“Crippled ex-Marine Jake (Sam Worthington) journeys to the beautiful planet Pandora to become an avatar — a quasi-alien “clone” of his real self — and unwittingly becomes involved in an interstellar conflict. When the alien Na’vi race rebels against humanity’s unchecked exploitation of Pandora’s resources, Jake must decide exactly where his loyalties lie. James Cameron directs this dazzling action film that also stars Sigourney Weaver.”
“This laugh out loud comedy is definatly worth watching. It tells the story of Andy (steve carell) a geeky 40 year old who never really grew up, with his rather strange obsession with boxed action figures. He works at smart tech an electronics store as the storeroom manager along with cal (seth rogen) who thinks andy is a bit of a looney because of the way he acts. one day a couple of cals friends David (Paul rudd) and Jay (Romany malco) invite steve to join them along with a few other guys to a poker game later that night. Upon arriving at the store that night they have a convisation about previous partners until they ask Andy to tell them about his love life, when asked this question Andy is unsure what to say because he is a virgin, so he makes up a hilarious story that concludes with him saying that breasts feel like “a bag of sand”. overall an extreamly funny movie that will keep you entertained from start to finish. Rated MA 15+ for sexual refrences, high corse language and nudity.” (moviereviews.com)
When someone is thinking of investing in an open market, he should follow some real good guideline. He should know the terminology of share trading. He has to have a good financial background in order to gain success in stock trading. You have to volatile and quite familiar with the stock market in order to make a good profit. But you don’t have to be so much savvy with the stock market.
In stock market investing, it is very commonly observed that small investors go through major losses due to lack of the knowledge of online stock trading strategy. The way of good trading strategy is of two ways. First, invest on an undervalued stock so that your investment should not go at total loss. Emotion should be kept out of mind and one should mentally acquire an upper and lower selling limit. Reflex ability should be maintained in this matter, when trading stock the instrument should be moveable, otherwise these trading would not work.
If you loved Avatar, as I did, and want to see a real-life narrative of a similar conflict, take out Geronimo. West Studi, who lends his voice to the village chief in Avatar, stars in Geronimo. Matt Damon, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman and Jason Patrick also star in this beautiful, amazing movie about a remarkable leader of the Apache people.
Here is the synopsis: “In 1885, the United States, under the policy of “manifest destiny,” had nearly finished conquering the west and its native peoples. The next step, the government believed, was to resettle the Apaches, but the powerful, rebellious warrior Geronimo threatened their plans. So Cavalry troops rode out to arrest him — but they failed in their mission and he escaped. Thus began a campaign in which the army deployed more than a quarter of its men to track down the Indian leader. Although the soldiers greatly outnumbered Geronimo’s small band of followers, he eluded capture for more than five years, as the cavalry chased him through Arizona, New Mexico, and all the way down to Mexico.
This 1993 ‘revisionist’ Western tells the story of the white army who came to remove Apache warrior Geronimo (Wes Studi) from his land and the struggles the Indians put up in order to keep their land. Led by two Army leaders (Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall), the government tries to extract the Indians from the land, using both force and lies. Director Walter Hill (48 HOURS, THE WARRIORS) looks at both sides of the conflict and shoots beautiful cinematography in the American Southwest. The story of the Apache …”
It’s fitting for Studi, a Cherokee, to play Geronimo. The 1830 Indian Removal Act (I can’t remember ever being taught this, can you?), under President Jackson, forcibly removed the Cherokee and nearly all Native Americans east of the Mississippi to Oklahoma. The Cherokee still call it the Trail of Tears, as they were forced-marched to Oklahoma, where Wes Studi was born. (Bruce Nussbaum)
Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular Internet search engine, fell as much as 5.8 percent in late trading after fourth-quarter sales growth failed to top the most optimistic of analysts’ estimates.
Sales, excluding revenue passed on to partner Web sites, increased 13 percent to $4.95 billion from the third quarter, Google said yesterday. Some analysts had predicted growth of as much as 17 percent, said Sameet Sinha, an analyst with JMP Securities LLC in San Francisco.
“For three quarters this company has really blown out numbers,” Sinha said.
Google, which has beaten profit estimates since the third quarter of 2008, was hampered by slower-than-expected increases in the prices of ads, Sinha said. The average cost of each click on Google’s ads rose 2 percent from the previous period, missing Sinha’s estimate.
Google fell as much as $33.98 to $549 in late trading yesterday. Earlier the shares rose $2.57 to $582.98 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Revenue from Google-owned sites such as Google.com rose 16 percent, while revenue from partner sites rose 21 percent. That meant Google paid more to partner sites than expected, said Clay Moran, an analyst at Benchmark Co. in Boca Raton, Florida.
Net income jumped more than fivefold to $1.97 billion, or $6.13 a share, from $382.4 million, or $1.21, a year earlier, when Google wrote down $1.09 billion of investments.
Profit excluding costs such as stock-based compensation was $6.79 a share. Analysts had estimated profit of $6.44 and sales of $4.91 billion, according to a Bloomberg survey.
Retail, Autos
The company, whose shares more than doubled last year, has benefited from strong sales in the retail sector along with autos, Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said in an interview.
“We’re really running back on all cylinders,” Pichette said. “We mirror the economy.”
The company is resisting the temptation to overspend even as its profit rises, said James Friedland, an analyst with Cowen & Co. in New York. Google reported $221 million in capital expenditures in the quarter, compared with more than $800 million in early 2008.
“They really did rein in the expenses,” said Friedland, who rates the stock outperform. “It actually had a very strong quarter on the top line and the bottom line.”
Paid Clicks
Paid clicks on ads increased about 13 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008, Google said. The cost-per-click rose about 5 percent from a year earlier.
Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said on a conference call with analysts that overall he was “very pleased with the performance of Q4.”
“We’re back in business, full blast,” he said. “We’re investing heavily.” He said the company will continue to make acquisitions this year at the rate of about one a month.
Overall online advertising in the U.S. shrank 4.6 percent last year, according to December estimates by EMarketer Inc. in New York. The market should rebound this year with growth of 5.5 percent, EMarketer said.
Google said earlier this month that it would stop censoring results and might shut down the Google.cn site and offices in China. The company made the decision after attacks on e-mail accounts of human-rights activists.
Schmidt said yesterday that Google is in discussions with Chinese authorities about how it operates in China. The company continues to follow Chinese law and offers censored results on its Web site, he said, adding that in a “reasonably short time from now we will be making some changes there.”
“We’ve made a strong statement that we wish to remain in China,” he said. (jthaw@bloomberg.net)
Increased access to high-speed Internet connections helps create jobs, though it doesn’t always result in higher wages, according to a new research report from the Public Policy Institute of California.
Areas of the U.S. that went from having no broadband provider to as many as three in the period from 1999 to 2006 had faster job growth than the rest of the country, according to the study, presented in Washington, D.C., at an event hosted by the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. Along with more jobs come additional employers and new residents who compete with workers for jobs. That in turn keeps pressure on salaries, the report says.
“This expansion in the labor supply keeps the employment rate from going up, and prevents wages and earnings from rising rapidly,” says PPIC fellow Jed Kolko, a former research director at Forrester Research (FORR). “While the effect on places seems very clear, the effect on residents is somewhat ambiguous.”
Because the population increases at the same time more jobs are created, the rate of joblessness changes little, Kolko says. Existing residents have to compete harder for new jobs and see no change in their chances of getting a job, according to the report.
Broadband Stimulus Expectations
The results may be useful in assessing the impact of government plans to spend $7.2 billion to fund grants aimed at improving access to broadband in the U.S., especially in areas that have little access to fast Web connections. “We looked at the recent past as our guide for what is likely to happen as a result of broadband stimulus initiatives designed to raise availability,” Kolko says.
William Lehr, a research scientist and economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has researched the economics of broadband access, says Kolko’s work may help manage expectations around the benefits of broadband. “It’s part of providing a richer understanding of what the available data can and can’t tell us,” Lehr says. “The benefits of job growth from broadband may not be as great going forward as some of the research in the past has suggested.”
People who live in areas where high-speed Internet access is not available or too expensive are left at a social and economic disadvantage, broadband advocates say. In an era when employers typically demand a familiarity with the Internet for even entry-level jobs, and when elected officials communicate with the public via e-mail and Twitter, there’s a case to be made that people without access to affordable broadband miss out on significant aspects of modern American life. The largest providers of high-speed Internet access include AT&T (T), Comcast (CMCSA), and Verizon Communications (VZ).
Last year, as part of the $787 billion American Recovery & Reinvestment Act, Congress approved $4.7 billion in funding through the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA), with the remaining $2.5 billion going to the Agriculture Dept.’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS). The first batch of funding, about $183 million, was awarded to 18 different organizations in December, and another $7.5 million was awarded in a grant to the city of Los Angeles on Jan. 13.
Job Creation Effect
Increased availability of broadband tends to result in more jobs for companies with high concentrations of professional, administrative, and scientific needs, and fewer for manufacturing firms, according to the research. The effect is also stronger in places with lower populations as local businesses find ways to reach new markets farther afield. Increased availability of broadband also results in higher tax returns for municipal and county governments as property values increase and the number of people paying taxes rises, the study found.
Researchers were unable to find a relationship between broadband expansion and telecommuting. “Back in the mid-1990s, there were lots of popular articles that argued that broadband would enable us to move to the places we really wanted to live, as opposed to the cities that we live in,” Kolko says. “There’s actually no evidence for that.”
Brian Mefford, chairman and CEO of Connected Nation, a nonprofit organization that encourages broadband development, says the report indicates the broadband stimulus program will ultimately pay off economically. “We’re finally seeing a correlation between economic growth and broadband,” Mefford says. “But it shows that there’s less of an impact until people are actually using the technology. That shows there’s a need for the stimulus to include programs that encourage demand.”
For government officials and planning consultants looking to create regional economic growth and drive innovation, industry clusters are the Holy Grail. Popularized by Harvard professor Michael Porter in the early 1990s, cluster theory holds that a government or economic development body can create a viable hub of economic activity in a specific industrial sector by bringing in businesses, suppliers, researchers, and additional related people or entities. In other words, a focused governmental effort can create something from nothing, turning, for example, a fallow field into a tech park bursting with highly competitive, innovative companies. Governments all over the world have invested millions—sometimes billions—of dollars to attract industries they consider strategic.
The trouble is that clusters engineered from the top down don’t usually work. I am hard-pressed to find a single example that has proven an unqualified success because of government intervention or the advice provided by economic development experts. They all talk about how great things will be, one day in the future, when they succeed in attracting venture capitalists to the area. But central planning rarely spawns innovation in free economies. Even in China, where the government has been able to transform slums into economic marvels, regional governments that spent billions on building semiconductor technology clusters have ended up with outdated fabrication facilities and massive oversupply.
Not that regional innovation-based economic development is impossible. It’s just that government officials and consultants put the cart before the horse. The best example I’ve seen of a region that has successfully pursued cluster development is the unlikely locale of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, India. It wasn’t the government that made the magic happen, but the region’s ambitious entrepreneurs who prodded officials to follow their lead and team up with them. In a few short years, that group has turned the sun-blasted state once known for backwardness and poverty into an up-and-coming destination for top technology companies around the world.
Bakshi: Jaipur meets Silicon Valley
The largest state in India, Rajasthan came late to the technology revolution that has swept the country. In 2002, the Rajasthan state government banned the purchase of computers for personal use because, confusingly, it considered them “luxury items” and the state was experiencing a drought. That’s right. Banned. Women were not allowed to work after sunset in any industry. The state’s capital, Jaipur, had only 10 small technology businesses. Most of the state’s businesses had little or no automation and made limited use of computers.
Enter Naren Bakshi. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Bakshi grew up in Jaipur. He earned graduate degrees in engineering and business at University of California-Berkeley, worked for a number of multinationals, and then launched two technology companies in the U.S. before retiring to mentor entrepreneurs in both Silicon Valley and his native state.
Bakshi believed that he could make a big difference by bringing modern management practices and technology to Rajasthan’s entrepreneurs. To get the ball rolling, he arranged a meeting in 2001 between budding technology entrepreneurs and those from traditional industries as diverse as carpet manufacturing, jewelry production, and mining. He encouraged them to work together to boost technology and entrepreneurship in the region. Bakshi laid out no priorities other than making smarter use of technology to drive innovation. There was no planning for a semiconductor or a biotech cluster. Rather, Bakshi hoped that by simply building a network of entrepreneurs and enhancing their global connections, good things would result.
Excited by Bakshi’s vision, the entrepreneurs banded together to educate the state government about technology and help craft more tech-friendly policies.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is meeting today in Washington to hold hearings on the recent financial crisis and economic meltdown. The Commission will ask Wall Street’s top brass—Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JP MorganChase, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America—questions about what went wrong. What the Commission really needs to do is ask what is wrong with Wall Street’s entire culture of finance. The populist rage, from both left and right, at Wall Street is not due to specific actions taken by banks and bankers but at the rise of a speculative, short-term, transactional, culture that rewards individuals with enormous bonuses. This trading culture, over the past 15 years, has replaced a different financial culture which was relational, focussed on the long-term, investment, and, most importantly, aimed at economic growth for many stakeholders—corporations, employees, and the nation as a whole.
The goal of the Commission, and of Congress, should be to replace Wall
Street’s short-term, transactional, trading culture of finance with a long-term, relational, investment culture. This isn’t difficult. In fact, the US did just this after the Great Depression, when traditional banking was separated from speculative trading by the Glass Steagall Act of 1932. Under the Clinton Administration, proponents of efficient market theory combined with heavy bank lobbied successfully to repeal
Glass Steagall. Paul Volcket, ex-Federal Reserve Chief, argues that Glass Steagall should be restored. Volcker is right. The social goal of finance (yes, there is a socio-cultural goal for finance) is long-term investment and economic growth.
A second step Congress should take is to end the financial incentives for transactional speculation. Culture is defined, in many ways, by the rewards bestowed on behavior. Change the rewards, the behavior changes. Washington has created a Wall Street reward system based on the principle of “Too Big To Fail.” No matter what mistakes bankers make–and they clearly made horrendous mistakes over the past decade–taxpayers will always rescue the biggest banks from the consequences of their actions. This incentive for speculation should end.
Another major step in changing the dominant culture of financial speculation would be to end quarterly profit announcements. This Wall Street practice is a device that reinforces the culture of transaction and rewards trading, not investment. Regulators should require annual profit announcements. It is that simple.
Finally, the Commission should examine ways of changing incentives for financial innovation. Innovation has been given a black eye because of the debacle in finance. Virtually all financial innovation in the past two decades has involved slicing and dicing transparent, long-term investments, especially mortgages, into opaque, short-term trading vehicles to better suit the needs of a speculative financial culture. At the very least all financial vehicles, including CDOs, need to be traded on open markets so they can be properly valued.
But, more importantly, new forms of financial innovation are needed that are directly at people and the economy, not bankers and speculation. For example, Yale professor Robert Shiller has long proposed home equity insurance. Had it been available, much of the housing crash might have been avoided.
The financial innovation of recent years reinforced the culture of financial speculation now dominant on Wall Street. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission should focus on reforming this culture and returning Wall Street to a culture of long-term investment and economic growth.(businessweek.com)
businessweek.com – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on the universality of Internet Freedom is a wonderful speech that I personally applaud but it is seriously flawed when applied to China and to Google in China. Absolute internet freedom is a value widely shared among hundreds of millions of North Americans, Latin Americans and Europeans but not among the vast, vast, vast majority of Chinese.
I recently spent two weeks in Shanghai and Beijing talking with designers and academics. Here is my sense of how internet censorship and “freedom” work in China. The stereotype of of a distant, old, militaristic censor shutting down blogs and web sites on whim is incorrect. Both the young. high-tech entrepreneurs developing new online businesses and the government censors come from the same good universities, are extremely well-educated and know each other personally. The two sides are in constant contact every day, pushing and pulling, reshaping the zone and focus of censorship. In general, both sides, mostly men in their 20s and early 30s, I am told, are trying to increase the space of what is allowed. I am also told that one problem with Google in China was that it was not tied into this network of censor and censored as well as Baidu and other Chinese web companies. And Google didn’t share the accepted culture of dynamic censorship, further antagonizing the censors.
Two weeks is not a long time in any country, but I did take away the conclusion that for nearly all Chinese, Tibet and Taiwan are as much a part of China as Hawaii and New Mexico are of the US. Government censorship of individuals and groups calling for Tibetan independence is widely applauded, not criticized. It is not an internet space that the younger generation in China wants expanded. However, there is an enormous amount of expressed anger at the rich and powerful all over the net. And throughout contemporary Chinese painting.
I remember going to the 798 art district of Beijing and looking at one installation that listed words. The first word was “propaganda.” The second was “advertising.” The flow of other words expressed the artists conclusion that two were basically the same—messages from powerful institutions designed to persuade you to think one way and behave in a particular way.
In the US, internet users have no problem with letting companies flood their computers at will with cookies that track their behavior and indicate their state of mind. They have no problem allowing companies to use gps to know exactly where they are at any point in time. But should the government be allowed to do this? Never. This is a cultural decision as much as a political one.
I totally agree with Secretary of State Hillary in keeping the internet free but mandating it as a “universal” right is a reach too far. European nations mandate universal health care as a “universal” right. How do Americans feel about that?
