Paper Cuts: Questions for Madison Smartt Bell
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Madison Smartt Bell (Jerome De Perlinghi) Madison Smartt Bell&#8217;s most recent books are &#8216;&#8217;Toussaint Louverture: A Biography'&#8217; and &#8216;&#8217;The Stone That the Builder Refused,'&#8217; a novel. 1) What are you working on? Officially, and to a considerable degree in fact, I am working on a novel about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate Cavalry general. It&#8217;s a less straightforwardly [...].
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Picking the right financial planner requires some homework and asking the right questions.
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By Therese Poletti and Nicole C. Wo, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Sep.
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Analysis Fragmentation and US indifference
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Suzy Welch, a former editor of the Harvard Business Review and the wife of John F. Welch Jr., the former chief executive of General Electric, has agreed to sell the rights to her book â10-10-10â to Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. A person involved in the negotiations said that Scribner paid Ms. Welch a price in the seven figures for world and audio rights to the book. Based on an article Ms. Welch wrote for O, the Oprah Magazine, in 2006, the book offers strategies for making decisions in which people think about what the consequences of a decision will be in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years. Robert Barnett, a Washington lawyer, negotiated the deal on behalf of Ms. Welch. Nan Graham, editor in chief of Scribner, will edit the book with Samantha Martin. Ms. Welch, who wrote the best-selling âWinningâ with Mr. Welch, said she originally thought there wasnât a book beyond the article. But, she said, âI began to encounter this hunger for people who were using it to play out its nuances.â She said the book would include examples from her own life as well as others she has observed using the â10-10-10â process. Susan Moldow, publisher of Scribner, said that although Ms. Welchâs article might seem sufficient for those who wanted to know about the strategy, Ms. Moldow believed the book would sell well. âThe Scarsdale Diet fit on a Xerox-ed sheet that you could fit on the front of a refrigerator,â Ms. Moldow said. âAnd it sold millions and millions of copies. Itâs often true that when something strikes an immediate âAha!,â you really want to have time to meditate on it and try to get to know more about it.â.
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By Miriam Hill, The Philadelphia Inquirer  Jun.
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Commercial paper is fancy-pants lawyer-speak for debt.
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By Julia Glick, The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif.  Jun.
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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Consider the New World of Information - stuff that, unlike the paper days of the past, doesn't always physically exist. You've got notes, scrawlings and snippets, Web graphics, photos and sounds. Stuff needs to be cut, pasted, highlighted, annotated, crossed out, dragged away. And, as Ross Perot used to say (or maybe it was Dana Carvey impersonating him), don't forget the graphs and charts.
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One budget-cutting proposal on the table
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I'm getting a new mobile phone :) In the whole spectrum of digital opportunities, mobile is where the next big battle lies and I'll be rejoining the fray. It's eight years since Western Mail & Echo bought my first mobile. Four phones later my new one will bear no resemblance to the first.
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An independent inquiry is helping to defuse a controversy over ink used in Saturday&#39;s election. By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor.
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Patrick Chanezon sayz :  "I got some pretty good feedback after my post Java Syndication Babel: let's paint the picture together!, mainly from the Rojo/Feedparser team."  ...  "Then the Rojo/Feedparser team, Brad Neuberg and Kevin Burton posted some good comments. I agree with Kevin that we don't necessarily need a JSR and should start collaborating now. From Kevin and Brad it seems like what we should work on first is defining a common set of Unit Tests, and a way to get a DOM-Rome-like API on top of their SAX-like API."  So check out the list  and the wiki .  Hopefully we'll be able to collaborate and make some forward progress.  I'm sure everyone will benefit.  The more I think about a ne ...
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A few notes on the NY Times outline... 1. I switched it back to the frequency sort, having tried it as an alphabetized list for about 18 hours. Now I want to see what happens with it flipped around so the most frequent keyword bins appear first. 2. Not sure, but I think it will empty out later this afternoon, as yesterday's stories expire, and before tomorrow's stories ship.  3. It seems that at least some people have bookmarked the site and are refreshing it. If so, I'm glad -- because that's the way these pages are most useful, they tell you something about what changed. Remember this is "news" not olds. 4. The outline view is something like TechMeme for the Times news flow. Not exactly because the keywords are assigned by people. Unseen news mavens. Where do they reside? Are they on the upper floors or in the basement of the NY Times skyscraper on 8th Ave, or somewhere inbetween? Maybe they work out of their homes. My mind wants to visualize these people, but I have nothing to cling to. It's not an algorithm that's determining where things sort out, it's people. Otherwise known as editors? Or are they librarians? 5. Do you bookmark the outline or the river? I'm a river guy for sure. I wonder about other people. 6. Francine Hardway twitted at me: "Times River is awesome on my iPhone! Was reading it while waiting for eye surgery and it was very distracting." Amen. That's the big secret. I wish there were a way to get everyone to look at the river on their cell phone. Eyes would open. 7. Thinking about integrating the two views, cross-relating them. Not sure exactly what I'll try first. That's why I wanted to let it settle in for a bit before moving in a other directions. 8. Of course, I know that if this ever becomes a "real" product, the user is going to control the view he or she wants to be the default. But for right now I'm experimenting. I want to see what people think. Enough people were asking for an alpha view that I wanted to see what would happen when I gave it to them, and if anyone would scream. Screaming isn't a bad thing, it's data.
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Jim Posner sent me a link yesterday to an MP3 of a conference call between the press and two members of the Clinton campaign. It's really illuminating.  There are controversies the press isn't reporting, esp betw the Clinton campaign and NBC. Will there be a debate on Feb 26 and will CNN host it or MSNBC? There's some doubt, but you can't see it when you watch the broadcasts.  I'd love to subscribe to a feed of these conference calls, but we only happened to stumble upon this one. This morning on MSNBC they were talking about a conference call with Hillary Clinton, they said she sounded tired. I'd like to hear that for myself.  There's a difference in 2008, the campaign is not just being covered by the professional media, the people are doing it too. Even if we don't have our people on the calls, I'd still like to hear them.  So, if you have an idea how we could catch a stream of these, please post a comment. Thanks. PS: I archived the MP3 in case the link above goes bad.
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They talk about them all the time on the news shows, every day the major Presidential candidates have conference calls with reporters. It seems much of the real action in the campaign happens here, but we (voters, taxpayers, citizens)  have no access. I listened to an MP3 of one of the calls, with the chief strategist and communications director of the Clinton campaign. It was fascinating, gave me a picture of how the press and the candidates relate that I had never seen before.  Now I want more -- I want it all!  I've been asking around, where can I get MP3s of all the conference calls, the day they happen, in full, not spun through the reporters, and so far have come up with nothing. So I'm bringing this issue to as many people as I can think of who might either know how I can get them, or apply pressure to one or more news organizations to make them public. I'd of course like to see them made available as an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures, so it will be accessible to everyone with a podcast client. I would help create this, even host the feed if necessary. Anyone at a major media organization would have access to this content. I'm pretty sure it's all on the record. Any help would be much appreciated.