Marketers get in touch with web feelings

New field of sentiment analysis is crunching emotions into hard data to serve the bottom line

Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fuelled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window into the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.

This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.

Yet many companies struggle to make sense of the caterwaul of complaints and compliments that now swirl around their products online.

As sentiment analysis tools begin to take shape, they could not only help businesses improve their bottom lines, but also eventually transform the experience of searching for information online.

Several new sentiment analysis companies are trying to tap into the growing business interest in what is being said online.

“Social media used to be this cute project for 25-year-old consultants,” said Margaret Francis, vice-president for product at Scout Labs in San Francisco. Now, she said, “top executives are recognizing it as an incredibly rich vein of market intelligence.”

Scout Labs, backed by the venture capital firm started by the CNet founder Halsey Minor, recently introduced a subscription service that allows customers to monitor blogs, news articles, online forums and social networking sites for trends in opinions about products, services or topics in the news.

In early May, the ticket marketplace StubHub used Scout Labs’ monitoring tool to identify a sudden surge of negative blog sentiment after rain delayed a Yankees-Red Sox game.

Stadium officials mistakenly told hundreds of fans that the game had been cancelled, and StubHub denied fans’ requests for refunds, on the grounds that the game had actually been played. But after spotting trouble brewing online, the company offered discounts and credits to the affected fans. It is now re-evaluating its bad-weather policy.

“This is a canary in a coal mine for us,” said John Whelan, StubHub’s director of customer service.

Jodange, based in Yonkers, N.Y., offers a service geared toward online publishers that lets the firm incorporate opinion data drawn from more than 450,000 sources, including mainstream news sources, blogs and Twitter.

Based on research by Claire Cardie, a Cornell University computer science professor, and Jan Wiebe of the University of Pittsburgh, the service uses a sophisticated algorithm that not only evaluates sentiments about particular topics, but also identifies the most influential opinion holders.

Jodange, whose early investors include the National Science Foundation, is currently working on a new algorithm that could use opinion data to predict future developments, like forecasting the impact of newspaper editorials on a company’s stock price.

In a similar vein, The Financial Times recently introduced Newssift, an experimental program that tracks sentiments about business topics in the news, coupled with a specialized search engine that allows users to organize their queries by topic, organization, place, person and theme.

Using Newssift, a search for Wal-Mart reveals that recent sentiment about the company is running positive by a ratio of slightly better than two to one. When that search is refined with the suggested term “Labour Force and Unions,” however, the ratio of positive to negative sentiments drops closer to one to one.

Such tools could help companies pinpoint the effect of specific issues on customer perceptions, helping them respond with appropriate marketing and public-relations strategies.

For casual web surfers, simpler incarnations of sentiment analysis are sprouting up in the form of lightweight tools like Tweetfeel, Twendz and Twitrratr. These sites allow users to take the pulse of Twitter users about particular topics.

A quick search on Tweetfeel, for example, reveals that 77 per cent of recent tweeters liked the movie Julie & Julia.

But the same search on Twitrratr reveals a few misfires. The site assigned a negative score to a tweet reading “julie and julia was truly delightful!!”

That same message ended with “we all felt very hungry afterwards” – and the system took the word “hungry” to indicate a negative sentiment.

While the more advanced algorithms used by Scout Labs, Jodange and Newssift employ advanced analytics to avoid such pitfalls, none of these services works perfectly.

“Our algorithm is about 70 to 80 per cent accurate,” said Francis, who added that its users can reclassify inaccurate results so the system learns from its mistakes.

Translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science, however.

“Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,” said Seth Grimes, the founder of the suburban Maryland consulting firm Alta Plana, who points to the many cultural factors and linguistic nuances that make it difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment. “`Sinful’ is a good thing when applied to chocolate cake,” he said.

The simplest algorithms work by scanning keywords to categorize a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (“love” is good, “hate” is bad).

But that approach fails to capture the subtleties that bring human language to life: irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions.

Reliable sentiment analysis requires parsing many linguistic shades of grey.

Source: TS

 

Thinking negatively can boost your memory, study asserts

Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad makes people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.
The study, authored by psychology professor Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales, showed that people in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world,” Forgas wrote.
“Our research suggests that sadness … promotes information processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations.”

For the study, Forgas and his team conducted several experiments that started with inducing happy or sad moods in their subjects through watching films and recalling positive or negative events.
In one of the experiments, happy and sad participants were asked to judge the truth of urban myths and rumors and found that people in a negative mood were less likely to believe these statements.
People in a bad mood were also less likely to make snap decisions based on racial or religious prejudices, and they were less likely to make mistakes when asked to recall an event that they witnessed.

The study also found that sad people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which Forgas said showed that a “mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.”
“Positive mood is not universally desirable: people in negative mood are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages,” Forgas wrote.
The study was published in the November/December edition of the Australian Science journal.

Source: Reuters

 

What Makes Beautiful Minds

Some forms of creative genius seem unfathomable. But as Sylvia Nasar the author of A Beautiful Mind tells us, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them.

 J. Nash and T. kaczynski

In Ron Howard’s movie based on my biography, A Beautiful Mind , Russell Crowe plays Princeton mathematician and economics Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash Jr. From the first frame, the young Nash — driven, brilliant, odd — is obsessed with finding the truly original idea that will reveal reality’s “governing dynamics” and, not coincidentally, win him mathematical stardom.

Clueless as Nash is about social dynamics, he correctly senses that it is ideas, as much as money, power, or sex, that make the world go round. That, of course, is what economic thinkers from Friedrich Hayek to Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, and Robert Solow have argued all along. The explosion of creative thinking in the past century and a half or so is the main reason living standards have risen eightfold, market economies have outperformed socialist ones, corporations have become innovation labs, and work has become more interesting.

And so we’d all love to understand, harness, and enhance that kind of thinking. How nations can promote creativity is the subject of many studies, including one by Edward C. Prescott, who just won a Nobel Prize in economics. But how the minds of truly original problem solvers such as John Nash work remains pretty much a mystery. While most of us can imagine writing a book and maybe painting a picture, very few of us can imagine composing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, or proving Fermat’s Last Theorem. Such inventions strike us as magical, perhaps the reason one synonym for creativity is “wizardry.”

The 21-year-old John Nash was certainly a bit of a wizard to have come up with the first theory of nearly everything. That’s no exaggeration, either. Most theories apply to just one specific discipline. But game theory, the subject Nash is best known for tackling, applies to any situation involving a mix of competition and cooperation — corporate rivalry, competition for votes, Darwinian struggles among species. Nash’s thesis was just one of a spectacular string of problems that he solved before he turned 30 and the onset of delusions and hallucinations sapped his creative powers. In fact, most of the mathematicians I interviewed insisted that Nash’s contribution to game theory was the most “trivial” of his accomplishments.

His theory of noncooperative games won him a Nobel Prize in 1994, more than 30 years after he fell ill with schizophrenia. When I began working on Nash’s biography, I was very clear about spending most of the book telling the story of his twenties and his great burst of achievement, not his descent into madness. I found his ambition, focus, and obsession with originality extremely impressive. I was especially intrigued by the way he worked: what he chose to learn or ignore, how he picked problems, his strategies for solving them. At first, some of his work habits — not reading, for example — seemed merely eccentric. Now I realize that he was mostly trying hard to maintain his creative momentum and protect his unique way of seeing things. And as seemingly magical and unfathomable as his mathematical genius was, his methods for husbanding and marshaling it are likely to resonate with anyone who’s striving to do something that hasn’t been done before.
“His methods for husbanding and marshaling genius are likely to resonate with anyone who’s striving to do something that hasn’t been done before.”

Nash absolutely believed in learning by doing. “Classes dull the mind,” says Russell Crowe in one of the opening shots in the movie, reflecting Nash’s sentiments completely. At 15, Nash was making pipe bombs, mixing beakers of nitroglycerin, and re-proving theorems by Fermat. Once he got to Princeton, “it was as if he wanted to reinvent, for himself, 300 years of mathematics,” said the mathematician John Milnor, who was a freshman when Nash was a first-year grad student. Nash was also always primed for inspiration, no matter where or when it came. He quizzed well-known visiting lecturers, and carried a clipboard and jotted down ideas in illegible scribbles. Some of his best ideas came from trying to reconstruct arguments from his own indecipherable notes. Within a semester, he had invented something new — a beautiful game played on a rhombus with Go stones — that instantly established his reputation as a pure mathematician. Within 14 months, he had also started on the thesis that would win him the Nobel.

Nash thought of mathematics as a ferociously competitive sport. “I imagine that by now you are indeed used to miscalculation,” sneers Russell Crowe’s Nash to a rival. The rival taunts him back as he beats Nash at Go: “What if you never come up with your original idea? What if you lose?” For Nash, who craved recognition, mathematics was about winning. He wasn’t alone, either. “Competitiveness — it was sort of like breathing,” another graduate student told me. “We thrived on it.” Nash may have skipped lectures, but he never missed afternoon tea. That’s where the graduate students and professors played Go and Kriegspiel, the elaborate variant on chess, and traded insults and mathematical gossip. “Trivial” was Nash’s pet put-down. “Hacker” was another. Ranking students and professors — with himself on top — was a favorite pastime. He was by no means a brilliant chess player, only an unusually aggressive one. “He managed not just to overwhelm me but to destroy me by pretending to have made a mistake,” recalled a man who had made the error of challenging Nash to a game.

Winning didn’t mean much, though, unless the stakes were high. Nash was always looking for big, unsolved problems. At MIT in the early 1950s, Nash on a dare took up a problem that had baffled mathematicians for a century. The experts in the subject predicted he’d get nowhere. They were wrong. He succeeded by simplifying the problem and then pursuing a strategy that seemed bizarre only because it was novel. It was just another example of Nash’s tendency to trust his own instincts over received wisdom. “Everyone else would climb a peak by looking for a path somewhere on the mountain,” one of Nash’s supporters said later. “Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from a distant peak would shine a searchlight back on the first peak.” Or as Nash himself put it, he tended “to think that the thing to do is to get away from what other people are doing and not to follow directly in anyone’s recent work.”

But Nash was no loner. As eccentric and competitive as he was, he was remarkably good at recruiting other people to join his coalition. “Some mathematicians like to work by themselves,” another graduate student said. “He liked to exchange ideas.” At MIT, for example, Nash finished what some regard as his most important work by persuading half a dozen colleagues to spend months collaborating with him to fill in gaps in his proof. “It was like building the atom bomb,” recalled one. Even in graduate school, Nash’s “beautiful mind” motivated other students to look out for someone they regarded as “obnoxious, a brat.” One insisted that Nash claim credit for his Nobel Prize-winning proof by immediately publishing a version in the National Academy of Sciences journal. “He was spacey,” said David Gale, now emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California in Berkeley. “He never would have thought of doing that.”

Making a movie that tries to take the audience inside Nash’s head confronted the filmmakers with a different kind of creative puzzle: translating thoughts and ideas into visual images. Akiva Goldsman, who wrote the screenplay, had the brilliant idea of letting the audience see the world through Nash’s eyes in the movie’s first half. The director, Ron Howard, invented scene after scene of carefully choreographed details to communicate the gist of Nash’s original idea — and later his delusions. Crowe exploited a chance encounter with Nash on the second day of filming to conjure up, eight weeks later, a perfect evocation of Nash in his seventies. Crowe wore the same red cap and tan raincoat, adopted the same tentative air, and repeated verbatim Nash’s monologue about Ceylonese versus Indian teas. It became one of the most affecting scenes in the movie. For me, that was the most extraordinary example of an actor’s wizardry.

The most surprising reaction to the movie came from high school students who told me they were intrigued by the world of mathematics, that they thought it was cool. It’s like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of what makes a first-rate mind: the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time. I think it’s great that they think of mathematics and Russell Crowe together. Great stories do inspire, and a story that can spark an interest in pursuing original ideas is about as creative as anything I can think of.

Sylvia Nasar’s best-selling biography about John Nash, A Beautiful Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1998), inspired the Academy Award-winning movie. She holds the Knight Chair in Business Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is currently working on a book about 20th-century economic thinkers.
 
 
Copyright © Gruner + Jahr USA Publishing.

Airlines lose seat appeal

Federal regulators in Canada have received a green light from the country’s top court to force major airlines to provide free extra seats to disabled or obese passengers who need them.

 The Supreme Court of Canada, in a decision released without comment today, rejected an application by Air Canada, Air Canada Jazz and WestJet for permission to appeal the move by the Canadian Transportation Agency.

 The court decision, in effect, upholds the agency’s finding that the three carriers were discriminating against the disabled. The agency ordered the companies last January to adopt a policy of “one person, one fare.”

 That would mean, for example, that a disabled person who needs additional room for a wheelchair, or an obese person who needs an additional seat, couldn’t be charged extra.

 It would also mean that, if a disabled person has to be accompanied by an attendant, the attendant would ride for free.

 ”This is going to make a huge difference for those people,” said David Baker, the Toronto lawyer who fought the case on behalf of disabled passengers.

 ”They are going to be able to travel now. . . . It’s a great thing for people with disabilities, it’s a great thing for Canada.”

 The Council of Canadians with Disabilities, which participated in the case, also welcomed the ruling Thursday.

 ”We celebrate this decision and are thrilled to see the removal of another long-standing barrier to our mobility and travel,” said Pat Danforth, speaking for the council.

 The transportation agency’s order technically applies only to Air Canada, Air Canada Jazz and WestJet, but their share of the domestic airline market is estimated at over 90 per cent.

 Baker said the ruling suggests that complaints against other airlines would be virtually certain to succeed. He expressed hope, however, that federal authorities will save people the bother of launching further complaints by simply issuing industry-wide regulations.

 Air Canada and WestJet said they will comply with the transportation agency’s order, which set a deadline of Jan. 9, 2009, for implementing the new policy.

 Both airlines noted, however, that the order applies only to their domestic flights, not to international ones.

 WestJet spokesman Richard Bartem said his airline would consider extending the policy to international flights but hasn’t decided whether to do so. Peter Fitzpatrick of Air Canada said he couldn’t speculate on that point.

 Both carriers also said they will have to develop detailed eligibility rules about precisely what kind of disabilities qualify for free seats and train their staffs on the subject.

 Bus, train and ferry companies have long made arrangements for free extra seats, but the airline industry had argued it would lose too much money by doing the same.

 The transportation agency rejected claims that providing extra seats would impose an “undue hardship” on airlines, saying they can afford the financial burden.

 The agency estimated the cost to Air Canada at abut $7 million a year and to WestJet at about $1.5 million a year. That amounts to about 77 cents a ticket for Air Canada and 44 cents for WestJet.

 To put it another way, the agency said the cost would be 0.09 per cent of Air Canada’s annual passenger revenue and 0.16 per cent of WestJet’s revenue.

 THE CANADIAN PRESS

Marketing: Toronto hotel boasts own honey from rooftop hives

Royal York luxury hotel

The term greenwashing is often used to describe companies that make ambiguous or flat-out erroneous claims to being eco-friendly – think of British Aerospace, who in 2006 attempted to green their ammunitions with reduced-lead bullets and recyclable explosives, or such paradoxical food products as organic TV dinners.

But on the flip-side of this are the companies who are so concertedly, over-the-top green, it seems almost farcical.
Take Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream makers from Vermont who recently launched a Fair-Trade vanilla flavour.
The launch, however, didn’t just consist of churning out the new ice cream and taking out some ads in local media – it included a comprehensive website outlining all the official Fair Trade regulations as well as an online photo album showcasing the company’s vanilla-bean growing operations in India, Paraguay and Ecuador.

On top of this, the website explains, Ben & Jerry’s are also working on a prototype for thermoacoustic fridges, which are powered by sound waves, as well as asking all their employees to offset their air travel and ensure their climate “hoofprint” is carbon neutral. They also use free-range eggs, strictly monitor their dairy farms, order all their brownie bits from a kitchen that teaches cooking to the homeless and they’re currently looking at converting their ice cream waste into energy with something called a bio-gas digester.

It gets to the point where consumers could argue that eating a tub of Half-Baked every weekend effectively offsets the drive to the cottage.
Here in Canada, too, there are businesses and organizations that are going ridiculously above and beyond when it comes to the green movement.
Evergreen, for example, the non-profit that’s headed by Geoff Cape and has been around since 1991, has been handed the reins to the development of Toronto’s Don Valley Brick Works.

In a couple years’ time, say the organizers, the heritage site will officially reopen to the public as “the greenest building in North America.” There will be pesticide-free educational gardens, a native plant nursery, a producers-only farmers market, community programming workshops and youth training services, urban wilderness camps, office space for socially responsible businesses and a slow-food restaurant with a seasonal, local menu, focused on public education and chef training.
Needless to say, all the buildings will also be LEED-certified with rainwater-capturing systems, solar panels, living walls, geothermal heating and green roofs.

But of course, in the world of eco-extremes, green roofs are nothing. These days, to impress most eco-buffs, you have to have a fully functioning rooftop garden, complete with seasonal herbs, fruit and vegetables, maybe even some hops, a few grape vines and a bee hive or two in order to produce as-local-as-possible booze and honey.

This may sound like it’s feasible only for those who live in the country and make gardening a full-time hobby, but in fact, the Fairmont Royal York hotel in downtown Toronto is doing all of this, with enough time leftover to offer guests daily rooftop tours with their afternoon tea.
And don’t even think about joking, “What’s next, livestock?” to executive chef David Garcelon – he’s already considered that possibility.
“I had someone suggest last week that we put chickens up here,” he said one recent Saturday morning, while up on the hotel roof inspecting his hives and zucchini plants, “but it’s illegal – plus we wouldn’t want any roosters waking up our guests. I think we’re going to stay away from the crazy ideas for at least another six months.”

The honeybees – who live in three designer hives called The Royal Sweet, the Honey Moon Suite and the V.I.Bee Suite, complete with the official hotel logo – are a new addition to the rooftop garden, managed by Garcelon, his apprentices and members of the Toronto Beekeepers Cooperative.
“The interesting thing about bees and the Royal York set-up in particular is that the honey will be specific to this location,” said Mylee Nordin, one of the TBC members. “They feed off the closest food source so they’re going to be feeding off the garden a lot and it’ll be kind of a taste-picture of the hotel itself.”

By keeping hives on the roof, chef Garcelon and the rest of the Royal York staff are not only ensuring that one of their restaurant’s most versatile ingredients is extra-local – the honey will be used in everything from salad dressings to soup, as well as cocktails and ice cream – but that surrounding green spaces like the ravine and the island are kept pollinated so the biodiversity of the city, as a whole, is further enriched.
Urban beekeeping is obviously a significant eco-friendly initiative, but it’s one that the average Canadian can’t exactly start up on a whim. There are various laws against operating hives within certain distances of people’s homes, rules and procedures that must be followed in terms of set-up and maintenance, a provincial apiarist to consult and inspections to undergo.

That said, in the race amongst sustainably minded corporations to be the greenest biz on the block, it appears no idea is too outlandish or impractical.
Perhaps over the next few years, the Royal York will get around to installing wind-powered hair dryers and composting toilets, maybe even a solar oven.
The more green initiatives a company takes on, the better – that goes without saying. It really is impossible to be too environmentally conscious these days. However, the more we’re deluged with list upon list, adjective upon adjective, detailing every single way an organization is green, the faster we may get sick of hearing about it.

As well, just because one business has gone to the extreme on the environmental front, doesn’t mean its competition should be shunned. Ben & Jerry’s may take the green prize, but buying a tub of Kawartha Dairy’s pralines and cream at the supermarket instead won’t exactly destroy the planet.
So let’s try to applaud all those who are leading the way and making enormous changes for the benefit of the earth, without brushing off the others who prefer to take baby steps.

Source: National Post

The Price Of Time

Time is the most valuable commodity. We never seem to have enough of it. Everyone is time-strapped, time-poor, time-starved. Choose your cliché.

Most of us don’t make the most of our time. We wish we did. A self-help industry has flourished on the hope that even if we can’t make more time–the 24 hours in a day remain immutable–we can at least make the most of what we have. Yet even the most ardent makers of “to-do” lists fritter time away.

Which raises this question to fill an idle moment: Why don’t we value time as we do any other good or service? We could then decide what we do with ours in the most cost-effective way: rationally maximizing our “return on time invested” (ROTI), if you will.

First, we’d need to be able to price time. Any hackneyed consultant can repeat Benjamin Franklin’s advice to a young tradesman that time is money, and then tell you to divide your annual income by 8,760 to get a per-hour value (make the denominator 8,784 this leap year). More sophisticated versions adjust for taxes and cost of living.

But mostly, that just reveals a depressingly low number: An hour of labor from the average U.S. chief executive, based on Bureau of Labor statistics, is worth only $16.

An economist might approach the problem from the starting point of a paradox that baffled Adam Smith in the 18th century: We cannot exist without water, but can get by without diamonds–and yet we value diamonds so much more highly than water.

Later economists, notably Menger in Austria and Jevons in the U.K., found an explanation in the notion that value is not inherent but subjective. In other words, prices are determined by the ability of a product to satisfy a human want, not what it costs to produce. To be technical, the actual value of a product depends on how useful its least important use is, its so-called marginal utility.

A product that exists in abundance, like water, will readily be used in unimportant ways. As it becomes scarcer, the least important uses are abandoned, and greater utility, and thus value (and prices), will be derived from the new least-important use.

The marginal utility theory of value is the foundation of most pricing in free markets. The classic textbook example of this is the marginal utility of corn to a farmer who has harvested five sacks of it.

The farmer needs the first sack just to survive until the next harvest. The second sack will ensure he eats well. The third sack he would use to feed poultry to provide variety in his diet. The fourth sack he would use to make whiskey. The fifth sack he would use to feed pet birds.

In these circumstances, the value of the fifth sack of corn is low to the farmer (although not to the birds). If he lost it, he wouldn’t pay much to replace it, if at all. He would just stop the use that provides him with the least value–feeding his pet birds.

As the farmer loses each successive sack of corn, the value rises. By the time he has only a single sack of corn, its value–and its price–is extremely high. Losing it may mean that he starves to death.

Applying the theory of marginal utility to time would lead most of us to value it cheaply. Our least important use of time is to do nothing. In short, time is more like water than like diamonds.

Yet in another sense, time is more like diamonds than water. While it seems infinite, it is actually scarce. Each individual has a finite allocation–without ever knowing what that allocation will turn out to be. As William S. Burroughs said: “No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”

Time is a curious good economically in other ways, too. It is highly perishable. Were it a bank account, time would pay no interest, close itself out each night, carry over no balances, and allow no overdrafts. What does that mean for the value of time?

It is also tradable in particular ways. We can reallocate time, but we can’t increase our supply. I can shop for food rather than grow it myself (or order in dinner rather than cook), using the time I save to undertake higher-value activities that will let me pay for my outsourcing. 

At least then I am making some attempt to determine the value of my time by reckoning its utility on an opportunity-cost basis. Franklin had a view on that, too: “He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.”

A modern behavioral economist would take issue with Franklin, or at least argue that the subject of Franklin’s admonition was making a rational choice, albeit not one that fits the neoclassical economist’s view of utility-maximizing economic man.

The Homo sapien isn’t just homo oeconomicus. Human beings make apparently irrational decisions because they value “diversions and idleness”–activities lacking market prices. Time spent in cultural pursuits, playing games, chatting with a spouse is time well and wisely spent, even if it is difficult to put a price on it.

Or, as T. S. Eliot put it, “Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time.”

Source: Forbes Magazine

Why Is CFO Turnover So High?

With the job getting tougher, one in four Fortune 1000 companies bid adieu to their finance leaders in 2007 alone.

For large-company finance chiefs considering job switches, the good news is that a lot of CFO positions are opening up. The bad news is that those who land one of them might not have it for long.

In 2007, almost a quarter of the CFO posts at Fortune 1000 companies – 234 of them, to be precise – were open at some point during the year, according to new data from executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles.

To be sure, only about 22 percent of those remained unfilled at the beginning of 2008, and more were filled shortly thereafter. But the churn rate continues to be high, with 33 new openings in just the first few weeks of the year. As of Feb. 29, 47 of the big companies were seeking a new CFO.

Turnover at smaller companies isn’t nearly as brisk. According to Liberum, a research firm that tracks management changes, at the approximately 16,000 public companies in the United States and Canada, there were 2,313 CFO changes of all kinds in 2007. But Liberum counts every promotion, resignation, hiring, and firing as one change. The actual turnover rate was a bit less than 10 percent.

Even within that larger database, however, activity has picked up markedly; the number of CFO changes last year was up 24 percent from 2005, the first year for which Liberum collected data. The industry sector with the greatest turnover in 2007 was banking, followed by pharmaceuticals/biotech and metals/mining.

Being a CFO at a very large company is a precarious position indeed. “The average tenure of a [Fortune 1000] CFO right now is less than three years,” Michele Heid, co-managing partner of the finance practice at Heidrick & Struggles, told CFO.com. “Five years ago, it was closer to five years.”

The reasons for this are many. But put simply, the job of such a CFO is getting bigger and harder at the same time the risk inherent in the position is rising. That results in more departures, both voluntary and forced.

The bigger uptick has been among those leaving voluntarily, according to Bill Behn, president of SolomonEdwardsGroup, a firm that provides technical and staffing services for corporate finance and accounting departments. The increased regulatory demands that were triggered by Sarbanes-Oxley certainly have influenced some of those decisions. “The workload has gone up 20 to 25 percent just because of the new regulation,” Behn told CFO.com.

Also because of the altered the regulatory environment, CFOs’ legal liability for errors has skyrocketed. Behn said a shift in their value systems is under way, whereby more are coming to believe that the financial rewards just aren’t as attractive in the face of this elevated risk.

As CFOs get older, their wariness may grow sharper. “Increased exposure has been very dramatic, and CFOs may be thinking that the longer they stay, the greater the potential that there will be some kind of issue,” Jonathan Schiff, a professor in Fairleigh Dickinson University’s graduate accounting program and a longtime advisor to large global corporations, told CFO.com. “So people are leaving their CFO positions not at 65, but at 50 or 55.”

Those who soldier on and become embroiled in Securities and Exchange Commission investigations and financial restatements – not to mention those who backdate stock options – are almost invariably tainted beyond repair. “Even if you win your case, you’re finished,” said Schiff. “The reputational issue is much worse than it used to be.”

Another effect of the heightened regulatory demands, for some CFOs, is that they spend more time on technical accounting issues and less on strategic planning and decision making, which may have been the opportunity that moved them to take a particular job. “They don’t even get to do the fun stuff. When you know that carrot is out there but you can’t grab it, there can be a lot of frustration,” said Behn.

At other companies the opposite situation prevails, where the level of strategic performance demanded of CFOs is so high that fewer executives today are up to the challenge.

Also a factor in the high turnover rate is “the robustness of private equity,” said Heid, “which is recruiting CFOs out of public companies to run their portfolio companies.”

For many CFOs, their span of control across the organization has increased, with functions such as information systems and human resources now reporting to them. “That puts a strain on someone whose sweet spot is finance, accounting, and treasury,” Schiff said.

Similarly, globalization is turning up the heat. Since it’s not uncommon now for Fortune 1000 companies to have half of their finance and accounting staffs abroad, CFOs must acquire a grasp of, or at least an appreciation for, diversity and cultural issues – something else that may be out of their comfort zones, according to Schiff.

Finally, there’s that great big bear called ERP. Many of the enterprise-resource-planning systems on the market the past several years showed a lot of promise up front but ended up being highly problematic in their delivery, according to Schiff. “There was a very pressured sell on these systems,” he said. “But their level of difficulty and complexity were often understated. Many CFOs signed onto enormous projects that violated their own rules of capital budgeting and planning. If these projects had been coming out of their own businesses, they would have been scrutinized much more.”

The result was that implementations that should have taken two or three years in some cases took five, six, or more. “That tends to burn a person out,” observed Schiff.

Source: CFO Magazine March 2008

Stop Speaking in Jargon

Too often, business people communicate in jargon and buzzwords. They’d be more effective if they spoke in plain English

 

Inspiring business communicators speak in clear, understandable language. The language of motivation is free of meaningless gibberish. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way the wheels came off, and business professionals began speaking in vague terms that fail to connect with listeners. The other week I read a magazine interview with an analyst who had been asked about his forecast for technology spending in 2008. His reply: “Expect commoditized processes to be optimized and varying instances to be consolidated and standardized on middleware platforms.” Words like “optimized,” “commoditized,” and “standards” are buzzwords that mean nothing to most listeners, but the use of such language does serve a purpose-to elevate a person in his own mind. Wikipedia says “buzzwords are typically intended to impress one’s audience with the pretense of knowledge.”

Anyone who thinks using buzzwords will make them sound intelligent is wrong. Clarity impresses. Buzzwords confuse.

Don’t get me wrong. Some jargon serves a purpose. Intuit  founder Scott Cook once reminded me that using jargon isn’t bad if it’s understood by your audience. For example, if a chief financial officer is speaking to investors, then EPS (earnings per share) is acceptable jargon. It’s “customer-preferred.” But in most cases where persuasion must take place, like selling a product to a customer or an idea to your boss, a compelling discussion should be largely free of jargon. Your goal as the speaker is to help listeners follow your message, not to leave them more confused. Here are several ways to make sure you are understood.

Answer the No. 1 Question

On my first day of journalism school at Northwestern, I was taught to answer the one question on the minds of my readers: What’s in it for me? Your pitch or presentation might have impressive data, eye-popping charts, and compelling case studies, but if it’s not clear how your product or service improves the lives of your listeners, you will lose their attention and their business.

A recent Dilbert cartoon poked fun at the hot buzzword in technology these days, “server virtualization.” It’s comical to hear IT (information technology) professionals explain it. Dilbert creator Scott Adams does as a good a job as anyone. Dilbert’s boss has read about virtualization in a magazine and instructs Dilbert to get right on it. In one strip, the boss is told, “there is no need to worry about the server virtualization project. In phase one, a team of blind monkeys will unplug unnecessary servers. In phase two, the monkeys will hurl software at whatever is left. Voilà!”

The actual definition is very confusing. Imagine trying to promote server virtualization throughout a company by saying, “Server virtualization is the masking of server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems, from server users.” That’s a technically accurate definition but so full of jargon that it is meaningless to most people. Now imagine if an IT professional told the CEO, “I’d like to show you how we can save money on our energy bills by consolidating our sprawling server farms into fewer pieces of hardware.” What’s the difference? This version answers the question, What’s in it for me? (in this case, for the CEO and the company). Answer the No. 1 question quickly and clearly.

Paint Verbal Pictures

WMware, a leading consulting company specializing in virtualization, has launched a Web site called Ain’t That the Truth, which provides examples of how much money and energy a company can save by “virtualizing” their servers with VMware technology. With the help of a “savings calculator,” the site offers a visual representation of the benefits.

For example, if a company virtualized its 100 servers, the calculator shows that it could reduce more than 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, the equivalent of planting nearly 5,000 trees, taking 250 cars off the road, and eliminating the emissions from nearly 500 cows. (Yes, the calculator tracks cow emissions. How’s that for a visual?) And the company saves more than $153,000 in server-related energy costs.

VMware’s site succeeds because it takes a complex technology and paints a vivid picture of the benefits. You must do the same in your discussions. Replace buzzwords and jargon with tangible examples, analogies, comparisons, and real-world case studies to paint a verbal picture for your listeners.

Find the “Wow”

Meaningless jargon and buzzwords are so common they have become a national joke. On a YouTube clip from NBC’s The Office, the former temp turned boss, Ryan Howard, explains a new initiative this way: “It’s convergence, viral marketing, we’re going guerrilla. We’re taking it to the street while keeping an eye on the street. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. It is what it is.” Funny, yes. But you hear this kind of thing all too often. Eliminate overused language or esoteric jargon from most of your conversations, especially with listeners who don’t live and breathe your field.

I was once helping a CEO prepare for a major investment conference. I asked him how he planned to describe his company for analysts. Without flinching, he said: “Our company is the premier developer of intelligent semiconductor intellectual-property solutions that dramatically accelerate complex SOC designs while minimizing risk.” At that point, I knew it was going to be a very long day. I kept urging him to simplify his message by asking him to “wow” me.

After 30 minutes, the exasperated CEO turned to me and said, “Look, do you have a cell phone?” “I sure do,” I replied. “Our technology makes cell phones that are smaller, have longer battery life, and allow you to do fun things on your phone like play music and video.” Now there’s the wow. The difference, of course, is that he eliminated industry-specific jargon. He also won over his audience.

“A Touch of Genius and a Lot of Courage”

We can put an end to jargon-filled communications, but it will take commitment. Some people are afraid to make the change. Financial guru Suze Orman once told me, “People criticize simplicity because they need to feel as though the topic is more complicated. If everything were so simple, they think their jobs could be eliminated. It’s our fear of extinction, our fear of elimination, our fear of not being important that leads us to communicate things more than we need to.”

Albert Einstein once said: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” Let’s be courageous and put our ideas into plain language we can all understand.

Source: Business Week

Are You Micro-Managing Your Mind?

One of the greatest traps in growing a business is also a pitfall for self management: if you don’t trust your system, you can’t let go of operational details and you’ll limit your ability to create at a bigger level.
 
Many successful entrepreneurs I have worked with over the years could be characterized (and have been, by their employees and friends) as “highly creative control freaks.” It’s understandable because usually it takes that kind of strong, directed energy to create a business, to make something out of nothing. Much like a parents will go to superhuman lengths to protect their vulnerable offspring, someone who gives birth to an enterprise almost of necessity must have skin as thick as an elephant’s and the aggressive/defensive capacity of a samurai warrior. It takes tremendous focus, determination, and, yes, a certain lack of sensitivity, to create something new and get it to stick around in this world.
 
That protectionism can, of course, become their undoing. In order to continue in their visionary capacity to grow and expand, they must mature not only their team and their systems but themselves as well, to prevent the strangulation of micro-management. They have to trust. But trust is not something you can just do because you should. I suppose you can develop a greater sense of overall optimism about life, but you don’t merely learn to trust — you learn to build trust. And you do that by creating a system and working it, so you can let go at that lower functional level, without letting go of the bigger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish.
 
A beginner at the wheel of a car will have jerky, small movements. They are maintaining control, just at small increments of focus. Only as they learn to trust the car’s responsiveness can they let go on that level, extend their horizon, and cruise at higher speeds more easily.

Similarly, if you don’t fully trust your personal systems, you are likely to be dedicating inappropriate and unnecessary mental attention to details and content, causing yourself stress in the process. You’ll feel pulled, overwhelmed, and often like you’re close to losing control.

But you can’t trust your system until it’s trust-worthy. When is that? When you know you have captured all your commitments, clarified what you’re intending to do about them, decided the actions you need to take about them, and have parked reminders of those actions in places that you know you’ll look, where and when you need to.

Entrepreneurs have to break out of their comfort zone of operational control and let go, getting good people in the right places, accountable for the right things and monitored appropriately. Similarly, to keep a clear head focused creatively at the right things you must have all the right things in your personal system and the behaviors to look at them at the right time. If you try to keep more than ten things in your mind at once, you’ll lose objectivity about their relationships with each other. Less important things will bother you more than they should, and you won’t give the tactical and strategic stuff the objective attention it deserves. And if some part of you knows that you don’t have everything captured and organized in the right place, your brain simply won’t let go of some attention to unseen details. You’ll find yourself still to some degree at the mercy of the latest and loudest. It’s the price paid for staying in the comfort zone of keeping control of it all in your head.

When people begin to implement the Getting Things Done methods, they initially feel a rush of energy and creativity, while feeling more relaxed at the same time. But those positive experiences can slip away quickly without the confidence that the content of their systems is complete and current (the inventory of which could have been changed and expanded hugely with the last phone call). People have often said, “Gee, I have everything captured in the system, but my mind is still worrying and reminding me about this and that.” My question is, “How long have you been working your system?” Usually they have only recently set it up. That won’t be sufficient to build trust yet, and your mind will still try to keep control. That’s why the challenge is to keep going – to keep coming back to everything downloaded, processed, and organized. And the trick is to come back often enough for the mind to be able to let go, trusting that remembering and reminding is really being handled by something better than it is. Then you’re truly free to be thinking about things, not of them. 

Source: Alternet

Dialling up the wireless dream

 

Late in October last year, a couple set out from Vancouver for a day of sailing. Within a few hours, they were in trouble. The navigation system on the boat had failed, and fog was masking the land.

Where did they turn for help? Their cellphone. They called their wireless provider, Telus Corp., C and its employees were able to locate the boat using global positioning system (GPS) technology and direct them to the nearest town. By nightfall, the couple had safely reached shore.

The incident underlines the remarkable transformation the cellphone has undergone since it was introduced over 25 years ago. Back then, it was used mostly to make calls. Now, it can take pictures, send video clips, broadcast TV shows, and even help locate us when we are lost. In emerging markets, it’s the first phone that many people have ever owned.

The sales figures are astounding. There are 6.6 billion people in the world. In 2006, nearly a billion cellphones were sold, according to research firm Gartner Inc., which estimates another 1.13 billion were snapped up last year.

Cellphones are everywhere these days and capable of performing almost any task – or at least that’s the industry’s hope. (Graham Roumieu)

The most advanced wireless markets are in Asia and Europe, whether measured by the number of cellphone owners, the popularity of mobile TV and gaming services, or the introduction of cutting-edge features.

North Americans, and Canadians in particular, have been slower to adopt some cellphone services, but there are changes afoot that could disrupt that market this year.

In Canada, the government recently decided to set aside some wireless spectrum, or airwaves, for new entrants to bid on in a coming auction. It’s hoping the presence of new competitors will lead to lower prices and greater innovation.

There’s more evidence of change in the United States. Apple Inc.’s C iPhone was the world’s hippest cellphone last year. Internet giant Google Inc. C is pushing for devices that will work on any wireless network, rather than being tied to a specific cellphone carrier, a change that the U.S. government has decided to adopt for part of the spectrum it is auctioning off this month.

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FISH FINDER:

It may not be the creepy chip implant from science fiction movies, but consumers are still being tracked – through the cellphone in their pocket. More devices are using GPS chips, which allow a wireless service provider to pinpoint a customer’s location within metres. Even without GPS, wireless carriers can still hunt down a subscriber based on the signal the phone sends out to nearby cell towers.

Despite obvious privacy concerns about who has access to the data and how they will use it, the sheer convenience makes such location services a hot area. Finnish cellphone king Nokia Corp. C obviously thinks so: It spent $8.1-billion (U.S.) to buy a maker of digital maps to put on its handsets. Google is also keen on this technology, and its mapping service for cellphones gives people detailed directions and information about local businesses.

In Canada, Bell Mobility Inc. C and Telus both offer a service that lets anxious parents keep close tabs on their kids by following their cellphones. (That’s how Telus located the sailboat and the couple lost off the B.C. coast.)

Customers of Manitoba Telecom Services Inc. C can access a service to locate a taxi company in their area and connect the call. Next up, a service from Rogers Wireless Communications Inc. C that will provide information on the fastest routes for commuters trying to avoid traffic jams.

There are even more imaginative ways to use tracking and location services. One of the newest in Canada, the United States and Britain guides cellphone customers to the nearest toilet.

In South Korea, cellphones have become a secret weapon for recreational fishermen. SK Telecom C offers an “AnyFishing” service that displays details about water depth and temperature and even the location of schools of fish on a subscriber’s cellphone. A radio transmitter in the water sends the “inside” information to a receiver hooked up to the cellphone.

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LIFESAVER:

Cellphones aren’t exactly known for their health benefits. Their constant ringing can cause headaches. Other people are concerned about possible long-term effects from using cellphones.

Yet some companies are betting they will enhance, not harm, our well-being in the future.

Switzerland’s Card Guard AG C uses wireless devices to check a patient’s heart rate or glucose levels and sends the information back via cellphone to a physician. The doctor gets a much better overall impression of a patient’s health because he receives regular reports, rather than just running occasional tests at the office. The service is available in Europe and will soon be introduced in the United States.

Card Guard also recently launched a service in the U.S. under the Sensei brand that is the equivalent of Weight Watchers for chubby technophiles. The cellphone becomes a diet coach, telling people what to eat, how to exercise and even giving them motivational pep talks. It could come to Canada as soon as 2008.

It’s still wishful thinking to believe that cellphones will cut down on doctor visits any time soon. Michael Gartenberg, a director at Jupiter Research, says there are a lot of issues to iron out in this area, including privacy concerns and figuring out where to send and store the information. “Probably it’s something that’s going to be a little bit further out …” he said.

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THUMB WRESTLING:

Games on cellphones are certainly handy for killing time during a bus ride or while waiting for a friend to show up. It’s no wonder that global mobile gaming revenue is expected to jump from $2.9-billion in 2006 to $9.6-billion in 2011, according to a report last year from Gartner.

Gamers in Canada have a wide array of titles to choose from, including classics such as Tetris and Pac-Man, action games such as Deer Hunter, and Texas Hold’em for the poker crowd.

In the future, look for mobile games to follow the evolution of their bigger-screen cousins. Nintendo, for example, has a big hit on its hands with its Wii video game console. Instead of pushing buttons, players move a motion-sensing remote control. Japanese wireless trailblazer NTT DoCoMo Inc. C is trying to replicate that innovation for cellphones. In its new bowling game, subscribers move their cellphone instead of a heavy ball and then watch the screen to see if they got a strike.

Although the small screen and keyboard can quickly turn a fun time-filler into an eye-straining, cramp-inducing experience, Gartner predicts mobile video games could eventually be more popular than the Wii, Xbox, or PlayStation consoles sitting at home.

“Given the ubiquity of mobile phones in many markets and the ease of game-play, mobile gaming is expected to reach more of the global population than has been the case for traditional PC and console gaming,” Gartner analyst Tuong Huy Nguyen said in the report.

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MOBILE TUTOR:

Cellphones, with their games, music and e-mail, have proven to be much more distracting for students than the folded notes and paper airplanes of the past. Text messaging also makes them effective tools for cheating. As a result, some school boards have expelled these devices from the classroom.

Not everyone believes that is necessary. They argue the devices offer potential educational opportunities, since so many kids and young adults own them and carry them everywhere. Moreover, cellphones, unlike some teachers, have no problem holding the attention of students.

“Mobile technologies have the potential to provide Canadian learners with increased access to information and learning materials, and to support learning and working ‘on the go’ and from anywhere rather than from a specific location at a certain time,” Mohamed Ally, an associate professor at Athabasca University and Simone Laughton of the University of Toronto Mississauga Library wrote in a 2006 mobile-learning study.

But while there is plenty of research in the field, it’s difficult to find real-life examples. Athabasca, which offers online and long-distance learning, believes it’s the leader in Canada. Students can get access to its digital library from cellphones, and download learning materials for computer science and English as a second language courses. “That’s where the students are,” said Athabasca professor Rory McGreal. He says they like the convenience of learning in such places as a bus, but high data charges are a drawback. He added that Europe and Asia are further ahead in cellphone learning.

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ROAD WARRIOR:

It’s the dream of many a business traveller – packing only a tiny cellphone that can handle all kinds of work on the road. But don’t ditch your laptop just yet.

“People will be like superheroes of days of old having a collection of all these nifty gadgets, and depending on where they’re going and what they’re doing, deciding which of the gadgets they’re going to take with them,” Jupiter’s Mr. Gartenberg said.

The BlackBerry has clearly done a good job of solving the problem of keeping up with e-mail when out of the office, turning a generation of business types into “CrackBerry” addicts.

Connecting to the Web or creating documents on a small wireless device, however, is trickier. For the most part, the miniature screen is not up to the demands of reading and navigating these images. Moreover, typing for hours on a keyboard that is many times smaller than the real thing requires a lot of patience, and virtual versions that project a larger keyboard onto another surface are just emerging.

For now, the laptop is better suited for tasks beyond e-mail. Hooked up to a cellular or WiFi network, it’s worth the added luggage on the road.

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GOLF ON THE GO:

Star Trek’s Captain James Kirk, a.k.a. William Shatner, flew to Toronto last year to plug Rogers’ video calling and television services for cellphones. It’s a product that has hogged the limelight in recent years as wireless carriers try to persuade customers to tune in to the small screen. It may sound cool like the gizmos on Star Trek, but video on cellphones still needs some work.

Video’s leap from TV sets to tiny cellphones has been an amazing development. In 2005, Rogers, Bell and Telus all started rolling out cellphone TV services and have since expanded their range of services to include YouTube clips and even full-length movies.

Nevertheless, even on the fastest 3G wireless networks, the experience is a far cry from watching a show or movie at home. To begin with, there is the picture, which is blurry and sometimes freezes. Wide angle camera views during sports games can make the players look more like stick men, and good luck finding the ball in a golf tournament. Getting news on the go is practical, but the shrunken headlines and sports scores are nearly impossible to read.

The selection of shows is also limited. Along with sports and news, there are music videos, weather updates, and a few specialized services such as The Learning Channel (TLC). But forget watching Grey’s Anatomy, House or other prime time hits.

For now, the TV-watching cellphone user is a rare species. There will have to be big changes to get more customers on board. Faster wireless networks in the future will help, allowing more frames per second and therefore a cleaner picture. Moreover, video clips and shows would probably look a lot better if they were shot with the small screen in mind.

“A two-inch screen or a three-inch screen isn’t a 30-inch screen and it needs to be treated differently,” Jupiter’s Mr. Gartenberg said.

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WIRELESS WEB:

Internet service on cellphones hasn’t lived up to its potential, according to research firm Yankee Group. The research outlet figures that it should be a $66-billion market by now, but instead is a mere $9.5-billion. Yankee Group cites a number of barriers, including the lack of “affordable and reliable” Web access on cellphones.

Anybody who has tried to connect to the Internet on a cellphone knows it’s a frustrating experience. First of all, it’s slower than on a land-line Internet connection. In part, that’s dependent upon the speed of the network, but also because the devices aren’t built to get the most out of that service. As well, media and retail organizations are only starting to catch on that they need to tailor their websites for the smaller screen.

Web access on cellphones presents some unique opportunities for retailers, according to Myron Flickner, who works in one of IBM’s research labs. For example, retailers could provide a wireless Internet connection that lets customers look up store or product information on their cellphone, he said.

The confused approach to the mobile Internet should change in 2008, Jupiter’s Mr. Gartenberg predicts. He said it’s not about delivering the entire Internet to the phone, or even just the basics. “The best efforts going forward are really going to be those that try to unite these two things together and realize that the phone is a different experience,” he said.

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WALLET KILLER:

Of all the possible cellphone services, one of the most compelling is also the most difficult to deliver. Imagine pulling out a cellphone to pay for a coffee, a bus ride or even groceries.

Right now, there are only a few areas where cellphones can be used as electronic wallets in Canada. Cellphone payments for parking have been around for a couple of years. More recently, Bell launched a service that lets people pay for movie tickets with their cellphone.

Royal Bank of Canada C is thinking big. It recently joined forces with Visa to test “contactless” payments that would let wireless subscribers move their cellphones past a card reader to pay for purchases. The hope is that this system could arrive in stores in just over a year.

Mr. Flickner of IBM also predicts consumers will receive a lot more coupons on their cellphones this year. Despite such enthusiasm, other countries have clearly been quicker to embrace the idea of mobile money. In Europe, consumers grab their cellphone to pay for train tickets or Coke in vending machines. Some banks and technology companies in France are testing cellphone payments for a wide range of products and services, including clothing, groceries, hair cuts, and meals.

Once again, though, Asia is the leader. NTT DoCoMo of Japan says a cellphone can take the place of most contents in a purse. Customers can use their cellphones when they shop at various convenience stores, buy snacks from vending machines, and make purchases online. NTT DoCoMo cellphones also take the place of paper tickets when passengers check in at airports or board a train. And they are used as keys and ID cards in some buildings. McDonald’s Corp. C even plans to accept cellphone payments in Japan.

So why does so-called mobile, or m-commerce, at times appear more complicated than decoding DNA? There are a few stumbling blocks. Cellphones are easily lost, so there need to be rigorous security features for consumers to feel comfortable using the device as a debit or credit card. Retailers would also have to do a lot of work to get all the systems in place. As well, it’s easier if all the cellphone carriers in a region work together to ensure there is a common system.

Then there are the cellphones themselves. Bar code scanners that use the cameras in wireless devices don’t work that well, according to Mr. Flickner. In other words, shopping with the cellphone is some time off.

“It’s going to be an evolution versus a revolution,” he said.

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BOOMBOX:

Apple’s iPod beat the wireless carriers to the music market. Since then, they’ve been trying to catch up. After all, Apple showed them just how lucrative digital music players can be. Six years after it introduced the iPod, the company sold 10.2-million of them in the fiscal fourth quarter, and it’s also generating revenue from its online iTunes music store.

Now music cellphones are the norm. Using extra memory cards, they can store some 4,000 tunes. Bell, Rogers and Telus all have introduced their version of iTunes, offering hundreds of thousands of songs to their cellphone subscribers. In 2006, they expanded their music offerings to include satellite radio. It’s not the full service, though, with only 20 or so stations.

Worldwide, cellphone subscribers spent $13.7-billion on music last year, a figure that is expected to soar to $32.2-billion by 2010, according to Gartner. Ring tones account for $7.13-billion of the 2007 amount. Consumers purchase ring tones to identify callers, and keep updating them to stay current. Music magazine Billboard even has a ring tone chart. The latest one is rather eclectic, featuring DJ Khaled’s I’m So Hood alongside Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Brothers Theme.

In at least one instance, Canadian wireless subscribers can be thankful they’re behind when it comes to cellphone services. South Korea’s SK Telecom offers – horror of horrors – a karaoke function for cellphones. Imagine how much more unbearable the commute home could be.

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SOCIAL BUTTERFLY:

An occasional e-mail or phone call isn’t enough to keep up with friends during the week. Instead, Generation Y constantly issues computer updates on their every move, sharing details and photos through social networking websites.

The next frontier is the cellphone. Social networking sites throughout the world, whether Facebook and MySpace in North America, Cyworld in South Korea, or Mixi in Japan are making the jump from the personal computer to the cellphone. It’s a natural fit since many cellphones now have cameras and video players, so users can record their activities on the go. One service called Kyte, which is now being tested among some users, actually lets them create their own TV channel starring themselves, producing their shows on cellphones.

“I could take a picture of where I am and show you where I am at this very moment and post it on the Web, I could send it to your phone, I could put it on the blog,” said Jill Meyers, an analyst at research firm In-Stat. “It’s very, very current. People like that.”

Along with updating the world, these sites can also help friends hook up. For example, Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google a few years ago, sends text messages to a user’s friends to let them know where to meet up. It also alerts users when their Dodgeball “crushes” are near.

There are even services to deter pests. In Japan, women can download a program on their cellphones that flashes warning messages to gropers to keep their distance.

Source: The Globe and Mail

Job to blame for work-life unbalance

Employers should be walking the talk when it comes to allowing time for family life, author says.

If you can’t stick to a healthy lifestyle or find time for family, blame the job, not yourself

 
New Year’s resolutions tend to be discarded like old Christmas trees – and often just as quickly.
But blaming ourselves for being weak only masks a larger problem. We don’t go to the gym or get home in time for dinner with the family because our lives contain too much stress and not enough time and we, the workers of the world, cannot unilaterally change that.

So I suggest turning the idea of resolutions on its head, and making them for other people, specifically, people empowered to change the punishing pace of the working world. I turned to smart thinkers in the realm of life/work – people who have done a lot to advance the conversation this past year. If you could assign a resolution to a business leader to improve the lot of the overstressed, less-than-balanced worker, I asked, what would that resolution be?

I began with Cathleen Benko, an author of Mass Career Customization (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), which I think was the most important life/work book this year. Benko is the chief talent officer at Deloitte & Touche USA, and her book is a prescription for workplace change based on her experiences at Deloitte, where an internal study found that flexibility policies were doing only half their job.

Boatloads of employees had flexible schedules but the arrangements tended to be made at times of “crisis,” Benko says, when a baby is born or a relative is sick, and were rarely revisited. So flexibility became de facto marginalization, making the workers seem like exceptions to the norm and providing no way for them to dial their schedule back up.

Deloitte has begun “mapping” the careers of all its employees – plotting their work schedules (full-time, part-time), their workloads, their work locations (home? lots of travel?) and their roles (leader, support player).
The maps show that today’s workers no longer climb a corporate ladder so much as navigate a corporate lattice – sometimes going sideways or even a few steps down, she wrote.
Rather than pretending that work is always first priority, “the boss should be the first to say, `I’m not going to make that meeting, because my newest grandchild is in town,’” she says.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the author of Off-Ramps and On-Ramps (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), proposes a similar New Year’s resolution for executives. The “permission” for balance must come from the top, she says: “Walk the talk, strut the stuff.”

Hewlett points to leaders who have done so. “Niall FitzGerald, when he was chair of Unilever, made a public breakfast date several times a week with his 6-year-old daughter,” she says. (FitzGerald stepped down in 2004.) “Instead of pretending he was at some early-morning meeting, he told everyone what he was doing,” she says. “It was profoundly liberating for his subordinates and resulted in a 20 per cent uptake in people making use of existing flexibility policies.”

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson also favour shaking up the workplace. In the past few years, they have polished a simple but revolutionary concept called Results-Only Work Environment, based on the idea that workplaces operate best when employees come and go on their own schedules( visit caliandjody.com).
Asked for resolutions, they wrote a manifesto that a business leader might do well to sign:
 
I, important CEO, resolve to stop saying things like “people are our most important asset” and start doing something about it.
I resolve to listen to what employees of all levels need to live their lives and then not dismiss what they say because it makes me uncomfortable.
I resolve to stop thinking that people’s lives outside of work are at odds with their lives at work.
I resolve to start putting results first and the clock second.

Shelley MacDermid, a family studies professor at Purdue University who studies the return of military workers to civilian life, is also concerned with the tone that leaders set. She suggested that company systems should be set so email messages “arrive only during business hours,” no matter when they are sent.
Often, she wrote in an email message, a boss is a night owl, dashing off notes at 3 a.m. and sending the message that employees should answer at all hours. “I don’t want to send any kind of overt or covert message that others should be ready to receive email whenever I care to send it,” she wrote of her own workplace.

If she ruled the world, Joan Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law, would “send the message that fathers are expected to take three months of family leave after the birth of their children.”

It is good for employers, too. “Many Gen-X and Gen-Y men are determined to play a larger role in their children’s lives than their fathers did in theirs,” she says. “They will stick with an employer who recognizes this.”

Eric Mosley, the chief executive of Globoforce, which creates corporate employee recognition programs, would have leaders resolve to say thank you.
“There is nothing worse than investing an enormous amount of time and energy in your work and having no one recognize what a great job you’ve been doing,” he says.

Ilene H. Lang, the president of Catalyst, which researches the role of women in corporate leadership, also proposes two words: “one more.”
“Add just one more woman to the candidate slate for every top management job,” she wrote in an email message.

Source: New York Times

A Tribute to Maurice Hilleman

Few youngsters might recognize Maurice Hilleman as the man behind their childhood immunizations. But with more than 40 vaccines to his credit, it’s no exaggeration to say Hilleman saves millions of lives each year.

On 26 January, 2005, some of the world’s most famous and accomplished biomedical researchers gathered in Philadelphia to honor Maurice Hilleman. That evening, Hilleman thanked the group, saying, “there’s no greater tribute that anyone can pay to a scientist than to give approval to a peer. All of you I think of as peers in the world of science.”

Addressed to a group of more than a hundred people, the statement was clearly absurd. By any objective measure, a gathering of Maurice Hilleman’s scientific peers would not fill a telephone booth.

Hilleman has produced a mind-boggling number of fundamental breakthroughs. He is the inventor of more than 40 vaccines, including those that prevent measles, mumps, rubella, Haemophilus influenzae type b, hepatitis A, hepatitis B and chickenpox. Epidemiologists often refer to the first few decades after World War II as the golden age of vaccinology. It might be more accurate to call it the Hilleman period. According to one estimate, his vaccines save nearly 8 million lives a year.

Hilleman also discovered SV40 and the adenoviruses, was the first to purify interferon, and the first to demonstrate that its expression is induced by double-stranded RNA—discoveries that launched several branches of molecular biology and immunology and jump-started the quest for antiviral medications.

Astonishingly, despite transforming the nature of public health, he seems to be fading into obscurity.

“Very few people, even in the scientific community, are even remotely aware of the scope of what Maurice has contributed,” Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, noted at the symposium. “I recently asked my post-docs whether they knew who had developed the measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B and chickenpox vaccines. They had no idea,” Fauci said. “When I told them that it was Maurice Hilleman, they said, ‘Oh, you mean that grumpy guy who comes to all of the AIDS meetings?’”

Indeed, Hilleman’s reputation as a prickly character often overshadows his accomplishments. Even at 86, he is a tall, confident man with a firm handshake who speaks softly but bluntly—and often profanely. Relating the story of how he met his wife, Lorraine, for example, he described his dating experiences in 1962: “I had a couple of dates. Christ. Finding women is sort of like by Brownian action. You don’t know whether they’re drunkards, or they’ll spend all your money, or whether they have venereal diseases.”

Giving up on the dating scene, he instead decided to hunt for a wife among the job applicant pool at Merck and Company in West Point, Pennsylvania, where he worked. He enlisted the aid of his administrative assistant. “I said, ‘Look, Ken, I want you to go through all these [job] applications and pick out what looks good to you, then send them up to me, and we’ll do that once a week until we find one,’” Hilleman recalls. On hearing this, a young woman in the audience at the symposium remarked to her companion, “You couldn’t get away with that today.”

The same could be said about much of Hilleman’s career. “Unlike other people in research, Maurice did every aspect of research and development,” notes P. Roy Vagelos, former chairman and chief executive officer of Merck. Hilleman characterized antigens and isolated them, then did the basic research, the process research and the clinical research, Vagelos says. Following clinical trials, Hilleman would also haunt the manufacturing facility to ensure that the vaccine was being produced correctly. “The manufacturing people were not quite used to that, so there was a constant grumble at that end of the campus,” says Vagelos.

“I ran into conflict with just about everybody,” Hilleman concedes. “I was told I had a very unusual management style. In spite of all this, I survived at Merck.” Asked if his one-man pipeline approach could work today, “it takes somebody who’s a bastard,” Hilleman says. “I don’t think there are basically any people at all left who would have the dedication.”

A strong proponent of a seven-day work week for scientists, Hilleman cites his upbringing on a farm in rural Montana as the inspiration for both his work ethic and his coarse language. Though he officially retired on his 65th birthday in accordance with Merck’s mandatory retirement policy, the company immediately re-hired him as a consultant, and he still goes to his office every day. During the course of a long interview one morning in February, he discussed everything from Sinclair Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith to the latest research on HIV and tuberculosis, revealing himself to be a sharp and voracious reader.

His dedication to his work is superseded only by his devotion to his family. Asked about his pastimes, Hilleman says, “my hobby is working.” There are dozens of stories about this workaholic virologist, but one of the most famous highlights his intense focus on public health. In 1963, when his oldest daughter, Jeryl Lynn, developed the characteristic fever and swollen glands of mumps, he made a late-night trip to the laboratory to retrieve some equipment, then returned home to culture her virus.

Jeryl recovered from the mumps virus, but the mumps virus never recovered from infecting Jeryl. Using the isolate from his daughter, Hilleman attenuated the virus and shepherded it through testing and production in his typical fashion. His younger daughter, Kirsten, participated in the early clinical trials. This now-standard mumps vaccine has since brought a classic childhood disease to the brink of extinction.

 

Looking at the current landscape of vaccinology, Hilleman advocates more collaboration between industry, academic and government researchers to develop the next generation of vaccines, a view that he says only recently became acceptable. “If you go back in history, industry was a leper,” he says. When he finished his doctoral work at the University of Chicago, he adds, “I was told … ‘we do not train people for industry,’ so I said what the hell, that’s exactly where I’m going.”

From Chicago, Hilleman went to E.R. Squibb and Sons in New Jersey in 1944, then to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington in 1948, finally joining Merck in 1957. According to Adel Mahmoud, president of the Merck Vaccine Division, the company currently produces seven vaccines, all invented by Maurice Hilleman. “This guy, whatever he touched, he developed a vaccine out of it,” says Mahmoud. “We owe him an incredible, incredible debt.”

Source: Nature Medicine