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Imagine you’re a business heavily dependent on your advertising for your success. Then your ad agency goes sour. The copy becomes banal, the art boring, the sales results dismal. So you think, “I better change ad agencies!” Well, if you are in Britain that might be a really unproductive move, all because of a new rule The rule, imposed by the British government in April, could require an advertising agency taking on new business to hire employees who worked on the account at the client's former agency, lawyers say. While the law is intended to protect workers, they add, it threatens to make advertising account shifts prohibitively expensive, or simply counterproductive. Agencies worry that they will be unable to pitch for new business, and they fear that clients won't want to move their accounts. "Clients move from one agency to another to get new people, not to keep the same ones," said Marina Palomba, legal director at the Institute of Practitioners in Adv...

A touch of Latin American Socialism… kinda like Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, if you will, is looking good these days. Brazil has been on a tear to stamp out hunger. The Christian Science Monitor has a progress report in yesterday’s online edition. I like Brazil for several reasons, so much so that I even invest a bit in them as a promising “emerging market.” I like the fact that they have done a lot to utilize ethanol without the kind of huge subsidies we give here in the U.S. I like their growth rate and sensible (for Latin America) business policies. Of course, there’s a lot not to like, but hey… One of the things I don’t like is their poverty level. So here’s the good news (excerpted from the CSM). Brazil is the world's fourth-largest food exporter, but more than 40 million Brazilians - a quarter of the population - lived below the poverty line, prompting President Lula da Silva to vow (in 2003) to stamp out hunger by December 2006. This June, the g...

Journalism is both the Sword of Truth and the Cloak of Invisibility as you might gather I believe based on some of the commentaries below ( News You Didn’t See Much Of , Coverage Suggestion ; etc.). The stories NOT covered constitute the invisibility powers of journalism. Not covered = not real to much of the American public. A reporter named Sarah Phelan of the San Francisco Bay Guardian , http://www.sfbg.com/ an old line, kick-ass “alternative” paper, wrote a very impressive piece called “Censored.” It’s in the current on-line issue. There’s a lot of good stuff in that piece (like how the media obsesses over trivial stories), but the part I like best is her list of the Ten Biggest Stories the Media Ignored. The actual list is developed by Sonoma State U. My favorite of the ten starts with: 2. Halliburton, the US energy company, sold key nuclear reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using...

Mostly I am extremely proud of the U.S.A. What a country! One has to say that before making any kind of criticism these days, sort of like one must say, “I support the troops” before voicing any kind of disapproval of the war in Iraq. Our great country is the leading nation in science, business, personal freedoms and a whole bunch of other stuff… but for this commentary, especially in science. I was thumbing through the 11 August Science Magazine to see if I’d missed anything, and derned if I hadn’t. There’s an article titled “Public Acceptance of Evolution.” Here’s the bottom line: Of 34 countries surveyed from 2002 to 2005, the U.S.A. is next to last in the percentage of population accepting the concept of evolution of humans as true. Check the bar chart. We are down there between Cyprus and Turkey! The authors conclude: The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in ...

Have you bought into the premise that the recent rash of huge forest fires is all because of those darn environmentalists, suppressing fires, refusing to let the lumber companies clear cut, etc? Certainly the right wing press machine has been all over this, in pursuit of fewer environmental restrictions on logging public lands on behalf of their Big Lumber supporters. Well, guess what? There is now profound scientific evidence that the main cause of the huge upsurge in major forest wildfires is caused by climate change. Warmer temperatures, earlier spring snow melts, cyclical wet seasons alternating with periodic drought and other indicators of climate change are the main causes, NOT those overzealous environmentalists. If you like facts and figures, read the piece in the Aug 15 Science Magazine. And keep in mind that oft-repeated “talking points” from the right frequently have an agenda that ignores science. Or, worse, denigrates science.

If you’ve been looking for an organized bandwagon to jump on to express your dismay at the anti-science leanings of the Bush Administration (on stem cells, global warming, “intelligent design,” etc.), go to: http://ga3.org/campaign/stem_cell_tellthem_4nature … sign up and add your name to the petition.

Should you be a New Mexican in District 4, take a long look at David Bacon, candidate for the Public Regulation Commission. Check out his web site at: http://www.davidbacon2006.org/ He is an honest, right thinking, very bright fellow who deserves to serve the public. He ran for Governor of NM on the Green ticket last election, which shows he is an unbridled optimist. Heaven knows we need more optimists in government. Here’s a look at his platform. If I had the gumption to run for office, it would be my platform. I want the PRC to... Promote clean renewable energy, encourage alternate local providers and spur innovation Increase local control of power distribution Move New Mexico toward affordable and universal health insurance Protect water resources by opposing large centralized power projects Extend rural telephone service through telecommunication competition Preserve full Internet access for everyone ...GO DAVID!

CRVs. They are everywhere. There goes one now! Honda CRVs - an SUV ( Small Utility Vehicle) - are infiltrating our world. ... and rightfully so. Twenty-seven mpg in town/country driving by my calculations. I see them everywhere these days. The pre-2004 models are a little boxier than this one. In '04 Honda sleeked them up a bit and put that slash of a rear light package on board. The CRV is taking the "huge" out of S-Huge-V. Consider this a testimonial for the CRV. And look around when you drive. They are everywhere. Smart folks buy them. Oh, did I mention, we have one?

Since for decades I made “angle” and “coverage tactics” recommendations to journalists as a news consultant, I just can’t contain myself. The Republicans have linked killing the inheritance tax to giving life to a raise in the minimum wage. Tricky devils. Since the inheritance tax affects a very small number of very wealthy people and in the process has a large effect on growing our national debt so it exacerbates two problems; the other being the growing gap between the incomes of the poor and the rich, a bad thing. The federal minimum wage affects several million of our lowest income citizens. It does nothing to speak of to the national debt. It (ever so slightly) decreases the rich/poor gap, a good thing. So here’s the coverage suggestion, news people. Pick five rich people representative of those benefited by killing the inheritance tax. See how much money their heirs would gain by not paying the tax. The compare that amount with how many folks making minimum wage would be...

We were hearing a lot about the failed long-range missile launch in N. Korea about the same time this was happening. First Agni III test fails India's first test firing of its nuclear capable Agni III intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM), launched at 1105 hrs local time (0535 GMT) on 9 July, failed due to technical problems at the second stage, according to defence sources. The launch has been postponed twice since November 2004 for a variety of political and technical considerations [Jane's Defence Weekly - first posted to http://jdw.janes.com/ - 10 July 2006] I don’t know about you, but I didn’t hear or read a single story about this in the “popular press.”

Confounded I am. There is a bit of positive news today (amidst all the sturm und drang in the Middle East). In Forbes online, the headline is “Alzheimer’s ‘Risk Score’ Spots Those Most Vulnerable.” http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2006/07/17/hscout533826.html Excellent! If you find that you might be more vulnerable, you can start worrying incessantly about it. OR… there might be something you can do to change the odds. Now the problem. There is a bit in the piece that confuses me. I thought maybe it was a trick paragraph, and further down in the article it would say “Gotcha! If you were confused by that paragraph, you’re in big trouble.” So I read it four or five times, and I’m still confused. After the article commented on two studies (lose weight, exercise, don’t get diabetes, keep your cholesterol down, etc.), there came a summary of a third study. Here’s the paragraph: “In men who developed dementia, cholesterol levels declined at least 15 years prior to...

The “Hockey Stick” Drives Conservatives Crazy The Wall Street Journey (my favorite newspaper) and its Editorial Page (my least favorite editorials) are showing their strange schism again. Friday’s (7.14.06) second editorial was headlined “Hockey Stick Hokum.” Whoo boy, what a piece o’weak thinking. What weak evidence. What strange rationalizations. Basically, the Fox-ites in print denied the current state of paleoclimate research in favor of the old, anecdote-based thinking about what’s been happening with global temperature changes over the past thousand years. They attack the original analysis that created the “hockey stick” graph (showing things have been heating up fast in the last century) by excerpting a new report commissioned by the House Energy Committee. The work was done by statisticians, not – heaven forbid – climatologists. Here are the graphics the WSJ editors used: The top graph is what we’ve had in our textbooks for decades, based on little more than historical ...