle noticed that many had significant plaques in their arteries, even those who were still teenagers, while the Koreans killed in battle did not. The atherosclerotic plaques in the Americans were attributed to the fact that they ate high-fat diets and the Koreans ate low-fat. But the Americans were also eating high-sugar diets, while the Koreans, like the Japanese, were not.

In 1970, Keys published the results of a landmark study in nutrition known as the Seven Countries Study. Its results were perceived by the medical community and the wider public as compelling evidence that saturated-fat consumption is the best dietary predictor of heart disease. But sugar consumption in the seven countries studied was almost equally predictive. So it was possible that Yudkin was right, and Keys was wrong, or that they could both be right. The evidence has always been able to go either way.

European clinicians tended to side with Yudkin; Americans with Keys. The situation wasn't helped, as one of Yudkin's colleagues later told me, by the fact that "there was quite a bit of loathing" between the two nutritionists themselves. In 1971, Keys published an article attacking Yudkin and describing his evidence against sugar as "flimsy indeed." He treated Yudkin as a figure of scorn, and Yudkin never managed to shake the portrayal.

By the end of the 1970s, any scientist who studied the potentially deleterious effects of sugar in the diet, according to Sheldon Reiser, who did just that at the U.S.D.A.'s Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory in Beltsville, Md., and talked about it publicly, was endangering his reputation. "Yudkin was so discredited," Reiser said to me. "He was ridiculed in a way. And anybody else who said something bad about sucrose, they'd say, 'He's just like Yudkin.' "

What has changed since then, other than Americans getting fatter and more diabetic? It wasn't so much that researchers learned anything particularly new about the effects of sugar or high-fructose corn syrup in the human body. Rather the context of the science changed: physicians and medical authorities came to accept the idea that a condition known as metabolic syndrome is a major, if not the major, risk factor for heart disease and diabetes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimate that some 75 million Americans have metabolic syndrome. For those who have heart attacks, metabolic syndrome will very likely be the reason.

The first symptom doctors are told to look for in diagnosing metabolic syndrome is an expanding waistline. This means that if you're overweight, there's a good chance you have metabolic syndrome, and this is why you're more likely to have a heart attack or become diabetic (or both) than someone who's not. Although lean individuals, too, can have metabolic syndrome, and they are at greater risk of heart disease and diabetes than lean individuals without it.

Having metabolic syndrome is another way of saying that the cells in your body are actively ignoring the action of the hormone insulin — a condition known technically as being insulin-resistant. Because insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome still get remarkably little attention in the press (certainly compared with cholesterol), let me explain the basics.

You secrete insulin in response to the foods you eat — particularly the carbohydrates — to keep blood sugar in control after a meal. When your cells are resistant to insulin, your body (your pancreas, to be precise) responds to rising blood sugar by pumping out more and more insulin. Eventually the pancreas can no longer keep up with the demand or it gives in to what diabetologists call "pancreatic exhaustion." Now your blood sugar will rise out of control, and you've got diabetes.

Not everyone with insulin resistance becomes diabetic; some continue to secrete enough insulin to overcome their cells' resistance to the hormone. But having chronically elevated insulin levels has harmful effects of its own — heart disease, for one. A result is higher triglyceride levels and blood pressure, lower levels of HDL cholesterol (the "good cholesterol"), further worsening the insulin resistance — this is metabolic syndrome.

When physicians assess your risk of heart disease these days, they will take into consideration your LDL cholesterol (the bad kind), but also these symptoms of metabolic syndrome. The idea, according to Scott Grundy, a University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center nutritionist and the chairman of the panel that produced the last edition of the National Cholesterol Education Program guidelines, is that heart attacks 50 years ago might have been caused by high cholesterol — particularly high LDL cholesterol — but since then we've all gotten fatter and more diabetic, and now it's metabolic syndrome that's the more conspicuous problem.

This raises two obvious questions. The first is what sets off metabolic syndrome to begin with, which is another way of asking, What causes the initial insulin resistance? There are several hypotheses, but researchers who study the mechanisms of insulin resistance now think that a likely cause is the accumulation of fat in the liver. When studies have been done trying to answer this question in humans, says Varman Samuel, who studies insulin resistance at Yale School of Medicine, the correlation between liver fat and insulin resistance in patients, lean or obese, is "remarkably strong." What it looks like, Samuel says, is that "when you deposit fat in the liver, that's when you become insulin-resistant."

That raises the other obvious question: What causes the liver to accumulate fat in humans? A common assumption is that simply getting fatter leads to a fatty liver, but this does not explain fatty liver in lean people. Some of it could be attributed to genetic predisposition. But harking back to Lustig, there's also the very real possibility that it is caused by sugar.

As it happens, metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance are the reasons that many of the researchers today studying fructose became interested in the subject to begin with. If you want to cause insulin resistance in laboratory rats, says Gerald Reaven, the Stanford University diabetologist who did much of the pioneering work on the subject, feeding them diets that are mostly fructose is an easy way to do it. It's a "very obvious, very dramatic" effect, Reaven says.

By the early 2000s, researchers studying fructose metabolism had established certain findings unambiguously and had well-established biochemical explanations for what was happening. Feed animals enough pure fructose or enough sugar, and their livers convert the fructose into fat — the saturated fatty acid, palmitate, to be precise, that supposedly gives us heart disease when we eat it, by raising LDL cholesterol. The fat accumulates in the liver, and insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome follow.

Michael Pagliassotti, a Colorado State University biochemist who did many of the relevant animal studies in the late 1990s, says these changes can happen in as little as a week if the animals are fed sugar or fructose in huge amounts — 60 or 70 percent of the calories in their diets. They can take several months if the animals are fed something closer to what humans (in America) actually consume — around 20 percent of the calories in their diet. Stop feeding them the sugar, in either case, and the fatty liver promptly goes away, and with it the insulin resistance.

Similar effects can be shown in humans, although the researchers doing this work typically did the studies with only fructose — as Luc Tappy did in Switzerland or Peter Havel and Kimber Stanhope did at the University of California, Davis — and pure fructose is not the same thing as sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. When Tappy fed his human subjects the equivalent of the fructose in 8 to 10 cans of Coke or Pepsi a day — a "pretty high dose," he says —– their livers would start to become insulin-resistant, and their triglycerides would go up in just a few days. With lower doses, Tappy says, just as in the animal research, the same effects would appear, but it would take longer, a month or more.

Despite the steady accumulation of research, the evidence can still be criticized as falling far short of conclusive. The studies in rodents aren't necessarily applicable to humans. And the kinds of studies that Tappy, Havel and Stanhope did — having real people drink beverages sweetened with fructose and comparing the effect with what happens when the same people or others drink beverages sweetened with glucose — aren't applicable to real human experience, because we never naturally consume pure fructose. We always take it with glucose, in the nearly 50-50 combinations of sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. And then the amount of fructose or sucrose being fed in these studies, to the rodents or the human subjects, has typically been enormous.

This is why the research reviews on the subject invariably conclude that more research is necessary to establish at what dose sugar and high-fructose corn syrup start becoming what Lustig calls toxic. "There is clearly a need for intervention studies," as Tappy recently phrased it in the technical jargon of the field, "in which the fructose intake of high-fructose consumers is reduced to better delineate the possible pathogenic role of fructose. At present, short-term-intervention studies, however, suggest that a high-fructose intake consisting of soft drinks, sweetened juices or bakery products can increase the risk of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases."

In simpler language, how much of this stuff do we have to eat or drink, and for how long, before it does to us what it does to laboratory rats? And is that amount more than we're already consuming?

Unfortunately, we're unlikely to learn anything conclusive in the near future. As Lustig points out, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are certainly not "acute toxins" of the kind the F.D.A. typically regulates and the effects of which can be studied over the course of days or months. The question is whether they're "chronic toxins," which means "not toxic after one meal, but after 1,000 meals." This means that what Tappy calls "intervention studies" have to go on for significantly longer than 1,000 meals to be meaningful.

At the moment, the National Institutes of Health are supporting surprisingly few clinical trials related to sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in the U.S. All are small, and none will last more than a few months. Lustig and his colleagues at U.C.S.F. — including Jean-Marc Schwarz, whom Tappy describes as one of the three best fructose biochemists in the world — are doing one of these studies. It will look at what happens when obese teenagers consume no sugar other than what they might get in fruits and vegetables. Another study will do the same with pregnant women to see if their babies are born healthier and leaner.

Only one study in this country, by Havel and Stanhope at the University of California, Davis, is directly addressing the question of how much sugar is required to trigger the symptoms of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. Havel and Stanhope are having healthy people drink three sugar- or H.F.C.S.-sweetened beverages a day and then seeing what happens. The catch is that their study subjects go through this three-beverage-a-day routine for only two weeks. That doesn't seem like a very long time — only 42 meals, not 1,000 — but Havel and Stanhope have been studying fructose since the mid-1990s, and they seem confident that two weeks is sufficient to see if these sugars cause at least some of the symptoms of metabolic syndrome.

So the answer to the question of whether sugar is as bad as Lustig claims is that it certainly could be. It very well may be true that sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, because of the unique way in which we metabolize fructose and at the levels we now consume it, cause fat to accumulate in our livers followed by insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, and so trigger the process that leads to heart disease, diabetes and obesity. They could indeed be toxic, but they take years to do their damage. It doesn't happen overnight. Until long-term studies are done, we won't know for sure.

One more question still needs to be asked, and this is what my wife, who has had to live with my journalistic obsession on this subject, calls the Grinch-trying-to-steal-Christmas problem. What are the chances that sugar is actually worse than Lustig says it is?

One of the diseases that increases in incidence with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome is cancer. This is why I said earlier that insulin resistance may be a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is not controversial. What it means is that you are more likely to get cancer if you're obese or diabetic than if you're not, and you're more likely to get cancer if you have metabolic syndrome than if you don't.

This goes along with two other observations that have led to the well-accepted idea that some large percentage of cancers are caused by our Western diets and lifestyles. This means they could actually be prevented if we could pinpoint exactly what the problem is and prevent or avoid that.

One observation is that death rates from cancer, like those from diabetes, increased significantly in the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. As with diabetes, this observation was accompanied by a vigorous debate about whether those increases could be explained solely by the aging of the population and the use of new diagnostic techniques or whether it was really the incidence of cancer itself that was increasing. "By the 1930s," as a 1997 report by the World Cancer Research Fund International and the American Institute for Cancer Research explained, "it was apparent that age-adjusted death rates from cancer were rising in the U.S.A.," which meant that the likelihood of any particular 60-year-old, for instance, dying from cancer was increasing, even if there were indeed more 60-years-olds with each passing year.

The second observation was that malignant cancer, like diabetes, was a relatively rare disease in populations that didn't eat Western diets, and in some of these populations it appeared to be virtually nonexistent. In the 1950s, malignant cancer among the Inuit, for instance, was still deemed sufficiently rare that physicians working in northern Canada would publish case reports in medical journals when they did diagnose a case.

In 1984, Canadian physicians published an analysis of 30 years of cancer incidence among Inuit in the western and central Arctic. While there had been a "striking increase in the incidence of cancers of modern societies" including lung and cervical cancer, they reported, there were still "conspicuous deficits" in breast-cancer rates. They could not find a single case in an Inuit patient before 1966; they could find only two cases between 1967 and 1980. Since then, as their diet became more like ours, breast cancer incidence has steadily increased among the Inuit, although it's still significantly lower than it is in other North American ethnic groups. Diabetes rates in the Inuit have also gone from vanishingly low in the mid-20th century to high today.

Now most researchers will agree that the link between Western diet or lifestyle and cancer manifests itself through this association with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome — i.e., insulin resistance. This was the conclusion, for instance, of a 2007 report published by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research — "Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer."

So how does it work? Cancer researchers now consider that the problem with insulin resistance is that it leads us to secrete more insulin, and insulin (as well as a related hormone known as insulin-like growth factor) actually promotes tumor growth.

As it was explained to me by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it. The more insulin, the better they do. Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Some do both. Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren't being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.

What these researchers call elevated insulin (or insulin-like growth factor) signaling appears to be a necessary step in many human cancers, particularly cancers like breast and colon cancer. Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, says that up to 80 percent of all human cancers are driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells. Cantley is now the leader of one of five scientific "dream teams," financed by a national coalition called Stand Up to Cancer, to study, in the case of Cantley's team, precisely this link between a specific insulin-signaling gene (known technically as PI3K) and tumor development in breast and other cancers common to women.

Most of the researchers studying this insulin/cancer link seem concerned primarily with finding a drug that might work to suppress insulin signaling in incipient cancer cells and so, they hope, inhibit or prevent their growth entirely. Many of the experts writing about the insulin/cancer link from a public health perspective — as in the 2007 report from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research — work from the assumption that chronically elevated insulin levels and insulin resistance are both caused by being fat or by getting fatter. They recommend, as the 2007 report did, that we should all work to be lean and more physically active, and that in turn will help us prevent cancer.

But some researchers will make the case, as Cantley and Thompson do, that if something other than just being fatter is causing insulin resistance to begin with, that's quite likely the dietary cause of many cancers. If it's sugar that causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly. For just this reason, neither of these men will eat sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, if they can avoid it.

"I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possibly can," Thompson told me, "because I believe ultimately it's something I can do to decrease my risk of cancer." Cantley put it this way: "Sugar scares me."

Sugar scares me too, obviously. I'd like to eat it in moderation. I'd certainly like my two sons to be able to eat it in moderation, to not overconsume it, but I don't actually know what that means, and I've been reporting on this subject and studying it for more than a decade. If sugar just makes us fatter, that's one thing. We start gaining weight, we eat less of it. But we are also talking about things we can't see — fatty liver, insulin resistance and all that follows. Officially I'm not supposed to worry because the evidence isn't conclusive, but I do.

Gary Taubes (gataubes@gmail.com) is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation independent investigator in health policy and the author of "Why We Get Fat." Editor: Vera Titunik (v.titunik-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

Incredible Bookmarks Helps You Sort and Check Your Bookmarks File [Downloads]

2009-12-03T20:58:00.001+05:30

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Incredible Bookmarks Helps You Sort and Check Your Bookmarks File [Downloads]

via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 12/3/09

Firefox: If you're all about keeping a tidy bookmarks file, Incredible Bookmarks is a Firefox extension packed with features to help you sort, organize, check, and color code your bookmarks.

Incredible Bookmarks comes with a variety of tools for helping you keep your bookmarks file clean and streamlined. You can color code individual bookmarks and folders and you can easily create custom toolbars based on the task at hand—toggling them on only when you need them.

Perhaps the most handy feature even if you're not bent on color coding and tagging all your bookmarks is check for duplicates and expired links. Any bookmarks folder, sub-folder, or toolbar can be scanned for duplicate bookmarks—as seen in the screenshot above—or for expired bookmarks. Check out the video below to see Incredible Bookmarks in use.

You can jump right to the Mozilla page for Incredible Bookmarks here or visit the link below for additional information. Have a bookmark tool—Firefox-centric or otherwise—you love? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Incredible Bookmarks [via Firefox Facts]

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Paint.NET Releases Big Update, Still a Killer Photoshop Alternative [Downloads]

2009-11-10T13:27:00.001+05:30

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Paint.NET Releases Big Update, Still a Killer Photoshop Alternative [Downloads]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 11/9/09

Windows only: Paint.NET is a free, fast, and powerful image editor for Windows. It's a giant leap above Microsoft Paint, and a serious alternative to bigger, bloated (for most users, at least) image editors like Photoshop or GIMP.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

We've highlighted Paint.NET in the past, but it just released its first significant update in years, so we'd recommend grabbing the latest. Paint.NET handles most of the basics you'd expect from advanced image editors, and the update has added new effects (including new blurs and distortions), better performance (though Paint.NET has always been really light and fast), and a complete refresh of the user interface (enhanced for Aero/glass). Check out the release post for a more detailed changelog.

If you need to do the occasional image tweaking or heavy image editing but don't want to spend a lot of cash on Photoshop or dive into GIMP, Paint.NET is well worth the download. It may not be able to do everything Photoshop does, but it can do everything most users need. Paint.NET is a free application, Windows only. Thanks Paul!

Paint.NET [via Paint.NET Blog]

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Livebrush - Drawing Application

2009-10-21T17:19:00.000+05:30

Livebrush - Drawing Application: "

Livebrush - Drawing Application
http://www.livebrush.com/

Livebrush is a drawing application. It employs an easy-to-use brush tool that reacts to your gesture. By combining simple motion controls with brush styles, Livebrush offers a fun and unique way to create graphics. Use graphics you create in Livebrush within your existing projects. Create entire compositions in Livebrush alone. Share styles and see how others combine your brush with their ideas. This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog. This has been added to World Wide Web Reference Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.

Jean Cocteau

2009-10-21T16:19:00.001+05:30

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Jean Cocteau

via Quotes of the Day on 10/19/09

"We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?"

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QT Lite Frees You from QuickTime's Bloat [Downloads]

2009-10-21T16:03:00.001+05:30

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QT Lite Frees You from QuickTime's Bloat [Downloads]

via Lifehacker by Whitson Gordon on 10/19/09

Windows only: No one likes being bugged by Apple's Software Update Utility in Windows, but many of us deal with it because we need QuickTime to use iTunes or view the occasional video. QT Lite aims to fix that.

If you don't use iTunes (or any other Apple software), you can finally rid yourself of Apple's Software Update bloat by replacing QuickTime with QT Lite. QT Lite installs only what is necessary to play QuickTime files and nothing more. It still has all the same settings and preferences as the normal version of QuickTime, though.

QT Lite is very similar to QuickTime Alternative, which we featured as one of our superior alternatives to crappy Windows software. The only difference is that QuickTime Alternative also installs Windows Media Player Classic, so it should also work as a QuickTime replacement if you want to install iTunes without the QuickTime bloat.

QT Lite is a free download, Windows only.

QT Lite [via The How-To Geek]

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How to run, meditate, and not get hurt

2009-10-16T22:37:00.001+05:30

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How to run, meditate, and not get hurt

via Boing Boing by Lisa Katayama on 10/13/09

It's a brisk Saturday afternoon in San Francisco, and I'm standing outside of Sports Basement with a metronome in my hand. Several hundred feet away, a guy in a funny hat is running around the empty parking lot at a consistent 85 steps per minute. His upper body angles forward as his legs cycle backwards to the beat... beep beep beep. It looks kind of ridiculous, but the guy is actually demonstrating an innovative exercise regime that combines the concepts of Tai Chi and mindfulness meditation with athletic techniques used by Kenyan Olympic sprinters. It's called Chi Running, and it's directly related to recent debates around natural vs power running and the case against heavy-duty sneakers. Most conventional athletic coaches and sports apparel companies advocate power running &mdash running for max speed, personal records, high performance, lots of muscle (think European sprinters with giant legs surging forward and arms pumping furiously). Chi Running takes advantage of a force that comes naturally to all of us — gravity. The funny runner guy is Chris Griffin; he's my instructor. I'm training for my first half-marathon right now, so I figured now would be a good a time as ever to learn good form and try to stay pain-free. Earlier, lying on the floor of the Triathlon department on a gaudy red carpet, me and a dozen others — including an injury-prone high school track star and a 60-year old grandma — learned the basic tenets of this unique running philosophy. By using what Griffin calls "the lean," we create momentum through gravitational pull, using the arms as levers and the legs as wheels revolve naturally behind us. "If you ever watch the Kenyans running in the Olympics," he says, "they're practicing Chi Running. It's the most natural way to run." There are some simple rules to follow — core tight, butt relaxed, calves relaxed, head straight, feet straight (a lot of people run with their feet pointed slightly outward, which causes stress on the knees and toes), weight balanced in the middle of the feet, cadence consistent no matter what the speed. And it works. One of Chi Running founder Danny Dreyer's first group of clients in 1999 was a group of rocket scientists at NASA's Ames campus in Silicon Valley. "One physicist came up to me after class and said, 'I don't believe in Tai Chi woo woo stuff, but what you're teaching is straight down the line good physics,'" Dreyer recalls. "Nobody had applied physics to running before, but this made sense to them." In 1972, American marathoner Frank Shorter won a gold at the Olympics and started advocating the idea that anybody could run for exercise. This led to the dawn of the running sneaker industry — by the end of that decade, the first Nike Air product had hit the market, New Balance had earned a reputation as the best running shoe ever, and UK company Reebok entered the US market with the most expensive running shoe to date. The problem is that most running shoes are designed with a half-inch heel lift. "George Sheehan, a cardiologist who wrote for Runner's World in the 70s, proposed quite correctly that by increasing the height of the shoe, you could increase stride length," Ian Adamson, a world champion adventure racer who now directs product development at running shoe company Newton, tells me. "But this can cause a couple of unfortunate results. Changing the biomechanical ratio between the fibula, tibia, and femur causes you to strike the ground too soon. Also, the 1/2 inch lift means you're effectively always running down a 15-degree slope. So you end up constantly over-striding; your joints lock out and it causes immense shock on the body." These performance-enhancing shoes have played a tangible role in the number of injuries caused by running. This has also inadvertently led to the rise of the running injury treatment industry — think braces and surgery and PT. The sneaker industry, though, has been showing signs of change. Newton currently sells about a dozen running shoe models exclusively designed for a mid- and forefoot strike. New Balance's 800s are made specifically for Chi Running, with shock absorption cushioning at the midfoot. Nike's Frees, though still with the half inch heel lift, are designed to mimic the sensation of barefoot running. And if you really want to get close to running with no shoes on there's Vibram Five Fingers. "There are a lot of options out there," Griffin, the instructor, tells our class. "But remember, technique has to precede gear." It's been about a month since I took the Chi Running workshop, and I'm happy to report that the 100+ miles that I've run since then have been injury-free. The hardest thing for me to incorporate was the mindfulness aspect. Most of us have gotten accustomed to listening to music or podcasts while running, so when Griffin suggested we ditch the iPod and treat running as a practice like yoga or meditation, I was hesitant. The whole reason I'd been able to start running distances in the first place was thanks to Nike Plus, so I just wasn't sure how I'd feel to run without knowing how fast and how long. One day, though, I forgot my iPod at home and was forced to run without metrics or music — it ended up being one of my most refreshing runs ever. I just listened to the wind and focused on my breathing. It reminded me of a passage I read in novelist and runner Haruki Murakami's memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void... The thoughts that occur to me while I'm running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always.

I still like to run with my iPod when I remember it, but I think that's okay. Like with any practice, it's important to be comfortable where you are while acknowledging that you're on the road to improvement. That's how I feel about my running now.

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QuietAgent - Finds You Jobs

2009-10-16T21:47:00.001+05:30

Dear Sunil,
You may find this interesting and hopefully useful.
Mohan

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QuietAgent - Finds You Jobs

via Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant by Marcus on 10/16/09

QuietAgent - Finds You Jobs
http://www.QuietAgent.com/

QuietAgent is a product of privately held technology company QuietAgent, Inc., founded by Jason Kerr and headquartered in San Diego, with offices in New York, Chicago and Auckland, New Zealand. It is the culmination of years of extensive research and development into the problems of online recruitment and the wants and needs of job seekers, employers and third party recruiters globally. QuietAgent is the pioneer of automated high-quality job-to-candidate matching; the single lifetime 'resume profile' and the anonymous two-way matching process, a key element as it removes all the 'resume gaming'; multiple candidate 'personalities' and 'advert-resumes' so common with job boards and social / professional networks. The company has relationships with a growing number of employer associations and educational institutions, and is used by governments for sophisticated matching in the areas of immigration and workforce development. The vision of QuietAgent is to establish a new benchmark for the engaging and sourcing of quality talent, moving away from 'paying, posting and praying' to a model whereby recruiters use rich toolsets to get two-way private connections with quality candidates, and only pay small fees when they have success. This has been added to Employment Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.

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Three Google Wave Searches Worth Saving [Google Wave]

2009-10-16T21:09:00.000+05:30

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Three Google Wave Searches Worth Saving [Google Wave]

via Lifehacker by Gina Trapani on 10/16/09

After only a few weeks of Wave usage, my inbox is full of waves from strangers and items I don't particularly care about. Rather than archiving everything in Wave, I'm going with the flow–with the help of saved searches.

Besides the previously-mentioned with:public search, three other saved searches are making drilling down to my most important waves much easier.

onlyto:me is:unread: This search shows waves that are directed only to me (no one else) and are unread. It provides a much more streamlined view of incoming waves that I'm more likely to want/need to respond to because they're only to me.
creator:me -is:note: These are waves I have created and added other people to, which most likely means they're waves I'm waiting for responses on. This view is very similar to an email sent box.
is:note: I've taken to using Wave as a personal notebook, and jotting waves that no one else is a participant on. This is probably an outside use case of Wave–its purpose is collaboration–but this handy is:note operator does easily return "notes to self" waves.

To save a search, enter the query, and then press the "Save search" button on the bottom righthand side of the results panel. As you can see in the screenshot, I also like adding a little color to my saved searches. To do the same, click the drop-down button next to a saved search and choose "Set color." What Wave searches have you saved?

Three Google Wave Searches Worth Saving [Smarterware]

Smarterware is Lifehacker editor emeritus Gina Trapani's new home away from 'hacker. To get all of the latest from Smarterware, be sure to subscribe to the Smarterware RSS feed. For more, check out Gina's weekly Smarterware feature here on Lifehacker.

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Sawfish: mining the forgotten forests of the sea

2009-10-16T16:02:00.001+05:30

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Sawfish: mining the forgotten forests of the sea

via Boing Boing by Lisa Katayama on 10/14/09

Did you know that some of the best hardwood can be found underwater? When people built hydrodams and created lakes in valleys to get quick, cheap power, they flooded the trees and essentially forgot about them. A small underwater logging industry has ensued, but no company has taken it as far as Triton Logging of Vancouver, BC.

Instead of sending human divers underwater, Triton built a giant yellow submarine called the Sawfish — a 5,500-pound unmanned logging device capable of finding, chopping, and floating trees weighing up to 200 pounds to the surface from deep underwater. When pictures of the Sawfish circulated the blogosphere in 2006, three years after its initial deployment, the sub was harvesting softwood on the west coast of Canada. It has since increased its fleet to four, doubled each machine's lifting power, and expanded its mission to underwater hardwood forests in tropical reservoirs in Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. Join me and Jim Hahurst, Triton's VP of Marketing, for a photo tour of how the new Sawfish works.

Guided by sonar, video cameras, and GPS, the Sawfish dives down under the surface and finds forests to harvest.

Once it finds the tree, the Sawfish grabs onto the bark with its grapples, which are like giant arms. It inserts a rolled up airbag that bolts onto the tree. Compressed air inflates the airbag. The saw on the Sawfish then cuts the trunk just below the airbag and stays there as the usable part of the tree shoots up to the surface. Then it moves on to the next one. The new Sawfish is capable of cutting and floating up 50 trees per dive.

When the airbags surface, a boat corals the floating trees and pulls them over to a barge area, where they are then transferred to a tugboat that takes them to shore for processing.

These photos were taken at a recent Triton mission in Kenyir Lake in Malaysia. "We got an invitation from the government to do this," Hahurst tells me. "Kenyir Lake had divers for underwater logging in the past, but they were keen to try out safer, more environmentally sound tech." The government gets a royalty and stumpage, but Triton gets full ownership of the logs.

There are about 300 million trees underwater, all of them lying still in a deep freeze, inert because the lack of air prevents them from sequestering carbon. "By putting these trees on the market, we potentially displace land-based logging," Hayhurst says. "There are 45,000 major dam reservations in the world, and we've identified the top 20 opportunities. This is kind of like mining, really — we know where the diamonds are."

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Dropresize: resize images by dragging them to a special folder

2009-10-16T12:51:00.001+05:30

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Dropresize: resize images by dragging them to a special folder

via freewaregenius.com by Samer on 10/14/09

Dropresize creates a special folder on your machine such that any images placed in this folder are automatically resized as per a predefined height or width and quality setting. This free program is designed for quickly resizing images for the purposes of posting on the internet.

If you post images on the internet you know that in most cases images need to be resized for optimal viewing in a browser and the compression quality adjusted to make the file sizes smaller and faster to download (my preferred settings, for example, are a width of 800 pixels and 80% quality setting). Dropresize is a program that provides a simple way to perform these adjustments on images simply by moving them to a designated folder. Here are more notes on this program.

How it works: Dropresize is a background app that lives in the system tray and monitors a designated folder on your hard drive. Once it detects images moved into that folder it automatically resizes them based on your size and quality settings. (Note: max resize is 1600 pixels, and images smaller than your defined resolution settings will not be enlarged).
Settings: users can specify desired height OR desired width in pixels, as well as the compression quality settings.
Supported filetypes: at the moment of this writing only Jpegs are supported, but it seems there are plans to support other image types.
Portable: unzip and run. No install needed. If you want this app to be launched when you boot into Windows you need to manually add it to the startup folder (found in the Windows' start menu).
Memory consumption: this is a MS .NET app and therefore memory consumption can be somewhat unclear. I believe its takes about 15 megs in memory, which is not that much but not quite lightweight.

Wish list: I could go on and on with ideas to make this better, but will make it brief

Auto rename: automatically adding a prefix or suffix to the file names; such as appending an "_s" to the filename fo example to indicate that it is a resized version.
Multiple profiles: for example having one folder resize to width=800 and another to width=200 (for thumbnails), etc.

The verdict: while there are many ways to resize images in batch, the "designated folder" concept employed by Dropresize is both innovative and appealing. The program is still in beta and my guess is that it will be improved greatly, but at what it does Dropresize works really well. If you frequently have to resize images for the internet then check this one out for sure.

Version Tested: 0.1.3b

Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Requires Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or newer. (This is already pre-installed in Vista).

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 22.99K).

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Quickly Copy File Paths to Your Command Prompt via Drag and Drop [Terminal Tip]

2009-10-15T23:11:00.001+05:30

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Quickly Copy File Paths to Your Command Prompt via Drag and Drop [Terminal Tip]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 10/15/09

Windows/Mac/Linux: If you spend much time at a command/shell prompt, you're probably very comfortable navigating from one folder to the next—but rather than manually typing through folders to find a file buried in your filesystem, just drag and drop instead.

Next time you want to change directories (cd to a folder deep in your filesystem but you're looking directly at that folder on your desktop, for example, just type in cd, then drag and drop that folder into your command prompt, and voilà. The simple drag-and-drop trick does the job any time you want the path to a file or folder without a lot of hassle.

This isn't a new feature by any means. You've long been able to drag and drop a file to the terminal in OS X and Linux, and weblog Addictive Tips reminds us (and the How-To Geek explains) that this functionality was also available in XP, broken in Vista, and now back in Windows 7. So even though it's an oldie, if you spend much time at your operating system's command prompt and haven't used this one, it's extremely handy.

Got a favorite terminal navigation shortcut of your own? Let's hear it in the comments.

Windows 7 Command Prompt Supports Drag & Drop [Addictive Tips]

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How to Write Feature Articles for Magazines

2009-10-15T13:09:00.001+05:30

Basic Steps to Well-Written Magazine Articles

Aug 12, 2008

Follow these tips and tricks to writing and publishing well-researched, well-organized feature articles.

Before writing an article, appropriate planning should be completed. Each article needs a central theme, which directs all other aspects of the article. Once a theme is determined decide on the structure and organization of the article. Take this information to create a basic outline. The outline is important because it organizes all of the article's components in a logical order. It forces the writer to focus on the article's theme and guides the writing process.

Parts of a Feature Article

A feature article's title is a defining point. It draws the reader in and gives the direction of the story. Other parts of the feature article are the lead, body, and conclusion.

A lead starts the article. It needs to grab the reader's attention and illustrate the central idea. Four types of article leads include:

quote – uses a quote that encompasses the theme of the article
anecdote – narrative lead that tells a story
summary – tells the who, what, when, where, why, how
surprising statement – peaks the reader's interest with an unusual beginning

The body of the article follows the lead. Paragraphs need to flow smoothly from one to the next, with sentences varied in length and structure to add interest. Some characteristics to use in writing the body include anecdotes to illustrate points, quotes and conversations from sources to add a personal touch, and specific examples to give substance to the article.
Following the body of the article comes a good conclusion. Use this to summarize the main point and confirm the intended purpose of the article. In addition to this typical article structuring, many feature articles also include sidebar. An appropriate sidebar enhances the appearance in presentation, which appeals to editors that read your article...

Editing and Revising Articles

When writing is completed, take proper care in editing the article for submission. Things to look for are proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Overall structure needs to be examined to see if the lead and conclusion are most effective for the purpose of the article. Individual paragraphs and overall points need to flow smoothly and be appropriately adapted to the article's theme. Have someone read the article for comments and suggestions, and then take time to make any necessary revisions.

OnlineOCR Converts Your Scanned Documents to Editable Text [Text]

2009-10-13T20:01:00.001+05:30

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OnlineOCR Converts Your Scanned Documents to Editable Text [Text]

via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 10/13/09

A page of printed notes from an instructor, an old proposal you want to edit, a letter your boss wants turned into a template, OnlineOCR can help take an image of text and turn it into an editable copy.

OnlineOCR is a completely free service. You can upload documents in a variety of formats like PDF, TIFF, JPG, and other image files as well as a ZIP of your document. Without creating an account you can convert documents up to 1MB in size and 5 pages long. Creating a free account allows you to upload documents that are 20MB in size and longer than 5 pages.

The biggest bonus that comes with account creation isn't the expansion in file size however but the format preservation. You can convert a PDF with columns into a Word document with columns and so on. The free version simply rips the text from the document into plain text—as seen in the screenshot above. If all you need is the text to slap into another application, the free account is more than sufficient.

Have your own favorite OCR tool? Let's hear about it in the comments.

OnlineOCR [via MakeUseOf]

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YaBB - Yet Another Bulletin Board

2009-09-29T14:35:00.001+05:30

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YaBB - Yet Another Bulletin Board

via Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant by Marcus on 9/25/09

YaBB - Yet Another Bulletin Board
http://www.yabbforum.com/

YaBB is a leading free forum software package that rivals any professional message board out there. It provides a real-time chat and support system for your visitors. While chat programs allow people to talk directly, you have to be on at the same time as others. With forum software like YaBB, you can talk any time, and everyone can join in the conversation! Build a community and get visitors to come back for interesting discussions, fun chit chat, or needed support without having to spend thousands of dollars. This system is the world's first and most popular open-source perl forum software! All you need to do to get started is download YaBB from this site for FREE and install it on your existing website! You can control every aspect of your forum. This has been added to Entrepreneurial Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog. This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.

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Picasa 3.5, now with name tags and more

2009-09-23T14:39:00.001+05:30

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Picasa 3.5, now with name tags and more

via The Official Google Blog by A Googler on 9/22/09

Today, I'm happy to announce that we're releasing Picasa 3.5, a new version of our free photo editing software. This version gives you the ability to add name tags to your photos, using the same facial recognition technology that powers name tags on Picasa Web Albums. Name tags are designed to help you organize your photos by what matters most: the people in them. Picasa identifies similar faces and puts these into an "Unnamed People" album. From there, you can easily add a name tag by clicking "Add a name" and typing the person's name. After you've added name tags to some photos, you can use your tags to do creative things, like quickly find all the photos with the same two people in them, make a face collage with just one click or upload and share people albums with friends.

In addition to name tags, Picasa 3.5 has integrated Google Maps, so you can easily geotag your photos or view the locations of already-tagged photos on a map. And using our totally redesigned import process, you can now import photos from your camera and upload the photos to Picasa Web Albums in one easy step.

Picasa 3.5 is available for both PC and Mac, in English for now. You can download and try it today at picasa.google.com.

Posted by Todd Bogdan, Software Engineer

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The Best Sounds for Getting Work Done [Productivity]

2009-09-23T14:04:00.001+05:30

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The Best Sounds for Getting Work Done [Productivity]

via Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy on 9/22/09

The right kind of sound can relax your mind, hone your focus, drown out distractions, or get you pumped to kill your to-do list. We've assembled some research and free resources to help you create your own best workspace soundtrack.

Photo by Sara Björk.

Does music really make you more productive?

The answer falls somewhere between "Listening to Mozart makes you a genius" and "Just be quiet and work."

The most often cited study into the question of music's effect on the mind involves the so-called Mozart effect, which suggests that listening to certain kinds of music—Amadeus Wolfgang's classical works, in particular—impacts and boosts one's spatial-temporal reasoning, or the ability to think out long-term, more abstract solutions to logical problems that arise. The Mozart effect has been overblown and over-promised, and even outright refuted as having "bupkiss" effect, but that doesn't mean a great mind-juicing playlist can't be created.

The Workplace Doctors site details both sides of the question. In one study, University of Illinois researchers found that listening to music in "all types of work" increased work output 6.3% over a control group. In another study (dissected at MetaFilter), 56 employees working on basic computer tasks were found to be more productive when there was no music playing over the same period tested with music.

So the real answer turns out to be, unfortunately, "it depends." It depends on whether your office or workspace is noisy enough that a good kind of noise or music is preferable to the natural cacophony. It depends on your personal attention span, and how likely you are to fiddle with controls versus letting a music stream trickle past your ears. Though many of the final answers to studies of music at work conflict, the general consensus seems to be that people can be boosted at work by music, if they're willing to be.

If that sounds like you, here's a few suggestions on where to find music that others have found helpful in their own workspaces.

The classical route

How it works: The ornate instrumentation and composition of Baroque classical music gets a lot of attention for its possible mind-boosting effects. Eight radiologists were asked to go about their day while listening to Baroque-period tunes. They mostly self-reported better mood and productivity, except for one worker who said the music had a negative effect on his concentration.

Followers of Getting Things Done and productivity writer David Allen note in forum posts that the man himself seems to dig Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #3, and other Baroque tunes as mood-setters for tackling tasks like a weekly review. A key suggestion from a David Allen forum poster—look for tracks paced at about 60 beats per minute:

It's the beats-per-minute required to get the brain up to optimal revs. David has a segment about it on GTD Fast – I also came across it at a speed-reading class. It seems to cause a "bright and breezy" frame of mind where thinking and creativity are easier. I find it works.

Where to get it: Being often hundreds of years old and a niche interest these days, classical music is relatively easy to find online. Wikipedia has hundreds of freely-licensed files, and public domain search sites like Musopen offers a lot of good stuff, too.

If the Baroque sound doesn't quite do it for you, Lifehacker commenter Catalyst suggests the Vitamin String Quartet, which covers pop tunes in string quartet/chamber music style. It's not the same kind of down-deep arrangement as traditional classical work, but the Quartet's work takes away distracting lyrics and soothes out pop music's more annoying edges. Here's a sample:

The ambient/techno route

How it works: The label "ambient" has been applied far too broadly to be of much help to anyone but record store owners. Still, at its core, all ambient music is designed not to jump in your face, but still keep your brain engaged at a lower, subconscious level. Pioneers like Brian Eno developed ambient music as an experiment in composition, allowing algorithms, randomness, synthesizers, and whatever sounded neat to replace the standard components of pop music.

A modern variant, chillout, and its categorical cousins downtempo, ambient house, and certain varieties of IDM, or Intelligent Dance Music, grew out of a need for dancers and partiers at techno clubs to take a break, relax, and recover from their efforts, along with whatever else they needed recovering from. Like the original ambient music, much of it is designed to relax the mind and allow it to roam, while providing just enough stimulation to register as inspiration.

Where to get it: Both Gina and Brian Ashcraft at our gaming-focused sibling blog Kotaku find Eno's Music for Airports to be superior music for deep tasks and serious studying. It was designed, after all, for actual airports, to put passengers at ease in an often stressful situation, right before getting on a tube that some consider their worst fear.

Gina and many, many commenters dig the Groove Salad stream and other stations, like Drone Zone and Secret Agent, provided by Soma.fm. Half as many recommend the ambient offerings at Digitally Imported, and often flip between it and Soma.fm for fresh streams. Both sites provide free audio to most any music player that can tune in web playlists or radio.

If you're a fan of streaming recommendation site Pandora, or like the minimalist, "glitch," or seriously ambient side of techno, commenter maczter recommends a playlist created by a Pandora employee, Ovals, that he describes as "minimalist elemental glitch." I tried it out for an afternoon writing session, and found five out of six tracks to be unexpectedly calming and helpful in the task—with the exception of one rather jarring, high-pitched interloper.

The noise route

How it works: If music is too distracting for your tastes, but your chatty co-workers, office machinery, and general clamor are even more distracting, colored noise might be a worthy addition to your audio repertoire.

Noise generators, usually grouped into groups of white, pink, or brown/red, cover a range of your ear's audible spectrum with generic sound to mask or lessen the distractions of other sounds. Wikipedia's entry on sound masking puts it best:

Imagine a dark room where someone is turning a flashlight on and off. The light is very obvious and distracting. Now imagine that the room lights are turned on. The flashlight is still being turned on and off, but is no longer noticeable because it has been "masked". Sound masking is a similar process of covering a distracting sound with a more soothing or less intrusive sound.

Where to get it: If you can install desktop software where you work, we've previously recommended Noise for Mac OS X and Chatterblocker for Windows as great apps for covering up sounds. Noise creates more straight-up sound waves, while Chatterblocker can recreate office environment noise to fill in notable gaps or introduce other ambient-type sounds, like guitar chords and nature, into your mix.

On the web, we're also partial to Zendesk's Buddha Machine Wall, which randomizes and loops relaxing sounds that you choose from among random buttons and speakers. For a more pure white/pink/brown noise generator, try SimplyNoise.

Lost in a sea of random speaker crackle? Editor's tests have found that pink noise generally simulates a waterfall effect, while setting the brown/red noise in SimplyNoise to a low volume, while allowing the volume to fall up and down, or oscillate, provides a soundscape similar to waves hitting the shore off in the distance.

Other routes

We asked our readers to share the music that helps them get things done, and they showered us with responses. There are a lot of specific artists, albums, and genres listed in the comments of that post that might inspire you to re-seed your own playlist, but a few had some unique ideas on what helped them listen while stay productive.

four12 wrote that listening to radio stations in foreign languages "effectively drowns out the office noise, but because I really don't understand what is being said (though I am learning), my brain tunes even that out." In his case, France Info radio provides the news-but-not-really-news he needs.

wowser808, on the other hand, goes with a more traditional, and heart-warmingly geeky, pic: the Blade Runner soundtrack." He notes that Vangelis' ethereal tunes "got me through every single essay at university."

We are still more than open to your suggestions of what music, noise, random sounds, or audio hackery makes for the most productive environment. Tell us your picks in the comments.

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http://word2cleanhtml.com/cleanit

2009-09-22T15:23:00.000+05:30

python anagrams

2009-09-19T21:14:00.000+05:30

Tags:	python, text processing
Subject:	An optimization anecdote
Time:	09:42 pm

Sometimes I see a quiz that gives some unsorted letters, and asks for the Italian words composed with those letters. It's an anagram problem. I have found a very good list of all Italian words ("lemmario", list of Italian entries) (6.2 MB of just different words, separated by newline), including all forms of all verbs, so I have tried to create a simple program to find the anagrams.
The basic starting point is to use word signatures, that is an invariant of anagramming, that is the sequence of the sorted letters of the word:

rinverdita ==> adeiinrrtv

Using Python you can find such word with just:

"".join(sorted(word))

So the program is very simple, you can find the signature of the single input string (sign), then for each line of the lemmario, you can compute its signature, and print the line if the signatures are the same (the following code is untested, I use Python as pseudocode):

signature = lambda s: "".join(sorted( s.strip().lower() ))
sign = signature(input_word)
for line in file("lemmario"):
    if sign == signature(line)
    print line.strip()

This works, but it's very slow, it may take ~20+ seconds on my very old PC. A solution is to relax the test, to make it faster. There are many ways to do it, this is one of the faster ways, we can create a less precise signature function, the faster one is just to use the set of the letters of the word. I have added a newline to the input_word to compute raw_sign because lines contain a newline too.

raw_sign = set(input_word + "\n")
sign = signature(input_word)
for line in file("lemmario"):
  if raw_sign == set(line) and sign == signature(line):
      print line.strip()

Python uses a shortcut, it doesn't evaluate the signature(line) if the first part of the and is False. So the first part removes most of the lines in a faster way. The resulting code takes ~6 seconds to run. 6 seconds are acceptable, but a quicker answer is appreciated when I play with friends with words. In this situation to speed up the code I don't think you need a faster language, but a smarter algorithm.
So I have created a list of 200 defaultdicts (with Python 2.5), one for each possible word length. I have computed the signature for each word of the original file. Each dictionary has the signature as key and as values the list of the words with that signature. Then I have saved each defaultdictionary in a different file, so the successive loads are fast:

dicts = [defaultdict(list) for i in xrange(200)]
infile = file(words_filename)
for line in infile:
  word = line.strip()
  signature = "".join(sorted(word.lower()))
    dicts[len(word)][signature].append(word)

for i in xrange(200):
  if dicts[i]:
    out_filename = "anags" + str(i).zfill(2) + ".pik"
    binarysave(out_filename, dicts[i]) #using cPickle

This is a pre-processing stage done once only. After that, given a word you can load just the pickle that contains the words of that length, and search for the signature as key.
Such pickle load takes most of the running time, about 1.2-1.7 seconds.

Can we go faster? The processing now is very little, most of the time is used loading a very big dict, and it's done using cPickle, so probably it's not easy to go faster (there is the marshal module too, but probably that can't reduce loading time much).

A dict is a complex data structure that requires some time to be decoded, so maybe using a simpler format we can read the data in a faster way. The simpler format is a text file. Maybe we can trade the dict loading, followed by an O(1) access, but a faster load time, followed by an O(n) sequential search inside the text. The sequential search is very fast because memory is contiguous (less cache misses), and the Python 2.5 string search algorithm is really optimised (it uses some very smart tricks).

So it's easy to create many text files like this (each file is relative to words of the same length, as before):

abdiin#bandii
abdiir#adibir#ibrida
abdiln#blandi#blinda
abdino#badino#bidona#bionda
  abdinr#bandir#bardin#brinda
abdins#sbandi
abdior#bordai

Inside each line the first part is the signature, the successive ones are the anagrams of that signature. Each different group is separated by "\r" (here shown as newline). I have chosen "\r" and "#" characters because they aren't present inside the lemmario. The resulting code is very simple:

SEPARATOR = "#"
GROUP_SEPARATOR = "\n"
word = input_word.strip()
txt_filename = compute_filename(len(word))
if not os.path.exists(txt_filename):
  return NOT_FOUND
  anags = file(txt_filename, "rb").read()
word_sign = GROUP_SEPARATOR + signature(word)
pos = anags.find(word_sign)
if pos < 0:
  return NOT_FOUND
else:
  next_pos = anags.find(GROUP_SEPARATOR, pos+1)
    if next_pos < 0: next_pos = None # for last line
  print anags[pos : next_pos].split(SEPARATOR)[1:]

The anags.find(word_sign) comes out really fast. The whole running time is around 0.3-0.4 seconds. The signatures are sorted, so maybe there is a way to use a binary search to speed up this code even more. Python has the bisect function inside the bisect standard module:

bisect.bisect()

Given a point into the string you can choose the right half looking just a bit forward, taking the first group of letters between \r------#, and using that as comparing string. I have not tried this optimisation because 0.3 seconds is fast enough for my purposes, and with some timings I have seen that the normal running time (with an already loaded file in cache) is about 0.02 seconds, so most of those 0.3 seconds are the interpreter start-up time.

To test that I have tried to remove the compilation time of the Python program with:

python -OO -c "from py_compile import compile; compile('fast_anagrams.py')"

This produces a 'fast_anagrams.pyo' bytecode executable for the Python VM, that takes about 0.02 seconds less than before to run, so the total running time is about 0.21-0.3 seconds still.

comments: Leave a comment

Is Google Analytics a Creative Writing Tool?

2009-09-19T19:09:00.001+05:30

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Is Google Analytics a Creative Writing Tool?

via Write to Done by Mary Jaksch on 9/3/09

A guest post by Bill Rice

Do a quick search on Google for writing inspiration, writing ideas, or writer's block. You find literally millions of articles.

That indicates a problem. And the millions of abandoned blogs littering the Web certainly confirm this fact. No group is likely to be more afflicted by writer's block or idea anxiety than bloggers. Faced with a reverse chronological, flowing river of content, any pause or break in quality can mean lost readership.

However, we might also have the best tool any writer could hope for to battle the blank page–web analytics.

I Need Fresh, New, Original Ideas

Nothing is more daunting to a blogger than a blank page. Chances are you are like many bloggers, started with a bang.

You were passionate about a niche or believed your blog was going to light your business on fire. The first several posts flowed out with ease. You were proud of them. You promoted them. You built a nice little audience.

Then…oh my goodness! I am out of ideas.

You probably turned to all the popular writing blogs for writer‚Äôs block busting ideas. That worked for a while. But you can only take so many walks, only travel so much, only read so many books, and only browse so many blogs. Then you still have to put a topic on the page.

Stuck again.

I Want to Give My Readers What They Want

The other problem that bloggers are often faced with is focus. They want to keep their readers happy and they want to attract in more of the right audience.

This was easy at first. You knew your niche and you knew your topic. As a result, you were right on point with your first few posts because you knew the pain points.

However, as you drifted off looking for new ideas and inspiration you have lost focus. If you are like many bloggers you meander off into topics less interesting to your original audience. Even more problematic you are potentially attracting less targeted (or less period) new readers.

Now your blog is becoming not only a writing frustration, but also missing your objective for starting it to begin with.

This is an emergency! We need to fix this or we‚Äôll have another Web ghost on our hands.

What, an Endless List of Writing Ideas?

Now that I have you wondering if you should just shut down your blog I am going to point you to the treasure. The really good news is it's free and sitting right in your backyard.

On a daily basis, your Web traffic is giving you a running list of new, fresh, and original topics. That'st people searching for answers, searching for new solutions, searching for your services are leaving you bread crumbs

Every one of these search queries is landing in your Web analytics. These are topics that you have brushed on and Google already thinks you are an authority on.

That means two big things for you:

1.) Your readers are telling you exactly what they want from you, and

2.) Google is telling you if you write more on these topics I will send you even more traffic.

Bingo! Writing motivation, happy readers, and more traffic. That sounds like a slam-dunk for blog success. Maybe even business success.

Quick How-To on Google Analytics

If you are not sure where to get this magic list let me give you a quick how-to on Google Analytics. It‚Äôs free and probably the quickest and easiest way to harvest this list of new writing ideas.

Sign-up for Google Analytics
Click on Add Website Profile
Type in website URL
Cut'n paste code snippet
Edit the 'footer' portion of your blog template
Add the code snippet to the footer, just before the </body> tag

With these few simple steps you will be building a whole new targeted list of writing ideas for your blog in no time.

…

Bill Rice is the founder of RICEinteractive.com, an Internet marketing and lead generation firm. He writes about sales at www.bettercloser.com and contributes to several financial services and online marketing publications.

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ReliefBand

2009-09-19T13:16:00.001+05:30

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ReliefBand

via Cool Tools on 9/16/09

I have always been prone to motion sickness. Going out in a boat meant that I would be sick; the only question was how long it would take before I was hanging over the edge. My wife really wanted to go on a cruise, so I looked to see if there was anything that modern science could do for me. Dramamine puts me to sleep, so that was out, and I feared the patch would be just as bad. Then I ran across the ReliefBand. After reading a number of reviews I tried it, and the results for me were amazing. I went on a seven-day cruise and never had a moment's illness, not even when we were on a small fishing boat with several people bringing back their lunch right near me.

The ReliefBand uses small pulses of electricity on pressure points in the wrist that relieve nausea. It's approved by the FDA for morning sickness, but it certainly works for motion sickness as well. You can adjust the strength of the tingling from 1 (very mild) to 5 (strong enough to make my fingers curl a bit, involuntarily).

The ReliefBand needs to be worn tightly, and I'm often adjusting the band to make sure the electric pulses fall in the right place on my wrist. I adjust the setting according to the level of ship's motion; sometimes I've set it on 5, mostly I leave it on 2 or 3. The most severe test I put it to was on my most recent cruise, where one evening we had 15-foot swells and Force 7 winds. Half the crew was seasick, and most of the passengers, too. I didn't feel so good, myself, but I never felt like throwing up; I just went to bed early.

I don't know why this device isn't better known or sold more widely because it does the job exceptionally well with no drugs and no side effects. I've run into a couple of people on cruises wearing the ReliefBand, and they all have stories similar to mine. Yes, it's expensive (if you hunt around you may be able to find it for around $110), but if you're planning to spend a lot of money on a cruise it pays for itself in the first sickness-free day.

-- Steve Peterson

ReliefBand Explorer RB-EL for Motion Sickness
$129

Available from Amazon

Manufactured by Neurowave Medical

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FocusBoosterLive is a Simple Web-Based Break Timer [Timer]

2009-09-15T08:05:00.001+05:30

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FocusBoosterLive is a Simple Web-Based Break Timer [Timer]

via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 9/14/09

Whether you need a timer to keep you on task or to remind you to occasionally get off task and emerge from your office, FocusBoosterLive can help ensure the hours don't slip away.

We're big fans of timers and time tracking—a simple timer is a great tool for keeping an eye on the time you have and reminding yourself to take ever important breaks.

FocusBoosterLive is a web-based tool. You don't need to remember your flash drive filled with portable applications or have permission to install any software. Visit the site, tell FocusBoosterLive how long of a session you want, how long of a break you'll be taking, and what sound effects you want. Start the timer and tear into your work knowing a set break is on the horizon.

FocusBoosterLive is a free tool and, if you really like the web-based version, there is a free Adobe Air-based desktop version available as well.

FocusBoosterLive [via MakeUseOf]

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12 Tips for Better Business Writing

2009-09-14T13:27:00.001+05:30

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12 Tips for Better Business Writing

via Stepcase Lifehack by Dustin Wax on 9/10/09

Today's business world is almost entirely information-driven. Whether you run a small business or occupy a small corner of the org-chart at a massive multinational corporation, chances are that the bulk of your job consists of communicating with others, most often in writing. Of course there's email and the traditional business letter, but most business people are also called on to write presentations, memos, proposals, business requirements, training materials, promotional copy, grant proposals, and a wide range of other documents.

Here's the rub: most business people have little experience with writing. While those with business degrees probably did a bit of writing in school, it's rarely stressed in business programs, and learning to write well is hardly the driving force behind most people's desire to go to business school. Those without a university background might have never been pushed to write at all, at least since public school.

If you're one of the many people in business for whom writing has never been a major concern, you should know that a lack of writing skills is a greater and greater handicap with every passing year. Spending some time to improve your writing can result in a marked improvement in your hireability and promotional prospects. There's no substitute for practice, but here are a few pointers to put you on the right track.

1. Less is more.

In business writing as in virtually every other kind of writing, concision matters. Ironically, as written information becomes more and more important to the smooth functioning of businesses, people are less and less willing to read. Increasingly, magazines and other outlets that used to run 2,000-word features are cutting back to 500-word sketches. Use words sparingly, cut out the florid prose, and avoid long, meandering sentences. As Zorro taught his son, "Get in, make your Z, and get out!" – get straight to the point, say what you want to say, and be done with it.

2. Avoid jargon.

Everyone in business hates business writing, all that "blue-sky solutioneering" and those "strategical synergies" that ultimately, mean nothing; "brainstorming" and "opportunities to work together" are more meaningful without sounding ridiculous. While sometimes jargon is unavoidable – in a business requirement document or technical specification, for example – try using plainer language. Even for people in the same field as you, jargon is often inefficient – the eye slides right past it without really catching the meaning. There's a reason that jargon is so often used when a writer wants to not say anything.

3. Write once, check twice.

Proofread immediately after you write, and then again hours or, better yet, days later. Nothing is more embarrassing than a stupid typo in an otherwise fine document. It's hardly fair – typos happen! – but people judge you for those mistakes anyway, and harshly. Except in the direct emergency, always give yourself time to set your writing aside and come back to it later. The brain is tricky and will ignore errors that it's just made; some time working on something else will give you the detachment you need to catch those errors before anyone else reads them.

4. Write once, check twice.

I know, I just said this, but I mean something else here. In addition to catching typos and other errors, putting some time between writing and re-reading your work can help you catch errors of tone that might otherwise escape you and cause trouble. For instance, when we're upset or angry, we often write things we don't actually want anyone else to read. Make sure your work says what you want it to say, how you want it to say it, before letting it reach its audience.

5. Pay special attention to names, titles, and genders.

OK, there is one thing more embarrassing than a typo: calling Mr. Smith "Ms. Smith" consistently throughout a document. If you're not positive about the spelling of someone's name, their job title (and what it means), or their gender, either a) check with someone who does know (like their assistant), or b) in the case of gender, use gender-neutral language. "They" and "their" are rapidly becoming perfectly acceptable gender-neutral singular pronouns, despite what your grammar teacher and the self-righteous grammar nazi down the hall might say.

6. Save templates.

Whenever you write an especially good letter, email, memo, or other document, if there's the slightest chance you'll be writing a similar document in the future, save it as a template for future use. Since rushing through writing is one of the main causes of typos and other errors, saving time by using a pre-written document can save you the embarrassment of such errors. Just make sure to remove any specific information – names, companies, etc. – before re-using it – you don't want to send a letter to Mr. Sharif that is addressed to Mrs. O'Toole!

7. Be professional, not necessarily formal.

There's a tendency to think of all business communication as formal, which isn't necessary or even very productive. Formal language is fine for legal documents and job applications, but like jargon often becomes invisible, obscuring rather than revealing its meaning. At the same time, remember that informal shouldn't mean unprofessional – keep the personal comments, off-color jokes, and snarky gossip out of your business communications. Remember that many businesses (possibly yours) are required by law to keep copies of all correspondence – don't email, mail, or circulate anything that you wouldn't feel comfortable having read into the record in a public trial.

8. Remember the 5 W's (and the H)

Just like a journalist's news story, your communications should answer all the questions relevant to your audience: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? For example, who is this memo relevant to, what should they know, when and where will it apply, why is it important, and how should they use this information? Use the 5W+H formula to try to anticipate any questions your readers might ask, too.

9. Call to action.

The content of documents that are simply informative are rarely retained very well. Most business communication is meant to achieve some purpose, so make sure they include a call to action – something that the reader is expected to do. Even better, something the reader should do right now. Don't leave it to your readers to decide what to do with whatever information you've provided – most won't even bother, and enough of the ones who do will get it wrong that you'll have a mess on your hands before too long.

10. Don't give too many choices.

Ideally, don't give any. If you're looking to set a time for a meeting, give a single time and ask them to confirm or present a different time. At most, give two options and ask them to pick one. Too many choices often leads to decision paralysis, which generally isn't the desired effect.

11. What's in it for your readers?

A cornerstone of effective writing is describing benefits, not features. Why should a reader care? For example, nobody cares that Windows 7 can run in 64-bit mode – what they care about is that it can handle more memory and thus run faster than the 32-bit operating system. 64-bits is a feature; letting me get my work done more quickly is the benefit. Benefits engage readers, since they're naturally most concerned with finding out how they can make their lives easier or better.

12. Hire a freelancer.

Not a writing tip per se, I know, but good advice nonetheless. Writing is most likely not your strong suit – if it's important, hire someone for whom writing is their strong suit. You may think freelancers are only for marketing material, but that's not true – a good freelance writer can produce memos, training manuals, internal letters, corporate newsletters, blog posts, wiki entries, and just about any other kind of writing you can think of. Depending on your needs, you can farm work out as needed or move a freelancer into a cubicle on-site, or work out whatever other arrangements best fit your needs. Expect to pay at least $30 an hour, and more likely $50 – $125 an hour, for good writing – anyone who charges less is either not very good, or not very business savvy. (These rates are for writers in US metro areas – rates my differ in other parts of the world.)

Great writing may require a talent that few of us have, but effective writing is a learnable skill. If your business writing isn't up to snuff, follow the tips above and see if you can't improve it. If your writing does pass muster, how about leaving a tip or two in the comments below?

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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My Text Tools - Free Online Text Tools

2009-09-14T13:12:00.001+05:30

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My Text Tools - Free Online Text Tools

via Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant by Marcus on 9/10/09

My Text Tools - Free Online Text Tools
http://mytexttools.com/

This website is a collection of simple yet "hard to find" browser-based text manipulation tools. NOTE: Javascript must be enabled for tools to function. This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.

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Talkinator - Talk Like Crazy

2009-09-14T12:51:00.001+05:30

Sent to you by mchunkat via Google Reader:

Talkinator - Talk Like Crazy

via Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant by Marcus on 9/12/09

Talkinator - Talk Like Crazy
http://www.talkinator.com/

Add chat to your web site or profile page in seconds! Just copy and paste the code, and start typing! Simply enter the name of the room in the textbox in the upper left on their page and your talkinator room will be created. How do I sign up? You don't. Talkinator is about speeding up your web experience. With Talkinator, there's no sign-up. For you -or- for the people who visit your talkinator room. Just grab a talkinator and go! Every Talkinator includes a "get-the-code" button. Click that (or click the here). Customize the talkinator for size, color and room name. Paste that code in your site - and you have your very own Talkinator! Share your Talkinator - or keep it a Secret! Want a rousing conversation going on in your website? Then pick a Talkinator room that already exists. Websites can "share" Talkinators. If you and another site have the same Talkinator room, it doesn't matter if you're on that site or your own - you are in the same Talkinator talking away! Of course, if your site is busy enough on its own, then just create your own unique roomname and use that. Or if you want just members of your site allowed in the room, then only show the Talkinator code once one of your members logs in - voila ! Members only room! This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.

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nice webpage creation intro

2009-09-09T14:11:00.001+05:30

web publishing made easy

tutorials
webdesign
resources
webannouncer
pagewizard
tell-a-friend

HTML tutorials
html basics, software and publishing
introduction to tables
layout with tables
layout with frames
all about forms
introduction to Dynamic HTML
how to use fonts
how to use meta tags
special characters
custom error messages
system speed tips
software download guide

Headline news
internet news
computing news
more news (over 300 categories)

http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/imagemap.shtml image maps

2009-09-07T17:35:00.001+05:30

Fold a World-Record-Setting Paper Airplane [Fun]

2009-09-07T10:35:00.001+05:30

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Fold a World-Record-Setting Paper Airplane [Fun]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 9/6/09

A few years back we pointed you toward the world's "best" paper airplane, and while we couldn't entirely back up the "best" claim, this Sky King paper airplane is a legitimate world-record holder. This video shows us how to make it ourselves.

Wired's video demonstrates the build from start to finish, but if you'd prefer a more barebones schematic, head over to the Wired page for a nice step-by-step in images. It doesn't look all that impressive when Wired put the plane into flight, but it looks more like a matter of an unbalanced build than a flaw with the design.

If you give it a try, let's hear if you fared better in the comments.

Fold Your Own Sky King Paper Airplane [Wired]

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http://www.balajisebookworld.com/ nice collection of free ebooks

2009-09-05T14:01:00.000+05:30

Make your own handwriting into a font in ten minutes.

2009-08-31T15:19:00.001+05:30

Sent to you by mchunkat via Google Reader:

Make your own handwriting into a font in ten minutes.

via Smart Stuff – The World's Smartest Stuff on 8/30/09

We just did. It may not be the prettiest hand in the land, but the process was quick and simple. The whole thing took about ten minutes. Everything is done over the 'net, so there's no scary software to download. You do need a printer and a scanner, though. If you don't have a printer or a scanner you could print and scan at a friends house, but then it would probably take more than ten minutes. If you have all the necessary hardware ready, all you have to do is go over to FontCapture and get started. It's free, too. We'll probably have another go at our own handwritten typeface, and this time we'll try to write a little tidier...

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PHPAnywhere: Online PHP Editor

2009-08-26T19:27:00.001+05:30

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PHPAnywhere: Online PHP Editor

via MakeUseOf.com by azim on 8/25/09

PHPAnywhere is a free online PHP editor based on Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It lets web developers code and edit their web applications written in PHP from anywhere online and right inside their browser. The application includes a real-time syntax code editor and built-in FTP client that supports all web formats.

Simply add your ftp server(s) and start managing your PHP and other files. Built-in ftp explorer lets you edit/delete remote files, modify folder permissions and other ftp functions.

Features:

Code and edit PHP files from your browser. No need to install anything.
Real time code syntax highlighting.
Add multiple ftp servers.
Manage remote files using built-in FTP client (change file and folder permissions, edit/delete files etc).
Different skins to change the look of the application.
Real-time code collaboration is coming soon.
Free, sign up to get started.

Check out PHPAnywhere @ www.phpanywhere.net

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PHPAnywhere: Online PHP Editor

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PDF Pirate: Pdf Restrictions Remover Freeware

2009-08-26T18:52:00.001+05:30

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PDF Pirate: Pdf Restrictions Remover Freeware

via MakeUseOf.com by kaly on 8/26/09

Next time you need to unlock restricted PDF files head straight to PDF Pirate.net . It is an online PDF restrictions remover freeware that lets you do it in no time. Just select PDF file and it will automatically remove all restrictions giving you a download link to save it back onto your computer.

Features:

Remove restrictions and limits from PDFs online.
Unlock as many files as you like.
Free and no sign up.
Similar tools: PDF-Crack

Check out PDF Pirate @ www.pdfpirate.net

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PDF Pirate: Pdf Restrictions Remover Freeware

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FE Editorial : Please Leave ‘Minor’ Ports Alone

2009-08-26T18:34:00.001+05:30

The Financial Express
Posted: Wednesday, Aug 19, 2009 at 2231 hrs IST
Updated: Wednesday, Aug 19, 2009 at 2231 hrs IST

: Minor ports have hitherto been beyond the Centre's purview. As the shipping ministry revisions this situation, we have cause for concern. Back in 1950, the Constitution made a distinction between major and minor ports, with the idea that the former would be principal gateways for international trade and hence under central jurisdiction, while the latter would be suitable for fishing and the like and so remain under state charge. This differentiation was without significant impact till liberalisation, when the government allowed private enterprise into the sector. Then, given that the Constitution didn't define ports by size, go-getting state governments like that of Gujarat made sure that their ports really took off on the back of private enterprise. Nothing epitomises this triumph better than that so-called minor ports have now become some of the biggest ones in the country. In 2004-05, Vishakapatnam's long reign (berthed in AP) as India's biggest port was interrupted by Gujarat's minor port of Sikka becoming the top port. Next fiscal, the state saw its minor ports handling 123.6 million tonnes of cargo compared to the 53 million tonne handled by its only major port at Kandla. In the 11th Plan, private enterprise is expected to deliver three-fourths of the total projected investment in the ports sector.

On the face of it, recommendations submitted in the first week of August by the committee headed by Vijay Chhibber, ministry of shipping, look liberal. For instance, on standardising port operations, the committee suggests delegating power for greater flexibility, clarity and operational freedom in the managements of major ports. The problem is that the Centre doesn't have too great a record on implementing policy in a consistent way. To take one example, the Centre gave security clearance to a consortium that includes a Chinese port operator to bid for terminals at Paradip Port in Orissa but denied permission to another group that includes a Hong Kong (now a part of China) company. Also, let's consider why captive ports (like the one belonging to RIL in Gujarat) are not pressing on the liberalisation argument to convert to general use, whereby they could charge other companies to use their facilities. What they fear is that such a step would bring a bunchload of bureaucrats and customs inspectors riding their operations. Finally, when ports and developers are outside the ambit of a central regulator, they have operational flexibility as well as freedom in fixing tariffs. When choosing between Kandla (major port) and Mundra (minor port), why did Maruti Suzuki decide on the latter? Because with the latter, it could rely on timely infrastructure upgrades and negotiate on prices at a market-updated level. Bottomline: if the minor ports look like they are taking good care of themselves without government intervention, why must the Centre interfere anyway?

Murray McMurray Hatchery

2009-08-26T18:28:00.001+05:30

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Murray McMurray Hatchery

via Cool Tools on 8/26/09

We've been buying baby chicks by U.S. mail from Murray McMurray Hatchery for 30-plus years. We'll get a call from the postmaster, sometimes a bit flustered, because there's a box there with peeping chicks awaiting pick-up. We'll go get them and set them up with a light and feed and water, and lo and behold in three months we'll have laying hens.

Minimum order is 25, so the chicks can warm each other in transit. We raise all of them and when they are teenaged, give or sell to neighbors. Raising 25 is no sweat.

Why get chickens by mail and not from your local feed store? McMurray has been in business for 90 years and their birds are of excellent stock. Lots of varieties to choose from. We've had not only Rhode Island Reds, Partridge Rocks and Auracanas for steady egg production, but exotics such as Cochins and Polish, as well as meat birds. They've all been top quality.

Get Murray's hard copy catalog if you want to start a flock. Wonderful to look through. A few tips:
1. A dozen hens will give you plenty of eggs for you and your neighbors.
2. If you want fertile eggs, plan on ending up with one rooster for every dozen hens.
3. In more urban areas, get 4 or 5 hens, no rooster.

Once you have your own fresh eggs, you'll never want store eggs again.

-- Lloyd Kahn

Mcmurrayhatchery.com

Sample Excerpts:

Red Cap
This Old English Breed with reddish brown feathers tipped with black spangles has a large rose comb covered with prominent points. They are white skinned and lay tinted eggs. Chicks (picture above) are a light reddish tan with black speckles and some stripes.

Egyptian Fayoumis
These small, active, lovely chickens have been raised along the Nile River in Egypt for centuries, and even though quite common there, are practically unknown in this country. We got our start of this very rare breed from one of the state universities whose poultry department was using them for special studies in genetics. No other breed matures quite so quickly as these do and the young pullets are apt to start laying their small tinted white eggs at 4 to 4-1/2 months while the cockerels will start to crow at an unbelievable 5 to 6 weeks. They are attractively marked with silvery white hackle and white bars on black background throughout the body plumage. Leg color can be either willow green or slate blue. Baby chicks are highly colored in brown, black, and white markings on the back and a brownish purple head color.

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7 Steps to Start Lucid Dreaming

2009-08-26T11:29:00.001+05:30

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7 Steps to Start Lucid Dreaming

via Stepcase Lifehack by Steven Aitchison on 8/25/09

Lucid Dreaming is consciously being aware within your dream. When you are dreaming and you become conscious that you are dreaming you can start to control your dreams and the direction they go in.

Lucid dreaming can help with recurring nightmares, solving creative problems, speaking with loved ones who have passed on, anxiety, and problem solving. It can be an exhilarating experience and the feeling of euphoria after your first few lucid dreams can last for days. <!–more–>

7 Steps to Start Lucid Dreaming

1. Remember your ordinary dreams.

A lot of people say 'I don't dream', everybody dreams, whilst you may not remember them you still dream. To start remembering your dreams try this simple technique.

Each night before drifting off to sleep repeat the phrase 'I will remember my dreams as soon as I wake up'. Say this phrase over and over until you fall asleep, after a few days you will start to remember your ordinary dreams.

2. Keep a dream journal

This can be tedious but it's well worth the effort. Even writing a few short sentences about your dream is enough. This will get you into the habit of remembering your ordinary dreams and to start looking for dream signs within your dreams. It can also be a tool to analyze your thought processes.

3. Pick out dream signs

A lot of your ordinary dreams will have objects or people in them that could act as a cue to you waking up in your dreams. For example if you regularly talk to 'Elvis' in your ordinary dreams this is an obvious dream sign and can be used to ask yourself if you are dreaming because you know Elvis is dead.

4. Notice your waking world

To be conscious in your dream world means you have to be conscious in your waking world. That might sound crazy, as you are conscious when you are awake. However what I mean is 'consciously focused' . For example you are consciously focused when learning a new task, you are thinking about every action you are taking to get the right steps. When you have learned the new task you no longer have to focus as intently as you did when learning it. Being consciously focused means looking around you and saying what you see, feel, hear, smell and touch and voicing it. This has the added benefit of being in the moment and can help you to inner calmness, it's almost zen like.

If you start to consciously focus on the world around you, you will carry this over into the dream world.

5. Ask yourself; 'Am I dreaming?'

Ask yourself just now 'Am I dreaming?'. Your obvious answer is to say no, of course you are not dreaming. How do you know? Don't just say; because I know, try and think about why you are not dreaming. For example you could say if I was dreaming I would be able to fly. When you are dreaming you cannot read text for longer than a few seconds, so try reading text to prove to yourself you are not dreaming.

This again will carry over into your dreaming world and you will start asking the same questions in your dreams which can turn into a lucid dream.

6. Your first lucid dream

Many people have their first lucid dream simply by reading about it. You might find that you become over-excited and lose the lucid dream however, you first lucid dream will be remembered for years to come.

7. Staying lucid

I have used different techniques to stay within a dream however by far the best one is calming myself down with self talk and dream spinning. If you find that you are losing your lucidity you can talk to yourself to calm yourself down and just start noticing the things around you in your dream.

Dream spinning is when you feel you are losing control of your dream you mentally spin like a tornado to stay within your dream. This is focusing the mind on staying lucid.

Have you ever had a lucid dream? If you have why not tell us about it by leaving a comment.

Steven Aitchison writes about personal development and making money on the web. His home page is at www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog.

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Jdownloader: automates downloads from Rapidshare, Megaupload and other file ...

2009-08-26T11:27:00.001+05:30

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Jdownloader: automates downloads from Rapidshare, Megaupload and other file hosting services

via freewaregenius.com by Samer on 8/25/09

Jdownloader is free software designed to download files from Rapidshare, MegaUpload and other one-click file hosting services (as well as many video sharing sites) in an automated manner without user intervention. It will automatically decrypt "encrypted" download links, manage wait times, recognize enter CAPTCHAs, and attempt reconnections from dynamic IPs in order to circumvent wait times, when possible (this function depends on your router/internet setup). Other options include pausing/resuming downloads, Firefox integration through Flashgot, vlipboard detection, automatic de-compressing/merging of downloaded files, and faster downloading for subscribers of the premium services of the hosting services. Jdownloader is Multiplatform (Windows/Linux/Mac).

There's no escaping it: file hosting services like Rapidshare and Megaupload have become a permanent feature of the internet landscape. If you use the internet you will very likely be downloading files from them, and this program can make the process much simpler, easier and faster for you. If you download a lot of files from these services then this program is an absolute must-have. (Note that it will also download videos from many video sharing sites as well).

Here are ~~SEVEN~~ EIGHT really cool things about this program:

1- Completely Automates downloading: Jdownloader works by managing hosting services compulsory "wait times" and circumvents CAPTCHAs (for more than 60 sites) by optical character recognition, without user intervention. This means that downloading, say, 4 files from Rapidshare can be done completely in the background, without requiring you to visit the download pages, wait for time counters to count down, enter Captchas, and spend 10 or 15 minutes doing this four times during the day.

2- Re-connects to defeat compulsory wait times: which is to say it tries to change your IP address such that the file hosting service treats you as a new user every time, and does not force a wait time between downloads. This function is dependent on the kind of connection and router setup you have, and I personally did not test it. If you are curious a list of reconnection scripts (and more info) can be found on this page (scroll down).

3- Supports a wide range of hosting services (and video sharing sites): in fact, way more than you every knew existed ("hundreds" by version 4). If you encounter something that is not a famous service like a Rapidshare or a Megaupload my guess is that Jdownloader will probably support it. A number of video sharing sites are also supported; to download, simply copy the URL of the video and look to see if Jdownloader has captured it. Note that although I could not find a list of supported services; if you go to settings tab / modules / Anticaptcha you will see a list of services which I assume also doubles as the supported sites list.

4- Captures multiple links on a webpage: want to download several links listed on a webpage? Simply highlight and copy all of them into the clipboard, and Jdownloader will recognize and add them to its list. (Contrast this with pasting links into a text file and downloading manually one-by-one).

5- The user interface: completely revamped in the new (0.7) version of this program, the "new" user interface is intuitive and straightforward and a very welcome change from previous versions, which was at times unnecessarily complicated.

6- Firefox integration: through the Flashgot Firefox extension. Jdownloader will provide the option to install this extension during its own installation process.

7- Scheduling downloads: a rather nifty option whereby you can tell the program to, say, start downloading at 2 am in the morning or something like that, when you know no one in your household is using internet bandwidth (as an example).

8- Open architecture: you can add or remove functionality by downloading and installing plugins. Examples include the auto unRAR-ing of downloaded files, "watching" of folders, and other cool stuff.

Notes on installation/uninstallation: unzip and run the .exe to install. Run the same .exe again to launch the app. The installer offers to install a browser plugin called Kikin (some sort of search engine aggregator), but AFTER it installs it tells you its still in closed beta and won't let you use it. My advice is do not allow Kikin installation (click 'cancel' when the Kikin screen appears during install). To uninstall Jdownloader, simply delete the Jdownloader folder (see here).

The verdict: a truly impressive piece of software. I would highly recommend this for anyone who does anything more than the very occasional downloading from file hosting services. This program can really save you a lot of time (and energy) and at what it does it is most likely the best in its class.

Version Tested: 7.504

Compatibility: Windows, Mac, Linux. Requires Java Runtime Environment.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 19.3 megs).

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Top 10 Irish Music Starter CDs

2009-08-25T20:02:00.000+05:30

By Megan Romer, About.com

See More About:irish musicfolk musicirelandethnic music

Irish music is, by far, one of the most popular forms of World Music in America. While it gained early success during the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s, it shot to major popularity with the success of the Broadway shows Riverdance and Michael Flatley's Lord of the Dance.

1. The Chieftains - 'Water From the Well'

The Chieftains are perhaps the best-known Irish group in the U.S., having been around the longest, played the most places and sold the most records. They often collaborate on their albums with superstars like Van Morrison, but Water From the Well is them at their best: playing straight-up Irish tunes, from reels to jigs to ballads.

2. Solas - 'The Hour Before Dawn'

This is a particularly good CD for those just starting in on Celtic music. While the band does break out into a few really old-school Irish tunes, many of the tunes are more on the folky edge of things, making it extremely accessible a new listener. Notable on this album is the song "I Will Remember You", which Solas member Seamus Egan co-wrote with Sarah McLachlan, who made a hit out of it in 1995. It's pretty Solas-ified here, though, and incredibly beautiful.

3. Altan - 'Harvest Storm'

This is a classic album from favorite group Altan, whose members hail primarily from Northern Ireland, which, to the advanced listener, will be clear from their deeply-rooted sound. Again, this album is a nice combination of fiery upbeat tunes and mournful but beautiful ballads.

4. Lunasa - 'Redwood'

Lunasa is something of an Irish supergroup.... or at least a really talented Irish music boy band. These hip young guys have made several albums, all instrumental, all a little bit "jammy", meaning the songs last for quite awhile. Lunasa is a personal favorite of mine, and I really enjoy the relaxed (but not lazy) feel of this record.

5. Seamus Egan - 'Traditional Music of Ireland'

Irish flute player Seamus (pronounced SHAY-mus) Egan is perhaps best known for his work with the band Solas, but this album is a particularly powerful representation of his tremendous skill on the flute. It's upbeat and exciting, and a must-have for Irish music lovers.

6. Cherish The Ladies - 'Woman of the House'

This is the latest offering by all-female Irish-American group Cherish The Ladies, and it is a great representation of their intense harmonies, both instrumental and vocal. Particularly notable on this album is their version of "Fair and Tender Ladies", an ancient song that long ago found its way to Appalachia from Ireland and England and therefore has roots on both sides of the ocean.

7. Liz Carroll and John Doyle - 'In Play'

American born Irish fiddle champion Liz Carroll and Irish born guitar master John Doyle have ganged up a few times now to create some of the most impressive and surprising Irish music on this side of the Atlantic. Part of the great charm of this album is that it's fiddle and guitar only... no frills, just straight-up Irish music.

8. The Bothy Band - '1975: The First Album'

This pioneering album from this forward-thinking 1970's Irish band brought a great deal of attention to Irish music during that era. It opens with a bang, the favorite "Kesh Jig", one of the first Irish tunes that fiddlers just discovering the music learned during that era. Also of note is the lovely ballad "Do You Love an Apple".

9. Kevin Burke - 'Sweeney's Dream'

Burke is a true musician's musician, or fiddler's fiddler to be exact. Virtuosic without being overly fussy, he all but burns up the strings on a huge variety of County Sligo-style songs. Several of the songs feature other musicians, including members of the Bothy band, of which Burke was a member. However, the truly noteworthy tunes are simply Burke and his fiddle.

10. Tommy Peoples - 'High Part of the Road'

I confess that this album isn't my pick per se; instead, I asked the real fiddle player in my house what his number one Irish fiddle pick would be. He immediately chose this one, and I have to agree with him. Peoples is a true legend. While this music is a bit more rough and ready than the offerings by newer bands, it is exciting, dynamic, and best of all, the real deal. Images of perfectly pulled pints and crowded pubs will dance through your head as you listen to this gem.

Seven Relaxation Tips

2009-08-25T14:22:00.001+05:30

"The time to relax is when you don't have time for it."
Sydney J. Harris

"If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn't ask me, I'd still have to say it."
George F. Burns

Maybe you are on vacation right now and are trying to relax and release the pressure and tension from a year of school or work. And maybe you are soon going back again.

So what can you do to increase your sense of centeredness and relaxation not only during these remaining weeks of summer but also during this fall?

Well, here are sevent tips that have worked well for me. I hope you find something useful.

1. Spend time online in a focused way.

One big change I have done during this summer is to minimize the time I spend online. I have cut it down to the essentials. Basically that means I update the blog. And check my email/Twitter/Facebook maybe once every other day. Of course, you may not have the option or want to make exactly those changes.

But you may want to try to cut down on your online time a bit. Maybe just check all the things you check online once a day. I have found that it has made me a lot more relaxed, focused on the most important things and left me with more time to use for other things. I will certainly keep this habit of minimized and focused internet use up – although perhaps in a slightly different form – during the fall and winter.

2. Let go of what you "have to do".

If you are feeling totally stressed out and wrapped up in everything you "have to do", here is a good question: "Will this matter in 5 years?". This is of course not an excuse for you to not do anything. But a reminder that the small things we get wrapped up in when we feel stressed are often not that important when you view it from a wider perspective.

In the end you can choose what you want to do and not do. There are of course consequences to everything that we do and that is something one must keep in mind. But I think it is very important to feel like you are in control of your own life to be able to stay centred and minimize stress and pressure. It's important to choose what you want to do instead of always living in reaction and feeling controlled by outside forces all the time.

You may for example feel like you have all these things you "just have to do before the summer is over". If such thoughts are stressing you out, you may want to choose to say no and take a day to take it easy and do pretty much nothing. It can do wonders.

3. Don't take things (or yourself) too seriously.

Taking things or yourself overly serious adds a lot of unnecessary negativity and stress to your life. A minor situation may be blown up to a major one in your mind. If you just learn to lighten up a bit then life becomes more fun and you realize that you get great results even if you aren't superserious about everything. Here is one article about how to lighten up. And another one about how to simplify things.

4. Take 30 belly breaths.

This is the quickest and most consistent way to relax that I have found so far. It can be done anywhere and anytime. It's great way to release pent up tension and to centre yourself in the present moment once again as you bring your focus to the in and out breaths.

Here's a simple instruction on what to do:

Sit or stand in a relaxed way.
Put your hands on your stomach. Using your stomach breathe in slowly through your nose. If you are doing it right your stomach will expand and you'll feel it with your hands.
Breathe out slowly through your nose.
Breathe in and out 30 times. Take deep and slow breaths.

5. Act as you would like to feel.

Another simple tip you can use just about anywhere. Your emotions work backwards too. If you slow down then while walking, moving your body or talking you can often start to feel less stressed (compared to if you move/talk fast).

Slowing down to decrease stress goes for many other things you do in everyday life too like riding your bicycle, driving the car and eating.

6. Stop thinking the world revolves around you.

One great way to make your life unnecessarily hard and difficult is to assume that the world revolves around you. It can make you feel like you are trapped in a cage built out of social pressure. Not pleasant at all.

But is everyone watching everything you do? Thinking about you a lot and discussing what you said or did? Probably not. It's very seductive to think they do because it makes you feel important and it gives you validation and attention. But they are probably spending their time worrying about their own challenges in life and what other people think about them.

It's not easy to let go of the belief that the world revolves around you. But there are huge benefits such as decreased shyness and increased openness towards people and trying new things.

So you give up or decrease the importance you put on validation from the outside. And by doing so you can release a lot of pressure and stress and increase your own inner centeredness and freedom to feel that you can do what you want in life.

And as you do so you stop raising your self esteem and positive feelings about yourself through the validation people may give you (or at least you cut down on it a lot). Instead you now raise it by doing more of what you think is right in life. And by caring more about what you think and feel about yourself and how you are living your life.

7. Just accept how you feel right now.

Maybe you try out some of the tips above. And maybe they still can't help you to shake that stress, inner pressure or whatever you are carrying around. I would then suggest just accepting that it is there. To tell yourself: "This is how I feel right now and I accept it".

This sounds counterintuitive and like you're giving up. However by accepting how you feel instead of resisting it you reduce the emotional energy that you are feeding into this conflict/problem. It tends to just kinda lose speed like a car that runs out of fuel. And oftentimes it becomes so weak after while that it just moves out of your inner focus and disappears.

Andrew Carnegie’s Top 4 Tips for Massive Success

2009-08-25T14:09:00.001+05:30

by Henrik Edberg

19 people liked this

"Aim for the highest."

"You cannot push anyone up the ladder unless he is willing to climb."

In the late 1800s there lived a very rich man. In fact, he was so rich that he is now considered the second richest man in history. And, at least as I remember it, he became an inspiration for Scrooge McDuck.

His name was Andrew Carnegie. You may have heard this name before if you have read the classic personal development book "Think and Grow Rich". It was Carnegie that gave the author Napoleon Hill the assignment to interview hundreds of wealthy people about success. And those interviews became the foundation for the book.

Here are four of Carnegie's own top tips for massive success.

1. Pay attention to the more important things.

"As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do."

This is one of my favourite quotes at the moment. And I have to agree, I pay less and less attention to what people say. Because in the end, what someone does is the most important thing. Talking is easy, but walking your talk is harder. And walking it consistently even though you fall, slip back into old habits and make mistakes is a huge part of success.

Now, talking and discussing what you want to do can be very helpful. But at some point you also follow that up and take action.

And this not just a good way to see people in a clear way. It's also a good way to look at yourself more clearly. Because you can tell yourself and others all kinds of things all day. But what you are actually getting done shows a lot about who you are right now and how you future will look.

2. Make it fun, make it light.

"There is little success where there is little laughter."

If your life and striving for success becomes just a big struggle then it will be very hard to keep it up.

If you want something bad then it it's very easy to overread or overthink that thing. It seems more complicated in your mind and it also becomes "heavier". What may have been pretty straightforward in real life becomes this huge struggle, where you are Rocky Balboa taking slow painstaking steps uphill against horrific odds. Yep, it's a real inspiring thing as you struggle as the heroic underdog.

It's also a great way to make things so much harder for yourself. It's you putting up imaginary obstacles in your own mind that aren't even there in reality. The Rocky way of thinking about these things is very seductive. But life becomes so much lighter and more fun when you just let that stuff go.

Sure, things may be vary in difficulty. But I believe we often make things more difficult and heavier than they really are.

So simplify it, don't overread or overthink it. This makes it a lot easier to relax and have fun while still working towards what you want.

Also, create a habit of simply making it fun. Keep a positive and fun attitude with the friends you are working with. Don't take things too serious. Learn to laugh about them a bit more. This does not only make it easier to consistently keep up the good work. It also makes it easier to handle what would previously be "huge setbacks/problems".

3. Be persistent. Don't spread yourself too thin.

"The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it."

How do you never get much done? Well, one good way is to try everything at once and spread yourself too thin. You get super enthusiastic for month and then you get deflated. You may even get an emotional backlash and start to feel negatively towards what you were so pumped up about since you aren't seeing the results you'd like as you quickly as you'd like to.

But on the other hand you have to get started and take action. Things can seem a certain way in your head when you think about doing them. But you have to actually do them for a while to gain understanding of how they really are. So to find one line that you want to stick with in some area of your life you may have to try a few of them and experiment to find what you love most to do.

I don't have many more tips really on how to find your line. I think you just have to think about some options and then try them to find out for yourself what you like and where there is opportunity.

I have for example been writing on this website for almost three years now. And I still find it fun and fascinating to write about these things. It's fun to be able to share my thoughts and what I have done and perhaps not only gain a clearer understanding for myself but also help out someone out there. I enjoy tinkering with the design and improving that. I enjoy learning more about how to spread the articles on this website to an even wider audience (and taking action on what I learn).

I think those are some good reasons to stick with what you are doing. And so I continue doing this.

4. Motivate yourself. It's your choice.

"People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents."

I wrote about this just a couple of weeks ago. Like Carnegie, I believe you have to rely on yourself to be able to keep taking action patiently and persistently. Sure, help and motivation from others is always good. But they can not always be there to support you.

The only person who is always with you is you. So you have to choose to place the most importance for motivation on yourself and then add help and inspiration from blogs, books, friends and family when you can or feel the need.

Like anything, this takes time and you slip and fail along the way. But over time your can become better and better at motivating yourself (or skipping the need for motivation to get started and instead just springing yourself into action).

Without developing this habit then action and results will go up and down and be very inconsistent. And without consistency over a longer time period it does not matter so much what other talents or gifts you may have inside of you.

Venezuela's "continuous" lightning storm

2009-08-25T13:54:00.001+05:30

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Venezuela's "continuous" lightning storm

via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz on 8/24/09

The folks in the video above aren't watching a fireworks show but rather the near-constant lightning strikes that occur over Vaenezuela's Catatumbo River almost half of the year. Apparently, sailors have dubbed the lightning "Maracaibo Beacon" because it can be used as a navigational aid. According to the excellent Atlas Obscura, there might be as many as 280 strikes per hour during 10 hour stretches. From Atlas Obscura (photo below from Wikipedia):

(The phenomenon) was first written about in the 1597 poem "The Dragontea" by Lope de Vega. De Vega tells of Sir Francis Drake's 1595 attempt to take the city of Maracaibo by night, only to have his plans foiled when the lightning storm's flashes gave away his position to the city's defenders.

It's still unknown exactly why this area--and this area alone--should produce such regular lighting. One theory holds that ionized methane gas rising from the Catatumbo bogs is meeting with storm clouds coming down from the Andes, helping to create the perfect conditions for a lighting storm.

Relampago del Catatumbo

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MVC's Experimental Email Blog

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Obama’s Young Mother Abroad - NYTimes.com

The scientist who studies scientists—An interview with Harry Collins

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Is Sugar Toxic?

By GARY TAUBES

Published: April 13, 2011

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