Faith + Reason = Truth

Since the 1980's, we've seen alarming reports of global test results showing that other countries' grade school students have surpassed the US with their math and science scores.  I question whether math/science/any other ability can be evaluated on the basis of test scores alone.  And I also question whether it even matters that Chinese or Indian or German students are stronger in math than their US counterparts, as long as the best and brightest ultimately end up applying their knowledge at American universities/institutions/companies.  And there can be no question of whether or not THAT is happening (it most certainly is).
The reason I question the assessability of math or science or any other skills by using standardized testing is because it's impossible, at least currently, to test creativity in these areas.  What was more important for Einstein:  memorization of the periodic table, which he may have tested poorly on when compared to peers in his own or other countries, or creative brilliance, which allowed him to conjure in his mind's eye what the underlying rules and structure of the universe may look like?   And was Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor in American (world?) history, known far and wide for his genius in calculus, or for his ability to put forth effort and creative ideas to discover and invent?  Granted, an individual of the caliber of a Stephen Hawking, possessing both creative AND numerical genius sure comes in handy on the theoretical side of the house, but can anyone honestly believe that his amazing mathematical mind is the result of the system under which he learned mathematics in elementary or high school?  No; he is an anomaly among anomalies, and would have shone brightly no matter where he came from.
The focus should be on maintaining, or preferably increasing, our lead in mathematical and scientific research institution performance and contribution, by continuing to make them attractive to the best the world has to offer.  There will be hiccups along the way, as with our nation's stem cell policy, that allow other nations to take the lead in certain areas; for now, however, America's mathematical and scientific community is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is our education system in these areas, with its strengths being its hands-on experimental focus that engages children and young adults in ways that equations and theorems simply cannot for most people, alongside involved parents who are constantly purchasing and using products, museums, and experiences for their children to maximize their interactivity with the world around them.  I like our chances.

As mentioned in a previous post on Nintendo's Wii, I'm currently under the sway of a book by Kim and Mauborgne called Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Marketspace and Make Competition Irrelevant from the early 2000's about the strategy of creating products/services that create new demand, rather than incrementally improve and fight over shares of existing demand.  Growing the pie, if you will, rather than grabbing for a bigger slice.  Nothing new there, but something about it has me intrigued.
Take the luxury fashion industry.  Companies like Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdales, Saks, and Nordstrom battle for more (of each other's) customers, constantly checking up on each other's "strategies" (which typically boils down to how many and where new stores are opening, or which ones are being updated/remodeled, etc.)  Neiman's gets credit for effort though, going so far as to launch an experiment in getting new customers into the NM brand through the opening of a few stores as their new Cusp concept, targeting younger/hipper customers.  I haven't been in one yet, but I've been told that they're not much different from any other luxury retail store, even using many of the same designers.  All of these retailers compete on "service", which means nothing to most people:  don't these customers EXPECT high levels of service from any of these retailers?  Or "selection":  aren't you going to find some mix of Armani, Prada, D&G, Chanel, etc. in all of them?  Yes, you are.
So why not try something totally totally unique and different for your experimental concept?  If the objective is to get new/younger potential fashionistas in there, maybe try luring them with something like fashion education exposure and experiential emotion as they shop.  Perhaps put the Italian designers in an Italy wing, Americans or Japanese in their own wings, France in its place, etc.  Have the wings in different architectural styles to convey a sense of location, and have large (or small) splashes of knowledge of the history of specific fashion houses/designers or the luxury fashion industry in general worked in via posters or museum-style information cards or whatever.
I take my inspiration from recent visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Fiesta Texas in San Antonio and the pretty new Texas State History Museum in Austin, all of which transported me to different times and places depending on which section of their facilities I was in.  I think this is the kind of thing that would differentiate your brand and give people an actual reason to shop at your place rather than someone else's.  And it could grow the marketspace with an untapped ocean of people who would like to shop at these places but are intimidated and/or have no reason to go and spend lots of money on a dress or handbag that, in their minds, is no different than the knockoffs they can purchase at 1/20 the price.  When they experience and learn WHY or HOW these items and processes are truly different, they could be enticed to splurge or indulge themselves or someone else.  Why not?  What do these retailers have to lose?

Cuban's film company Magnolia Pictures has agreed to distribute a conspiracy theory short film about the "real" story behind the 9/11 attacks.  Even though he has said he doesn't believe the film is true, he DOES believe it's a story that can/will be refuted by future films, and he would also distribute those if/when the time comes.  In Dallas and across the country, people have a huge problem with this, and for a very silly reason:  not the usual free speech or un-patriotic anti-government abuse thereof, but rather, because he owns a pro sports franchise and it "looks bad" or "distracts" the team.  Is his dual-role unprecedented?  Not by any stretch:  someone named Ted Turner immediately comes to mind.  After a quick timeline check, I found that Turner bought a local Atlanta tv station in the early 70's, took it nationwide via satellite, then bought the Braves and Hawks (2 pro teams!) for tv station content.  THEN, he starts freaking CNN in 1980, which really grabs hold of everyone's every waking moment with the Gulf War in 1991, followed 5 years later by the sale to Time Warner in '96 (which still saw him in management until 2000 when he left).  If Turner can own an NBA AND an MLB team, and own THE most important news network of the 90's (which more than a few have termed the Clinton News Network for its unabashed liberal political bias), why can't an NBA owner in the 2000's own an itty bitty film company and distribute (remember, his company didn't make or back the film; it's been on the internet for 6 months or more) whatever he decides to distribute?  Unlike Turner, he's not creating and broadcasting news stories as fact; he's distributing an alternative viewpoint which he himself doesn't even believe.  Will someone PLEASE enlighten me here with what, exactly, is the big deal?

Do you feel a little bit different while in Manhattan, and even more so when you return to your native land?  I do.  I'm somewhat awestruck at the sheer magnitude of the place, which seems like 20 downtown Dallases crammed onto 1 little island.  But older and dirtier (where the hell are the trash and dumpster services?)  Even the newspaper has the famous tag line right there at the top:  "All the News That's Fit to Print".  And some that isn't, while they're at it.  Like who, outside of a few ultra-wealthy residents of the island, would possibly concern themselves with a zip code being split into 3 zip codes?  The supposedly famousest zip code in America, 10021, comprised of a rectangle extending away from Central Park/5th Avenue, across Madison and Park Ave. and other famous streets, was split by the USPS into 3 zips, leaving lots of billionaires and cultural luminaries out in the cold.  Lots of them still get the prestigious code for their stationery (Bill Cosby comes to mind as one of the chosen few), but others including Mayor Bloomberg and maybe Rupert Murdoch and a host of others (their names all run together in my mind at this point) have been banished.  Anyway, I don't care, and neither do you.
Another article from that day was more interesting, as my hometown Mavericks were in town against the Knickerbockers the night before.  The sports page had a great, insightful article about the self-made billionaire owner Mark Cuban, his self-made coach Avery Johnson, lots of non-blue chip players, triumphing over the blueblood Madison Square Garden-inheriting owner of the Knicks and his silver spoon coach and blue chip players (or at least they have blue chip salaries and shoe deals).  Give me self-made over entitled, give me our black coach over theirs, give me the German over the playground star, and bring that trophy home (after receiving it from the commissioner, who also works in New York.  Damn them!)

Spending the early part of childhood in Rochester, NY (my dad worked for Eastman Kodak), I remember that he traveled on occasion to conduct training.  I remember him going to Beirut, Lebanon, in the early-mid 70's, before it was destroyed, and hearing stories of sitting up on a balcony in the hills watching some rockets being fired off in the distance as the fighting was getting underway.  I also remember an Iranian man named Vigaine (not sure of the spelling) who was here for training and had family in Iran he was always worried about.  Not sure what ever became of him or his family.  He was extremely nice, generous, polite, friendly, wore a business suit, and gave me one of the few gifts I remember from those early years - a big, white, plastic Formula racing car that I could roll down ramps or along the ground (by my own arm power, of course).  Very cool.
Spending the remainder of my childhood and adult years in Texas, Richardson (outside of Dallas) had a pretty sizable Islamic community.  There was an interesting-looking mosque adding an international flair to the short skyline in one part of town, and lots of people attended  - that always made an impression on me, all of the women in burkas and men dressed in their non-Western attire, at least for that particular day and time.  Friendliest haircutter I ever regularly visited was from Iran and he owned the salon, but was always careful to refer to it as "Persia" rather than Iran.
Today, my next door neighbors are Iranians.  She's a nurse, he's an engineer that used to wear a hard hat on his way to work in his little pickup (he's opened up a Mexican restaurant as a career change within the past year though), and they have a teenager who's crazy about soccer as well as an infant.  We've been neighbors for 7 years now.  Nothing but a hard-working, polite, westernized, American family, who happens to travel to and from Tehran every summer to see family (as did the Persian hairmaster above).
These stories/slices of life have no point other than to illustrate that although the world is vast and much of it is filled with circumstances and responses to those circumstances that are beyond our comprehension or ability to reason through, people are people at the local, neighborhood level, and I have to believe that if the world were filled with neighborhoods just like these, where everyone has enough to eat and drink, electricity, jobs, a little money to spend, safety and security, freedom to worship as desired as long as others are not harmed, then we'd all be a whole lot better off.  Maybe the neighborhoods are centered around mosques or temples or cathedrals or shopping malls or factories, but if people had these basic necessities taken care of, most of the world's issues would no longer exist.  I've seen an interview with citizens of Baghdad saying "the Americans can take the oil - just let us live our lives", or words to that effect.  People just want to be left alone to pursue what they feel is their life's purpose, be it to raise a family, excel at a job, worship privately, evangelize their religion in a non-violent manner, display their artistic abilities, or invent something that would improve the world.  I realize global politics are not that simple - but I can't make logical sense out of why they are not, or why they can't start making their way in that direction.

Say there is $65 trillion worth of "stuff" to be distributed among the 6 billion human residents of earth every year.  Every man, woman, and child gets $10,833 worth of stuff per year, and they have to do absolutely nothing to earn it.  Food, shelter, clothing, transportation, heat and a/c, entertainment, the works.  Now, say someone wants to get ahead - to have more than his allotment of stuff.  And he's willing to work.  He realizes he can earn $1 per hour of labor doing things for other people (services that only people can do, rather than "stuff"/physical goods), so he works almost 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, every week of the year, and he now has twice as much stuff.  Then his stuff attracts the attention of other people who want more than their allotment and are also willing to exchange their labor for it, but they don't know how to find the people willing to exchange goods for service or don't know what service to offer.  The 1st guy says "I'll show you where to find them and show you what to do, and I'll pay you $.50 per hour worth of goods."  He pockets the other $.50/hr of course, but it is well-deserved, for he is enabling others to accomplish what they otherwise would not without his assistance.
And so it goes.  Eventually, he accumulates enough excess materials and laborers to enable him to force others to work for him against their will, and those laborers cost him nothing, which bloats his excesses exponentially since it costs him nothing.  He can now rule the world, and no one else can amass the goods or labor necessary to challenge him.

Such was the case with the most powerful civilizations throughout the history of the world, until the slave trade was outlawed by the world's most powerful empire, Britain, 200 years ago this year.  France, England, the U.S. and Spain all outlawed slavery entirely within a 50-year period, over 100 years ago.  Yet slave-like conditions persist today for much of the world's population, which is an absolutely necessary requirement for the condition of some people having 5, 10, or a million times their theoretical equally alloted share of world GDP.
Or is it?  The Industrial Revolution kicked into high hear at roughly the same time that slavery was outlawed in practice by the world powers in the early-mid 1800's (the Industrial Revolution started earlier than that, but this is the period in which it exploded).  Man's ingenuity was forced to come up with replacements for the millions of lost no-cost human laborers, and it did so with technology.
If the rest of today's world were somehow brought up to the same living (and income) standards as the industrial powers enjoy, what similar or even more wondrous revolution in progress might result?  Just think:  what if, instead of earning $1000 per year to spend on goods/services, the world's inhabitants had $10,000 or $20,000?  If the billions of slave laborers currently producing the clothing and footwear and industrial chemicals of the world were suddenly paid the wages of 1st world laborers, costs would certainly spike, but then what would happen?  People of the U.S. and other countries would make due with maybe 5 pairs of shoes instead of 15, or wearing clothes for 2-3 years instead of a season, or eating out at restaurants a little less often.  And the rest of the world would have LOTS more money to spend, pumping it into the world's financial system, resulting in more sales at companies, more R&D, more ingenuity, more potential Edisons or Einsteins or Mozarts in the pool of available genius, less financial disparity, less spectacular haves and MUCH less have-nots.

Might be worth a shot, but for one small detail:  if you were the kind of person who did the kinds of things that are necessary to become one of rulers of the economic world sitting on top of the mountain, and no one could MAKE you do anything against your will for that very reason, would you voluntarily do anything to raise others up a little closer to you, while at the same time lowering yourself a little closer to them?  No.  Sorry for wasting your time here.

A certain company that shall remain unidentified here has been advised by me on several occasions to upgrade their business intelligence system.  I stand to gain nothing financially from their doing so, and they are aware of this.  First, I wowed them with the gee-whiz features common to many of the current offerings in this space.  Predictably, I got "cool!  how much does it cost?" in response.  Too much, apparently, as the answer was no.  I next tried the fear tactic of "this is OLD hardware, unsupported at this point due to its age, and the version of the software is causing conflicts with newer versions of other software (Windows, Office, the ETL package for interfacing with the Oracle transactional system, etc.)".  Again, a polite "no thank you, it's not in the budget.  Finally, I went with the nebulous "new hardware and software will be SO MUCH FASTER, it'll change the way the departments can do their jobs, and allow to do jobs they SHOULD be doing but don't have time to.  Things like taking 20 minutes for an update [or even faster] versus 7-8 hours, which is only done overnight."  Nada.
The past 2 weeks may have won them over, however, as my nebulous argument/scenario of a new speed paradigm changing the very way they do business (internal financial business, not customer/product business) came to fruition.  In testing the system's workings with a new ETL package, the going was rough.  And each non-passing result gave the opportunity for roughly one theory/idea of what the problem might be before waiting until the next DAY to see if the fix worked or not.  This gave, at best, 1-2 chances PER DAY to fix the problem.  With the upgraded hardware alone in place from my earlier recommendations, they could have gone through 10 to 12 troubleshooting iterations per day and had the problem nailed in a day or two, rather than holding up the entire project with all of its high-priced hourly external consultants at a standstill for 2 weeks.  Would have EASILY paid for itself with this snafu alone.  It's that kind of inside the box, how much does it cost, what cool feature does it have mentality that drives me nuts, as opposed to the willingness to spend a little to change the way you do business and accomplish things the organization has never had the time to even contemplate wanting to accomplish.  Sigh.

Two of my favorite blogs have entries that tie into an audiobook I checked out from the library yesterday.  The posts at Seth's Blog (here) and Infectious Greed (here) discuss risk-taking types vs. safe types and interactive exercise ala Wii, respectively.  The audio cd is Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, and the big idea is strategy to create new markets that haven't existed rather than competing against others in tired, existing theaters in the eternal corporate war of attrition.  While Sony and Microsoft were spending years and (hundreds of) millions on trying to out-speed or out-graphic each other with their "next gen" game systems (as Seth might observe, though it seemed the safe thing to do, it was the exact opposite, especially considering the virtually unlimited resources of the competitors in the space), Nintendo took the "blue ocean strategy" of creating an entirely new market for true, physically interactive/engaging video games.  Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed blog commends an exercise equipment company for trying to follow this path and capitalize on the trend of exertainment (I just coined that term right now).  And just over the weekend at SeaWorld San Antonio with my kids for a few days of spring break fun in the Texas Hill Country, there was an interactive Wii exhibit on the SeaWorld map.  Could Nintendo have possibly competed with the likes of Sony and Microsoft if they had played it "safe" and tried to out-processor or out-dvd them?  Not a chance.  But by "riskily" dreaming up and creating an entirely new realm of video game-based entertainment, they've vaulted the entire world into the REAL next-gen gaming incarnation.  Well done.

People live in fear.  Fear of bad traffic, bad weather, dying, getting sick, losing jobs - quite a pervasive emotion.  The job thing baffles me though.  It didn't ALWAYS baffle me - I also used to fear making a mistake at my prior stints as a financial analyst, or missing a deadline, or saying the wrong thing in the meeting, thinking it would get me fired.  It wouldn't have.  Does Steve Nash fear making a bad pass and throwing the ball away?  Does Dirk Nowitzki fear missing the tying shot as the ball leaves his hand with time expiring?  Maybe.  But they don't fear losing their jobs.  If you're good, and if the people in charge know you're giving a solid, honest effort, that's really all that matters.  When you mess up, find out how or why, then let them know it mattered enough to you to look into how it happened so that it can be (hopefully) avoided in the future.  Realize that you don't have all the answers, and focus on what you believe you need to be able to do at your job.
And if the REAL reason you fear losing your job is because you're slacking or daydreaming or, for whatever reason, desperately longing to be anyplace other than your job, then you don't belong there anyway and they'll be doing you a favor by firing you since you're obviously too wussy to stop wasting your precious life and leave on your own.

Individuals launch websites - sorry, I mean "potential multi-million or billion dollar ventures within the space of months rather than years" - every day.  Maybe it's a site that you can customize and become part of a larger community, or a place to upload videos or charts or pictures to, but they do all have something in common:  they make it easy for people/users/members/participants to express their creative sides while incurring massive financial hemorrhaging  for the investors in the company (of course there are investors, because the guy/girl who dreamed up the idea for the site in the first place couldn't possibly bankroll the server and development costs with a budget of zero dollars, based on realistic future projected revenue of zero).

I submit that the ONLY economically viable ventures are those which do one of two things:  allow people to be more productive, or provide entertainment.  Simply allowing an outlet for creative expression will not generate revenue; the only reason people use such sites is because they don't cost anything.  Ask these masses of Spielberg/Lucas aspirants to shell out for the right to display their worthless pieces of crap to the rest of the masses, and they would laugh.  Heartily.  "What?  You want me to PAY to distribute this garbage?  Are you INSANE?"  Sure, lots of people participate when it costs them nothing (who WOULDN'T jump on the opportunity to have their junk distributed to hundreds of millions of people for free?  What's the risk/opportunity cost to them?  It's exactly zero.).  But deep down, they know their effort is pure rubbish, and they're not going to spend a dime of their own on distributing it.
However, what people WILL pay for is entertainment and productivity.  Give them a better way to make money or get something done more efficiently or enjoyably, and they'll gladly open up their wallets.   Give them sustained entertainment (we're talking 10's of minutes here, not just a music-video length rib-tickler, or in the case of songs or video games, something that can be repeated ad nauseum without losing its luster), and they will likewise voluntarily de-shekel themselves with great vigor and regularity.
So if you're looking for a way to monetize the fruit of your love's labor (and face it, you realistically have a virtually infinitesimal  chance of generating anything more than several dollars from ad revenue unless you already have sort of existing forum or exposure to produce even more exposure to your offering), you need to give them a better way of doing something they're already trying to do or would like to try to do, or make them laugh, think, be amazed, or, preferably, all 3, on a regular and frequent basis.

Back on February 27 I ran a poll of readers to see what the single most important voting factor for them is in the 2008 Presidential Election.  I got several emails from people along the lines of "I didn't vote because I don't base my vote on a single issue".  Well, no kidding!  Who does?  Kudos to you and your complex intellect.  As I politely replied to those that seemed interested enough, I COULD have phrased it something like "If a candidate lined up with your views on every issue except one, what one issue could cause you to vote for the other guy?"  But I didn't, so please accept my apologies.  Many of you got it though, and I thank you for fighting through and forcing yourself to boil it down to the one thing that matters most to you in an election; it's actually a fairly soul-searching exercise if you allow it to be.  Know thyself, if you will.
The overwhelming single most important factor when casting a vote for President is good ol' believing what they're telling you, whatever it is:

Trust of candidate - 42%
Political party - 21%
Abortion/stem cells/moral issues - 17%
War in Iraq - 8%
Economy - 8%
Immigration Issue - 4%

Thanks to all who voted!

A couple of sources peg global governmental military spending at $900 billion to $1 trillion in 2005 (these sources are the CIA World Fact Book and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which relied upon by European governments for its data).  Of this total, the U.S. is responsible for more than half of the total, or around $500 billion.  Per year.  That's 10 times Russia, over 10 times China, 2 times the entire European Union, etc.  Now I know that sounds like a lot, but to put it in perspective, it's less than 3 times the market cap of Google, and about 20% more than the market cap of Exxon Mobil.
Do you ever wonder what would happen if we just stopped?  Stopped policing the world, protecting it from...itself?  Consider Iraq:  all sorts of bad things were (and maybe still are) going on there with respect to terrorist hideouts/safe places/weapons development.  Now we're there.  But what about its neighbors, Syria and Iran?  Aren't they terrorist states?  So don't terrorists have free reign there?  Yet in practice, both are democracies with elected officials who worry about losing their jobs if they don't please their constituencies.  And neither of them are attacking our borders.  Iran's oil flows freely and suffers no sabotage attacks; Iraq's barely flows at all and suffers greatly from sabotage.  I'm sure Iraqi citizens as a whole feel safer with us there for the time being, but is that enough to justify the tremendous cost?  And wouldn't the cost end exponentially more heinous, heartbreaking crimes against humanity if re-routed to civilizing at least some, if not all, of the war-ravaged sections of Africa?  I don't know; I hope somebody's analyzing the facts and making the proper decisions on how to spend that half a trillion per year though.

The keyword phrase "best political blogs" as a keyword for pay-per-click advertising with Google Adwords, which to my amazement in this post had gone from $.25/click to $5/click in 8 days (Feb. 19 to 27), has now doubled again to $10/click.  That's a 40-fold increase in the cost of this ad keyword in 2 1/2 weeks.  Yikes!  At a cost of $10 for every single click on their fleeting ads, some people out there are apparently REALLY confident in their abilities to convert your search engine quest for the Best Political Blogs into some sort of meaningful action on your part.

Have you ever gone to a "fare deal"-type site, where they've got amazing deals on the condition that you have to commit to purchasing RIGHT NOW?  You get to pick your departure, destination, and dates, but not necessarily the airline or the time, for instance.  But there really are amazing deals, and it's due to the ability of airlines to know EXACTLY what seats they need to fill at any given instant (yes, there are some things that airlines are quite capable of executing).  Why can't auto dealerships do this?  They might not be able to get together with other manufacturer's dealerships, but a 3rd-party company could come in and be an online repository for these unique deals that could go on and off the board throughout the day or month.  So when you've got a situation where a vehicle came in but the buyer broke the contract, you could post that VIN and specs to the deal site, maybe with an MSRP of $37,000 marked down to $32,000 or something, for that specific vehicle.  It would allow dealerships to manage their inventory and quotas more effectively, cut out lots of negotiating headaches for customers and wasted time for salespeople, and become known as THE place for serious buyers who want to go buy a vehicle right now, today, to get something done without worrying about anything.  Customers would be savvy enough to know if something's a good deal or not based on kbb.com or similar auto pricing information sources, just like they are able to recognize that a DFW-JFK flight for $600 roundtrip isn't exactly something they should pounce on.  Where's Captain Kirk's agent?

This is actually for people who think they have migraines but really have something else that's almost as painful.  After years of suffering through allergies (probably Mountain Cedar, particularly bad in Texas), I finally tried some Claritin every day for a week.  In the past I had tried it for a day or two, saw no improvement, and stopped.  But a doctor said it needed to be in your system to really work, so give it at least 4 days in a row.  Well, after a few days, my allergy symptoms were gone - but I had excruciating headaches.  So I stopped, because the headache was worse than all the allergy symptoms that I had suffered through the years.  The next doctor prescribed Allegra-D (for Decongestant - Claritin also makes a "D" version, and there's generic Claritin and now generic Claritin D).  The Allegra D worked, and no headache!  The doc said my headaches had been caused by sinus congestion.  But I didn't FEEL congested, I protested!  Couldn't argue with the results though.  After that 30-day supply ran out, I switched to generic Claritin D, with equally spectacular headache-free allergy relief.  And next moved on to plain generic Claritin (called Loratadine) and Sudafed as the decongestant.  Then, this very week, with my wife suffering debilitating headaches for a little over a week and trying every headache medication she could buy or borrow, I finally got her to try my good old-fashioned decongestant (Sudafed Maximum Strength Non-Drowsy) so her head would stop pounding as she lay in bed.  It worked that night, and has been working every day since (it's a 12-hr that she takes in the morning and at night, and it hasn't been keeping her awake at night, oddly).  Her mom and her sister are trying it today for their "migraines", which started right about when my wife's did (allergies are frequently inherited) and I expect the same miraculous results.  So do yourself a favor if you're suffering from "migraines" like this and drop a few bucks to try some Sudafed Max - whether you FEEL congested or not.

What's the popular scenario for man-made global warming wreaking havoc on the earth?  First, the temperature of the earth rises, then the polar ice caps and glacial shelves melt, resulting in cataclysmic flooding of continental coastlines.  44% of the world's population lives within about 90 miles of a coastline.  So there goes the neighborhood, right?  But what happens when the neighborhood goes?  Massive insurance company losses, that's what.  And to stave off those massive losses, insurers and re-insurers have to collect the money beforehand in the form of hefty premiums.  "Beforehand" should already be underway as of right now if these dire catastrophic predictions are to be taken seriously, and who's more serious than insurance companies?  Are they collecting enormous, never-before-imagined premiums based on Al Gore's slide show bringing to light these amazing scientific proofs of what we're doing to the atmosphere and what the consequences will surely be, probably within the next 100 60 30 years?  Actually, no.  In my view, either there's not enough hard evidence on which to base the man-made global warming claims, or the insurance companies aren't doing their jobs and collecting as much money in the form of ridiculously high global warming premiums as possible for the next 10-30 years to pay for the claims that will be made when half the population of the world inevitably watches their homes get slurped up by the ocean.  Am I a global warming skeptic?  Not necessarily - I just believe in the actuarial sciences and in Warren Buffett's companies' ability to suck every penny possible out of those who would pay moreso than I subscribe to man's ability to look around and analyze ancient ice cores and be able to discern that we're about to be in serious need of one mother of an ark.

Google has no reported accounting improprieties, as did Enron, but at the heart of Enron's implosion was the fact that they were booking revenue that was to be produced from assets that weren't likely to produce that future revenue.  Similarly, Google generates revenue (and to be fair, they ARE actually generating it rather than merely booking it) from assets that aren't likely to produce that revenue in the future.  One key difference actually goes in Enron's favor:  at least they actually OWNED the assets that they claimed would one day likely generate that revenue.  Google does not own the valuable content that their advertising revenue is generated based on.  If content owners were to assert their ownership rights and deny Google their valuable content to base ads on, as are many of the video content owners with Youtube and as publishers may more actively engage in doing with the groundwork being laid by Microsoft's (legitimate, in my opinion) criticism of Google's interpretation of Fair Use...I shudder to think.

The % of Employed Wage & Salary Workers who are union members is down from 20.1% in 1983 to 12% in 2006.  2005 was 12.5%.  Gov't sector workers have 36% union membership while the Private sector has only 7%; within these groups, Local Gov't is even higher, at 42% (this would include teachers, police, firefighters, etc.), while in the Private Sector, the Financial Activities subgroup has the lowest union membership rate (1.9%).
5 states have less than 5% union membership:  N.C., S.C., Virginia, Georgia, and Texas.
4 states have greater than 20% union membership, with Hawaii topping the list at just under 25%:  Hawaii, NY, Alaska, and NJ.
Why does this matter?  Unions are very influential in elections in terms of financial support to campaigns, but in terms of voters, 1 out of 8 isn't that impressive.  The 2008 election promises to have no shortage of warchest funds for the candidates, so it would look to me like there won't be quite the level of catering to labor unions that there has been in the past.

This is not a full review, just a quick thought based on the specs of Excel 2007.  Spreadsheets and databases are different technologies with different uses, each with abilities to do things the other can't.  Every corporate environment uses Excel, as well as Microsoft Access.  Often times, however, the main (and frequently ONLY) use of Access is for dealing with datasets too large for Excel to handle with its 65,000 row limit.  So analysts get the data into Access, run some quick filters to get it to a manageable size, then take the filtered dataset back to Excel to analyze.
This is no longer necessary with the Office 2007 version of Excel, because Excel 2007 now has a 1 million row limit, plenty large for most dataset analysis.  Now, you'll need LOTS more RAM to run Office 2007 efficiently and to work with million record spreadsheets, but this should knock a broad swath of current, limited Access users right off the map.  The users with true, multi-table requirements to link data sources together will still need to stick with Access, of course (or FileMakerPro, whose latest release includes VERY cool web integration for mapping, among other goodies), and eventually may have some real alternatives with web 2.0-based apps such as DabbleDB, which are currently limited by their inability to work with datasets larger than several thousand records (but what these web apps CAN do in terms of ease-of-use and creative uses are well worth an exploratory effort if the datasets aren't too large).

Do you know what, exactly, "evangelism" means?  One definition is "missionary zeal, purpose, or activity".  We hear it all the time, both in terms of religious message-spreading and in corporate marketing.  This makes sense:  at dictionary.com there are 2 synonyms listed for evangelism - one is crusade, and the other is propaganda.  "Crusade" has synonyms like "cause" and "movement", while propaganda has "advertising", "hype", "brainwashing", and my favorite, "disinformation", among others.  Yet evangelism can mean either crusade OR propaganda, and it's frequently a combination of the two (see the Iraq War, either side, or Microsoft/Apple, either side).
When we hear of someone being appointed as an Evangelist for a company or product, I think we tend to hear along the lines of propagandist or hypester; yet the person appointed may well view their new role as that of a crusader, with missionary zeal and purpose.  Here's how to avoid this conflict in perception if you're a company:  don't have a paid position of Evangelist whose mission is to sing the gospel of your product or service and engage in hype and/or disinformation to drown out or bury your competitors.  If you're going to pay a person $150k for a year of evangelizing, why not instead give away an additional $150k worth of the product (assuming it's a product you actually believe in the merits of) to people who can influence purchase decisions (bloggers, corporate executives, journalists, talk show hosts, etc.)?  The stipulation would be "you can have this product for your personal use and ownership; all we ask in return is that you say some good things about it if you find it useful, and if not, rather than publicly ripping it to shreds for the entertainment of your constituency, please return it to us with your detailed feedback and recommended improvements and allow us the opportunity to get it right."
I really don't have a problem with corporate evangelists - it would be a dream job for someone who really believed in the company and/or product, and the fact that they are getting paid is just icing on the cake to many of them.  As a consumer or potential business partner, however, I personally would put much more stock in the opinion of someone who isn't drawing their livelihood from saying good things about something, someone who doesn't have a vested interest in the success of something.  If it's your company or product, great - get my attention and ask me to give it a fair shot.  Just don't try to make up my mind for me before I have the facts and experiences in hand to make an accurate assessment.