N. Joseph Woodland, Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91
By MARGALIT FOX
N. Joseph Woodland, who six decades ago drew a set of lines in the sand and in the process conceived the modern bar code, died on Sunday at his home in Edgewater, N.J. He was 91.
His daughter Susan Woodland confirmed the death.
A retired mechanical engineer, Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology — based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations — that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.
Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time. But it would ultimately give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code is officially known.
The code now adorns tens of millions of different items, scanned in retail establishments around the world at the rate of more than five billion a day.
The bar code would never have developed as it did without a chain of events noteworthy even in the annals of invention etiology:
Had Mr. Woodland not been a Boy Scout, had he not logged hours on the beach and had his father not been quite so afraid of organized crime, the code would very likely not have been invented in the form it was, if at all.
Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City on Sept. 6, 1921. As a Boy Scout he learned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.
After spending World War II on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Mr. Woodland resumed his studies at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia (it is now Drexel University), earning a bachelor's degree in 1947.
As an undergraduate, Mr. Woodland perfected a system for delivering elevator music efficiently. His system, which recorded 15 simultaneous audio tracks on 35-millimeter film stock, was less cumbersome than existing methods, which relied on LPs and reel-to-reel tapes.
He planned to pursue the project commercially, but his father, who had come of age in "Boardwalk Empire"-era Atlantic City, forbade it: elevator music, he said, was controlled by the mob, and no son of his was going to come within spitting distance.
The younger Mr. Woodland returned to Drexel for a master's degree. In 1948, a local supermarket executive visited the campus, where he implored a dean to develop an efficient means of encoding product data.
The dean demurred, but Mr. Silver, a fellow graduate student who overheard their conversation, was intrigued. He conscripted Mr. Woodland.
An early idea of theirs, which involved printing product information in fluorescent ink and reading it with ultraviolet light, proved unworkable.
But Mr. Woodland, convinced that a solution was close at hand, quit graduate school to devote himself to the problem. He holed up at his grandparents' home in Miami Beach, where he spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking.
To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.
What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, were adapted graphically? He began trailing his fingers idly through the sand.
"What I'm going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale," Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. "I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn't know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: 'Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.' "
That transformative sweep was merely the beginning. "Only seconds later," Mr. Woodland continued, "I took my four fingers — they were still in the sand — and I swept them around into a full circle."
Mr. Woodland favored the circular pattern for its omnidirectionality: a checkout clerk, he reasoned, could scan a product without regard for its orientation.
On Oct. 7, 1952, Mr. Woodland and Mr. Silver were awarded United States patent 2,612,994 for their invention — a variegated bull's-eye of wide and narrow bands — on which they had bestowed the unromantic name "Classifying Apparatus and Method."
But that method, which depended on an immense scanner equipped with a 500-watt light, was expensive and unwieldy, and it languished for years.
The two men eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000 — all they ever made from their invention.
By the time the patent expired at the end of the 1960s, Mr. Woodland was on the staff of I.B.M., where he worked from 1951 until his retirement in 1987.
Over time, laser scanning technology and the advent of the microprocessor made the bar code viable. In the early 1970s, an I.B.M. colleague, George J. Laurer, designed the familiar black-and-white rectangle, based on the Woodland-Silver model and drawing on Mr. Woodland's considerable input.
Thanks largely to the work of Alan Haberman, a supermarket executive who helped select and popularize the rectangular bar code and who died in 2011, it was adopted as the industry standard in 1973.
Mr. Woodland, who earned a master's in mechanical engineering from Syracuse University in the 1950s, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1992. Last year, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. (Mr. Silver, who died in 1963, was inducted posthumously along with him.)
Besides his daughter Susan, Mr. Woodland is survived by his wife, the former Jacqueline Blumberg, whom he married in 1951; another daughter, Betsy Karpenkopf; a brother, David; and a granddaughter.
Today, the bar code graces nearly every surface of contemporary life — including groceries, wayward luggage and, if you are a traditionalist, the newspaper you are holding — all because a young man, his mind ablaze with dots and dashes, one day raked his fingers through the sand.
NYT
Thursday, 13 December 2012
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
Sunday, 17 June 2012
Queen's English Society to Fold
Queen's English Society says enuf is enough, innit?
Society formed 40 years ago to protect language against poor spelling and grammar closes because too few people care
The Queen may be celebrating her jubilee, but the Queen's EnglishSociety, which has railed against the misuse and deterioration of the English language, is to fold.
For 40 years the society has championed good English – and hasn't been above the occasional criticism of the Queen's own pronouncements – but it has finally conceded that it cannot survive in the era of textspeak and Twitter.
Having attempted to identify a role for the society and its magazine, Quest, "for the next 40 years", the society chairman, Rhea Williams, decided it was time to close. She announced the group's demise in a terse message to members following the annual meeting, which just 22 people attended. "Despite the sending out of a request for nominations for chairman, vice-chairman, administrator, webmaster and membership secretary, no one came forward to fill any role," she said. "So I have to inform you that QES will no longer exist. There will be one more Quest, then all activity will cease and the society will be wound up. The effective date will be 30 June 2012."
She said it was sad that the society was to close but added that the difficulty in getting people to take on roles in the society was a problem being experienced by other groups across the UK.
"Things change, people change," she said. "People care about different things. If you look at lots of societies, lots of them are having problems. Lives have changed dramatically over the last 40 years. People don't want to join societies like they used to."
Former Tory MP Gyles Brandreth, the society's patron, was nevertheless optimistic: "The Queen's English isn't under threat. Her Majesty can sleep easy. The language is still in the good hands of all the people who speak good English."
He described the members and organisers of the society as "a group of enthusiasts celebrating the richness and diversity of the English language", and is convinced that whether or not enough volunteers can be found to keep the society going, their enthusiasm and love for good English will live on.
He added: "I spoke to the society about six months ago. They were in good heart."
The closure followed a major setback earlier this year when the society's plans for an Academy of Contemporary English collapsed.
Dr Bernard Lamb, president of the society, refused to accept that it was about to close. "I think our chairman is wrong to say it will cease to exist," he insisted. "The trouble is, these days no one wants to join a committee."
He added: "We've achieved more than our numbers would suggest. We've brought to public attention the very low standards of English that exist. We've provided hard evidence, not just anecdotes, on standards."
Among the issues that the society has championed over the years are the need to improve the standard of written and spoken English in Britain, the revival of the reading of stories to young children to get them to appreciate and understand the language from an early age, and the improvement of the standard of English in exams. One of its biggest achievements was to help shape the spelling, punctuation and grammar elements of English in the national curriculum.
It has also highlighted deficiencies in the use of English by university undergraduates – more than 80% were unable to spell and use the word "effect" correctly, while 43% were unable to spell the word "miniature".
Society formed 40 years ago to protect language against poor spelling and grammar closes because too few people care
The Queen may be celebrating her jubilee, but the Queen's EnglishSociety, which has railed against the misuse and deterioration of the English language, is to fold.
For 40 years the society has championed good English – and hasn't been above the occasional criticism of the Queen's own pronouncements – but it has finally conceded that it cannot survive in the era of textspeak and Twitter.
Having attempted to identify a role for the society and its magazine, Quest, "for the next 40 years", the society chairman, Rhea Williams, decided it was time to close. She announced the group's demise in a terse message to members following the annual meeting, which just 22 people attended. "Despite the sending out of a request for nominations for chairman, vice-chairman, administrator, webmaster and membership secretary, no one came forward to fill any role," she said. "So I have to inform you that QES will no longer exist. There will be one more Quest, then all activity will cease and the society will be wound up. The effective date will be 30 June 2012."
She said it was sad that the society was to close but added that the difficulty in getting people to take on roles in the society was a problem being experienced by other groups across the UK.
"Things change, people change," she said. "People care about different things. If you look at lots of societies, lots of them are having problems. Lives have changed dramatically over the last 40 years. People don't want to join societies like they used to."
Former Tory MP Gyles Brandreth, the society's patron, was nevertheless optimistic: "The Queen's English isn't under threat. Her Majesty can sleep easy. The language is still in the good hands of all the people who speak good English."
He described the members and organisers of the society as "a group of enthusiasts celebrating the richness and diversity of the English language", and is convinced that whether or not enough volunteers can be found to keep the society going, their enthusiasm and love for good English will live on.
He added: "I spoke to the society about six months ago. They were in good heart."
The closure followed a major setback earlier this year when the society's plans for an Academy of Contemporary English collapsed.
Dr Bernard Lamb, president of the society, refused to accept that it was about to close. "I think our chairman is wrong to say it will cease to exist," he insisted. "The trouble is, these days no one wants to join a committee."
He added: "We've achieved more than our numbers would suggest. We've brought to public attention the very low standards of English that exist. We've provided hard evidence, not just anecdotes, on standards."
Among the issues that the society has championed over the years are the need to improve the standard of written and spoken English in Britain, the revival of the reading of stories to young children to get them to appreciate and understand the language from an early age, and the improvement of the standard of English in exams. One of its biggest achievements was to help shape the spelling, punctuation and grammar elements of English in the national curriculum.
It has also highlighted deficiencies in the use of English by university undergraduates – more than 80% were unable to spell and use the word "effect" correctly, while 43% were unable to spell the word "miniature".
Original Article at The Guardian
Monday, 4 June 2012
Manmohan - Shikhandi?
Prashant Bhushan has beaten a hasty retreat after calling the prime minister a 'shikhandi' on live TV. And Manmohan Singh's emotional reaction to it, offering to step down if charges against him are proved, threatens to turn a battle against sleaze into a war over semantics. Still, since most of the other UPA ministers have not even bothered to react to the serious charges against them, the point to ponder is: did the lawyer get his mythology wrong? Does the 'honest' PM resemble Dhritarashtra from Mahabharata more than Shikhandi?
Bhushan is not the first one to slap the PM with the arguably sexist label. Former finance minister Yashwant Sinha had preceded him in the run-up to the 2009 general elections, accusing the 'shikhandi prime minister' of doing the bidding of an Italian. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Manmohan had let the slur pass then, but was stung by L.K. Advani calling him "nikamma" (useless). But four years is clearly a long time in politics judging from Manmohan's mile-high reaction this time round.
But was there reason for the prime minister to take offence at being compared to a character from the Mahabharata? Contrary to popular perception, Shikhandi was not of 'indeterminate gender', or even impotent, for that matter. Abducted by Bhishma in an earlier incarnation for a dubious 'forced marriage' with Bhishma's brother Vichitravirya which never took place, Amba (the name Shikhandi had in that incarnation) vowed to avenge her humiliation and was granted 'manhood' as a boon in her next birth.
She was reborn as the daughter of King Drupada but with the caveat that in due course, she would acquire 'manhood'. She was brought up as a prince but trained both in the arts and as a warrior. S(h)e also consummated her marriage, according to one version, or proved his manhood by making love with a concubine, according to another. Lord Krishna knew that Bhishma, who was invincible, would not take up arms against a woman, and that he would recognise Shikhandi as Amba. The stratagem succeeded. Bhishma dropped arms after he saw Shikhandi on the chariot, giving Arjuna the opportunity to rain arrows on the unarmed Bhishma.
Thus, there is much that Manmohan Singh can take solace from in Bhushan's label: Shikhandi was not impotent or a hijra. On the contrary, he/she had the attributes of both an accomplished high society lady and a cool dude. He was of a royal lineage and remained a man till his death. And he or she was definitely on the winning side. More importantly, Shikhandi not only sided with the righteous and the wronged, he/she had reason enough to avenge the personal disgrace and indignity inflicted by Bhishma. Moreover, Shikhandi was the chosen one, used as an instrument to defeat the evil forces represented by the Kauravas.
Bhushan, clearly, had got his metaphors horribly mixed. Perhaps he did not mean to take potshots at the PM, perhaps he was implying that the PM's more corrupt and impotent colleagues were taking advantage of him by using him as a shield. Quite unwittingly, though, he has equated the UPA with the Pandavas, who were ranged against a reckless, power-hungry and mindless opposition, willing to bend every rule in the book. The PM should actually feel flattered.
While Shikhandi is not a eunuch or hijra, it is worth recalling that several eunuchs have contested elections in this country and some have even won local elections. Indeed, I remember the slogan coined by one of them, one of the first eunuchs to contest for a seat in the Bihar assembly: "Ab tak aap sabne hijron ko vote diya hai; is baar ek asli hijre ko vote deejiye (You have so long voted for eunuchs and imposters, this time, vote for a genuine eunuch)" is what the posters declared.
The truth also is, public figures do get called names and some of them can and do respond in kind. Indira Gandhi found herself being called "goongi gudiya" (dumb doll). In the recent French presidential elections, Nicholas Sarkozy called his rival a slanderer and a liar. US President Barack H. Obama continues to struggle with the perception that the Hussein in his name makes him a Muslim. Winston Churchill is said to have quipped that Charles de Gaulle looked like a "female llama surprised in the bath".
The taciturn sardar, clearly, is no bulldog, who could turn around and say that members of Team Anna are "mischievous people, who have much to be mischievous about" like the great Briton, who said about Clement Attlee that he was "a modest man, who has much to be modest about". Insults were surely classy in those days. As were comebacks.
Bhushan is not the first one to slap the PM with the arguably sexist label. Former finance minister Yashwant Sinha had preceded him in the run-up to the 2009 general elections, accusing the 'shikhandi prime minister' of doing the bidding of an Italian. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Manmohan had let the slur pass then, but was stung by L.K. Advani calling him "nikamma" (useless). But four years is clearly a long time in politics judging from Manmohan's mile-high reaction this time round.
But was there reason for the prime minister to take offence at being compared to a character from the Mahabharata? Contrary to popular perception, Shikhandi was not of 'indeterminate gender', or even impotent, for that matter. Abducted by Bhishma in an earlier incarnation for a dubious 'forced marriage' with Bhishma's brother Vichitravirya which never took place, Amba (the name Shikhandi had in that incarnation) vowed to avenge her humiliation and was granted 'manhood' as a boon in her next birth.
She was reborn as the daughter of King Drupada but with the caveat that in due course, she would acquire 'manhood'. She was brought up as a prince but trained both in the arts and as a warrior. S(h)e also consummated her marriage, according to one version, or proved his manhood by making love with a concubine, according to another. Lord Krishna knew that Bhishma, who was invincible, would not take up arms against a woman, and that he would recognise Shikhandi as Amba. The stratagem succeeded. Bhishma dropped arms after he saw Shikhandi on the chariot, giving Arjuna the opportunity to rain arrows on the unarmed Bhishma.
Thus, there is much that Manmohan Singh can take solace from in Bhushan's label: Shikhandi was not impotent or a hijra. On the contrary, he/she had the attributes of both an accomplished high society lady and a cool dude. He was of a royal lineage and remained a man till his death. And he or she was definitely on the winning side. More importantly, Shikhandi not only sided with the righteous and the wronged, he/she had reason enough to avenge the personal disgrace and indignity inflicted by Bhishma. Moreover, Shikhandi was the chosen one, used as an instrument to defeat the evil forces represented by the Kauravas.
Bhushan, clearly, had got his metaphors horribly mixed. Perhaps he did not mean to take potshots at the PM, perhaps he was implying that the PM's more corrupt and impotent colleagues were taking advantage of him by using him as a shield. Quite unwittingly, though, he has equated the UPA with the Pandavas, who were ranged against a reckless, power-hungry and mindless opposition, willing to bend every rule in the book. The PM should actually feel flattered.
While Shikhandi is not a eunuch or hijra, it is worth recalling that several eunuchs have contested elections in this country and some have even won local elections. Indeed, I remember the slogan coined by one of them, one of the first eunuchs to contest for a seat in the Bihar assembly: "Ab tak aap sabne hijron ko vote diya hai; is baar ek asli hijre ko vote deejiye (You have so long voted for eunuchs and imposters, this time, vote for a genuine eunuch)" is what the posters declared.
The truth also is, public figures do get called names and some of them can and do respond in kind. Indira Gandhi found herself being called "goongi gudiya" (dumb doll). In the recent French presidential elections, Nicholas Sarkozy called his rival a slanderer and a liar. US President Barack H. Obama continues to struggle with the perception that the Hussein in his name makes him a Muslim. Winston Churchill is said to have quipped that Charles de Gaulle looked like a "female llama surprised in the bath".
The taciturn sardar, clearly, is no bulldog, who could turn around and say that members of Team Anna are "mischievous people, who have much to be mischievous about" like the great Briton, who said about Clement Attlee that he was "a modest man, who has much to be modest about". Insults were surely classy in those days. As were comebacks.
No one can tell why Manmohan wasn’t referred to as Dhritrashtra, the blind king in the Mahabharata who symbolised blindness to corrupt ways
It's insulting enough for anyone to be described as Shikandi, given the connotations of impotence the name carries on its own; it's even worse for a man who has been caricatured as a yesman, but wears his character and integrity as badges of honour. Deeply hurt by the comparison foisted upon him by senior advocate and Team Anna member Prashant Bhushan, prime minister Manmohan Singh offered to quit public life if any of the charges levelled against him by the anti-corruption crusader were proved. The specific charge is of wrongdoing in the allotment of coal blocks for mining, based on a preliminary CAG report—a scam that has come to be known as Coalgate.
So far, Team Anna had shied away from targeting the prime minister; even at the height of Anna Hazare's campaign, it was the government that was targeted—not Manmohan. But although Bhushan's fellow-campaigner Arvind Kejriwal has since apologised for the former's caustic tongue, Anna Hazare's team maintains the charges need to be investigated. No one can tell why Manmohan wasn't referred to as Dhritrashtra, the blind king in the Mahabharata who symbolised blindness to corrupt ways. But Bhushan's unfortunate comparison caught on; a day after, BJP leader Yashwant Sinha too used it for the prime minister.
Behind this is also perception that Anna, given his age, is vulnerable to pressure from politicians, specially those from his native Maharashtra. Hence the movement now will be channelised and spearheaded by Bhushan, a man whom the government fears and loathes in equal measure. Kejriwal, often referred to as the crowd mobiliser-cum-media planner and strategist, says, "Anna needs rest, given his age and health."
It seems the movement is undergoing a change. What is now being planned is an aggressive attack on the government, more agitations and a fast beginning in the last week of July. "We will fast again," says Kejriwal. The recent attack on the prime minister and his cabinet, one is told, is just the beginning. Gone are the vague attacks on the entire political class and the government. Instead, the attack is sharp and targeted. Says a source from the movement, "It was important for us to let people know the names of the corrupt in the government. While corruption struck a chord with people, it was also important for us to identify the corrupt in the political class. All of them, it would seem, are above the law."
It is also not surprising that the team is not speaking of the Lokpal bill—which, for all practical purposes, has been shelved. While the Budget session has gone by without a discussion, it is learnt that the bill has been slated for discussion in the last week of the monsoon session in July. Even then, there's no guarantee that the bill will come up for discussion. "We are going to adopt an aggressive strategy after July," says Kejriwal. While the team knows that asking for an SIT to examine charges of corruption is unlikely to be complied with by the government, the pitch has been queered. There may well be differences within the team on issues ranging from naming the prime minister to turning into a political movement. Differences, whether imagined or real, between core team members too might crop up ocassionally. What is for real is another round of mobilisation. This time by Bhushan and Kejriwal. And both of them plan to fast to the finish.
Full Article - Anna, The Mascot
So far, Team Anna had shied away from targeting the prime minister; even at the height of Anna Hazare's campaign, it was the government that was targeted—not Manmohan. But although Bhushan's fellow-campaigner Arvind Kejriwal has since apologised for the former's caustic tongue, Anna Hazare's team maintains the charges need to be investigated. No one can tell why Manmohan wasn't referred to as Dhritrashtra, the blind king in the Mahabharata who symbolised blindness to corrupt ways. But Bhushan's unfortunate comparison caught on; a day after, BJP leader Yashwant Sinha too used it for the prime minister.
Behind this is also perception that Anna, given his age, is vulnerable to pressure from politicians, specially those from his native Maharashtra. Hence the movement now will be channelised and spearheaded by Bhushan, a man whom the government fears and loathes in equal measure. Kejriwal, often referred to as the crowd mobiliser-cum-media planner and strategist, says, "Anna needs rest, given his age and health."
It seems the movement is undergoing a change. What is now being planned is an aggressive attack on the government, more agitations and a fast beginning in the last week of July. "We will fast again," says Kejriwal. The recent attack on the prime minister and his cabinet, one is told, is just the beginning. Gone are the vague attacks on the entire political class and the government. Instead, the attack is sharp and targeted. Says a source from the movement, "It was important for us to let people know the names of the corrupt in the government. While corruption struck a chord with people, it was also important for us to identify the corrupt in the political class. All of them, it would seem, are above the law."
It is also not surprising that the team is not speaking of the Lokpal bill—which, for all practical purposes, has been shelved. While the Budget session has gone by without a discussion, it is learnt that the bill has been slated for discussion in the last week of the monsoon session in July. Even then, there's no guarantee that the bill will come up for discussion. "We are going to adopt an aggressive strategy after July," says Kejriwal. While the team knows that asking for an SIT to examine charges of corruption is unlikely to be complied with by the government, the pitch has been queered. There may well be differences within the team on issues ranging from naming the prime minister to turning into a political movement. Differences, whether imagined or real, between core team members too might crop up ocassionally. What is for real is another round of mobilisation. This time by Bhushan and Kejriwal. And both of them plan to fast to the finish.
Full Article - Anna, The Mascot
Indian Middle Class-magnified sense of self and a perceived sense of neglect
This class of divergent people rarely comes together as a force, and their sense of power does not get translated into electoral power.
But the Anna Hazare-led movement against corruption last year put a lie to that notion. It was an indication of the middle-class's need to find a political space. Middle-class activism also gained strength on online forums and via NGOs. Sadly, the enthusiasm remained shortlived, and like the television TRP, middle-class activism too disappeared soon from the radar, making it convenient for the political class to shift focus.
And in the current economic scenario, when there is no threat to life or livelihood, it seems unlikely that the middle class will push for a long battle, including against corruption—though inflation remains a concern. According to this point of view, with growth in most sectors having flattened, it is directly impacting rise in salaries and leading to "some frustration".
Other observers feel that the middle class has no reason to be optimistic as the government continues with populist measures in the name of inclusive growth. That's the reality in a country with so many poor people. Diplomat-author Pavan K. Varma feels the middle class is facing a double jeopardy. "When the economy slows down, the middle class, which has been the beneficiary of higher growth, is likely to be the first to be hit. And it is precisely during such times that the government's focus shifts to the larger population of poor to ensure benefits reach them." But, as Usha Ramanathan, an expert on development and poverty issues, says, while several policies are formulated for the poor, they are not implemented properly and as such the benefits rarely reach them.
At the root of the present crisis is the government failure to carry out the promise it made in its 1991 budget: of administrative reforms, as also ensuring social protection and quality of employment. "The assumption that we will collect from the people and spend on the people is at fault as the rich are always seeking ways to dodge taxes. There is no political will to charge the rich high taxes," says Dr Indira Hirway of the Ahmedabad-based Centre for Development Alternatives. She cites the resistance to Right to Education as an example, with the middle class thwarting the attempt to uplift the lower classes and be included in their domain.
This resistance apart, the competition for the limited number of seats in good schools and colleges is becoming tougher, with more and more youngsters from poor families using the education ladder to better their lot. This is the same route used by the yesteryear lower middle class, particularly with competence in English, to chart success stories, points out Ajit Balakrishnan, the chairman of Rediff.com. As democracy deepens, the middle class, Balakrishnan says, will feel "more anxiety-struck" as people from financially weak backgrounds will become more aware and seek better opportunities.
Under pressure on all fronts then, this is a fresh moment of trial for the middle class. With such poor mood, the economy will go through some turbulence. Many say the Indian middle class—dogged, resolute and always optimistic—will eventually prevail. If that sounds a bit like the "India story", the middle class (complaints and all) will continue to bear that cross.
Everyone loves to hate buzzwords, but in the office setting, people are often powerless to resist them
More businesses are using the word "innovative" to describe what they do, from developing new soup flavors to redesigning packaging.
But are these achievements really innovative?
According to a Wall Street Journal article, firms are not necessarily innovating more than before, say critics; many are simply throwing around the buzzword to show they're on the cutting edge. They're following the pack.
Hate buzzwords if you must, but our affinity for them may stem from a basic human desire for acceptance, experts say. Often, people use buzzwords not to convey factual meaning, but to show they belong to a social group, according to socio-linguist Robert Leonard.
"Buzzwords are code words to show you're an inside member," says Mr. Leonard, who chairs Hofstra University's linguistics program. "[They show] you're part of the 'hip' group."
As a result, we are constantly "manufacturing" new buzzwords, he says.
That could explain the ever-growing list of clichéd corporate buzzwords, including "synergy," "optimization," "leverage," "pivot" and "cross-functional."
The rank-and-file are guilty of using buzzwords, too: LinkedIn recently compiled a list of the most overused words in members' profiles and uncovered a few gems, including "dynamic," "organizational" and "effective."
Because such catch-all words tend to be vague, they're usually not the most efficient mode of communication, Mr. Leonard says. Two people having a dialogue about "innovation," for example, might have completely different perceptions of what the word means.
Readers, start thinking out of the box: What are your least favorite buzzwords? What buzzwords are you guilty of using?
Original here
But are these achievements really innovative?
According to a Wall Street Journal article, firms are not necessarily innovating more than before, say critics; many are simply throwing around the buzzword to show they're on the cutting edge. They're following the pack.
Hate buzzwords if you must, but our affinity for them may stem from a basic human desire for acceptance, experts say. Often, people use buzzwords not to convey factual meaning, but to show they belong to a social group, according to socio-linguist Robert Leonard.
"Buzzwords are code words to show you're an inside member," says Mr. Leonard, who chairs Hofstra University's linguistics program. "[They show] you're part of the 'hip' group."
As a result, we are constantly "manufacturing" new buzzwords, he says.
That could explain the ever-growing list of clichéd corporate buzzwords, including "synergy," "optimization," "leverage," "pivot" and "cross-functional."
The rank-and-file are guilty of using buzzwords, too: LinkedIn recently compiled a list of the most overused words in members' profiles and uncovered a few gems, including "dynamic," "organizational" and "effective."
Because such catch-all words tend to be vague, they're usually not the most efficient mode of communication, Mr. Leonard says. Two people having a dialogue about "innovation," for example, might have completely different perceptions of what the word means.
Readers, start thinking out of the box: What are your least favorite buzzwords? What buzzwords are you guilty of using?
Original here
When it comes to collaboration, we tend to pick partners of our own gender
Here's at least one instance of parity among the sexes: Men and women are equally biased when it comes to choosing work partners, a new study suggests.
When selecting colleagues to collaborate with on a daily basis, males and females are both significantly more likely to choose someone of their own gender, according to an analysis by Innovisor, a Copenhagen-based management consulting firm.
The study, based on a survey of 5,000 employees from 60 large public companies around the world, asked respondents to list the names of colleagues they cooperate with every day.
While both men and women said they collaborated with an average of eight colleagues, the makeup of their peer groups – later confirmed independently by the consultancy – skewed heavily towards their own gender, the findings show. (Direct superiors, who tended to be male, were dropped from the results to filter out relationships based on influence.)
"We prefer to collaborate with people who look just like us," says Jeppe Hansgaard, a managing partner at Innovisor. "That's a management issue, because you want your employees to collaborate with the right people, not just people who look like them."
The gender bias existed in all 29 countries involved in the study, from developed nations like the U.S., U.K. and Australia to emerging markets like China, India and Brazil, the findings show. Anecdotal evidence suggests similar biases may also exist when it comes to ethnicity and religion, though more analysis is needed, Hansgaard adds.
Often, these biases go unnoticed because collaborative relationships are forged informally between individuals rather than being assigned by a boss, he says. But as a growing body of research suggests diverse groups perform better, companies should more actively manage their collaboration efforts, he says.
When selecting colleagues to collaborate with on a daily basis, males and females are both significantly more likely to choose someone of their own gender, according to an analysis by Innovisor, a Copenhagen-based management consulting firm.
The study, based on a survey of 5,000 employees from 60 large public companies around the world, asked respondents to list the names of colleagues they cooperate with every day.
While both men and women said they collaborated with an average of eight colleagues, the makeup of their peer groups – later confirmed independently by the consultancy – skewed heavily towards their own gender, the findings show. (Direct superiors, who tended to be male, were dropped from the results to filter out relationships based on influence.)
"We prefer to collaborate with people who look just like us," says Jeppe Hansgaard, a managing partner at Innovisor. "That's a management issue, because you want your employees to collaborate with the right people, not just people who look like them."
The gender bias existed in all 29 countries involved in the study, from developed nations like the U.S., U.K. and Australia to emerging markets like China, India and Brazil, the findings show. Anecdotal evidence suggests similar biases may also exist when it comes to ethnicity and religion, though more analysis is needed, Hansgaard adds.
Often, these biases go unnoticed because collaborative relationships are forged informally between individuals rather than being assigned by a boss, he says. But as a growing body of research suggests diverse groups perform better, companies should more actively manage their collaboration efforts, he says.
The subject of one of the Internet's most beloved memes passed away after complications from a stroke.
Eduard Khil, 'Mr. Trololo,' Dies at 77
The Soviet crooner whose wordless tune created an Internet meme has passed away at the age of 77. Eduard Khil was hospitalized in late May after suffering a stroke and was thought to have suffered brain damage. He died Monday morning at a hospital in St. Petersburg.
His gleeful, warbling rendition of the minor Russian hit "I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home" vaulted him to fame, though not until 34 years after his original performance on a Russian television show. The tune became a YouTube sensation in 2010 for its playful yet incomprehensible lyrics.
Read more:
Pippa Middleton Toned It Down For The Queen's
While eyes were on Kate Middleton's smashing Alexander McQueen dress at Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee Flotilla Celebration this afternoon, sister Pippa Middleton took an uncharacteristic backseat dressed in a nautically-inspired Oria Kiley number.
Critics at the Daily Mail tie the demure outfit choice to rumored demands by the Royal family for Pippa to keep her notoriously flashy style under wraps at Jubilee events. Regardless, Pippa's dress fit the event, joining Kate's red Alexander McQueen and her mother's (Carole Middleton) ivory skirt suit to complete the colors of the British Flag.
Kate may have out shined her this afternoon, but Pippa seems to be doing just fine on her own, even if that means trading in her flashy duds for something a bit more suitable for celebrating the Queen's 60-year reign.
In other Pippa news, the royal sister reportedly quit her job at party planning company TableTale to pursue her own wedding planning operation. This comes the positive acclaim she received for her role in planning parts of the Royal Wedding.
Read more:
Stephen Colbert Makes Fun Of Book Genres
Stephen Colbert's Maurice Sendak-inspired"I Am a Pole (And So Can You)," a new children's book parody about a personified pole finding its purpose in life, is expectedly topping sales charts, but not in the genres you'd assume.
The talk show host poked fun at The New York Times and Publisher's Weekly for placing his satire on lists such as Advice, How-to, Miscellaneous (New York Times) and Non-Fiction (Publisher's Weekly).
"A pole can't give you advice, it's pure fantasy," Colbert jested.
Original Article and Video at Huffpost
The talk show host poked fun at The New York Times and Publisher's Weekly for placing his satire on lists such as Advice, How-to, Miscellaneous (New York Times) and Non-Fiction (Publisher's Weekly).
"A pole can't give you advice, it's pure fantasy," Colbert jested.
Original Article and Video at Huffpost
Sunday, 3 June 2012
Spelling Out the End
By TANIA JAMES
Published: May 28, 2012
ON Wednesday, nearly 300 kids will take the stage in the Maryland Ballroom to sweat it out at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Fewer will make it to the following day's semifinals, where one mistake means elimination. I'd wager that many of them will be silently praying, Not on the first word. At least this was the plea — and later, the lament — that hummed in my head at the very same bee, 17 years ago.
I was 14 years old, too anxious to be dazzled by the monuments and memorials of Washington. My mother and I had flown from Kentucky, but she was no stranger to the capital. My older sister had already competed three times at nationals, having performed an unprecedented three-peat at the state spelling bee in grades six, seven and eight.
"Don't worry," a spelling bee official told me after one of her victories. "Your turn'll come too!"
I thought, "Does it have to?"
When the time came, I hurtled headlong into words. When my sister was 14 and I was 12, we trained together. We began with the Suggested List distributed at school — hundreds of words printed in 7-point font on a poster that folded up like a map. When the words along the creases began to vanish, we bought additional spelling books, including "Valerie's Spelling Bee Supplement," by a legendary trio of spelling sisters.
Sometimes my mother tested us, squinting with the intensity of a palm reader at words most English teachers wouldn't know how to pronounce, let alone my Indian-born mother. She jotted a disheartening dash by the misspelled words, even when I pretended to blame her accent for my errors: oh, you mean eudaeMONic!
I lost my first school spelling bee to my sister, but not without a face-off that rendered the entire student body nearly comatose with boredom. It came down to the two of us at the mike, spelling word after word in an awkward duet, each waiting for the other to hit a false note. Two years later I arrived at nationals. I wore a board around my neck with the name of my sponsor and home state. The stage was crammed with seated spellers facing the roving eye of an ESPN camera. I had no idea where my mother was seated, but I felt her everywhere at once.
For my first word, I approached the microphone and awaited my fate.
The announcer was somewhere to my left, a man who enunciated so emphatically, his lips could be read from the back of the convention room. "Barbican," he said.
It's likely that a good number of my competitors were inwardly groaning at the relative ease of my word. But I seized on the end. That last syllable could go two ways: C-A-N or C-O-N. I asked all the requisite questions — "Can you repeat the word?" "Definition?" "Use it in a sentence?" "Etymology?" — and finally gambled on C-O-N.
The pause. And then: the sickening tinkle of a tiny bell, whose clapper seemed to ping! against my very heart. There went the Suggested List, the hotel room, the hope, the arsenal of words — gastrocnemius, papeterie, appoggiatura — that would never now prove useful. There went my vaulting ambition, which didn't know what it wanted and so flung itself everywhere: spellings bees, tap dance contests, thumb wars, whatever my sister was doing or had done. There went my mother, sighing somewhere in that pitying sea, gathering up her coat and purse.
But I didn't go to meet her just yet. I was ushered offstage by an angel of a college student, dewy and beautiful in her sympathy, telling me, in my brain-dead state, that we were going to the Comfort Room, a term with the biblical weight of the Promised Land. I yielded to her like a lamb.
The Comfort Room was a room cordoned off from parental or public interference. Inside, the most recent losers were sitting around a table abundant with junk food, in fairly credible portrayals of calm and normalcy.
We snacked on Ho Hos and cheese sandwich crackers. We casually mentioned the words that defeated us, a brief bloodletting to initiate each new arrival, but then we dropped the subject of spelling altogether, as if we'd already moved on from missed words and lost opportunities, as if the specter of our common failure wouldn't follow us forever. We were told we could stay as long as we wanted.
In the years since, I've watched spelling bees from the other side of the camera, and it's always painful to see a speller fail. The first one out always prompts deafening applause; you can feel the sympathy gushing out of all those parents. But we keep watching these young people with so much skill and innocence, who haven't figured out how to be guarded on camera, who might possess five times the average kid's vocabulary but lack the ability to hide their relief or joy or disappointment when directed to the wings.
I take comfort in knowing what is found there — the crackers and Sprite of the Comfort Room and, eventually, my mother.
"Well," she said, "I guess you won't be doing this again."
I saw it then: the tarnished silver lining. Next year I would be 15 and forever ineligible.
Tania James is the author of "Aerogrammes: and Other Stories."
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 29, 2012, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Spelling Out the End.
Published: May 28, 2012
ON Wednesday, nearly 300 kids will take the stage in the Maryland Ballroom to sweat it out at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Fewer will make it to the following day's semifinals, where one mistake means elimination. I'd wager that many of them will be silently praying, Not on the first word. At least this was the plea — and later, the lament — that hummed in my head at the very same bee, 17 years ago.
I was 14 years old, too anxious to be dazzled by the monuments and memorials of Washington. My mother and I had flown from Kentucky, but she was no stranger to the capital. My older sister had already competed three times at nationals, having performed an unprecedented three-peat at the state spelling bee in grades six, seven and eight.
"Don't worry," a spelling bee official told me after one of her victories. "Your turn'll come too!"
I thought, "Does it have to?"
When the time came, I hurtled headlong into words. When my sister was 14 and I was 12, we trained together. We began with the Suggested List distributed at school — hundreds of words printed in 7-point font on a poster that folded up like a map. When the words along the creases began to vanish, we bought additional spelling books, including "Valerie's Spelling Bee Supplement," by a legendary trio of spelling sisters.
Sometimes my mother tested us, squinting with the intensity of a palm reader at words most English teachers wouldn't know how to pronounce, let alone my Indian-born mother. She jotted a disheartening dash by the misspelled words, even when I pretended to blame her accent for my errors: oh, you mean eudaeMONic!
I lost my first school spelling bee to my sister, but not without a face-off that rendered the entire student body nearly comatose with boredom. It came down to the two of us at the mike, spelling word after word in an awkward duet, each waiting for the other to hit a false note. Two years later I arrived at nationals. I wore a board around my neck with the name of my sponsor and home state. The stage was crammed with seated spellers facing the roving eye of an ESPN camera. I had no idea where my mother was seated, but I felt her everywhere at once.
For my first word, I approached the microphone and awaited my fate.
The announcer was somewhere to my left, a man who enunciated so emphatically, his lips could be read from the back of the convention room. "Barbican," he said.
It's likely that a good number of my competitors were inwardly groaning at the relative ease of my word. But I seized on the end. That last syllable could go two ways: C-A-N or C-O-N. I asked all the requisite questions — "Can you repeat the word?" "Definition?" "Use it in a sentence?" "Etymology?" — and finally gambled on C-O-N.
The pause. And then: the sickening tinkle of a tiny bell, whose clapper seemed to ping! against my very heart. There went the Suggested List, the hotel room, the hope, the arsenal of words — gastrocnemius, papeterie, appoggiatura — that would never now prove useful. There went my vaulting ambition, which didn't know what it wanted and so flung itself everywhere: spellings bees, tap dance contests, thumb wars, whatever my sister was doing or had done. There went my mother, sighing somewhere in that pitying sea, gathering up her coat and purse.
But I didn't go to meet her just yet. I was ushered offstage by an angel of a college student, dewy and beautiful in her sympathy, telling me, in my brain-dead state, that we were going to the Comfort Room, a term with the biblical weight of the Promised Land. I yielded to her like a lamb.
The Comfort Room was a room cordoned off from parental or public interference. Inside, the most recent losers were sitting around a table abundant with junk food, in fairly credible portrayals of calm and normalcy.
We snacked on Ho Hos and cheese sandwich crackers. We casually mentioned the words that defeated us, a brief bloodletting to initiate each new arrival, but then we dropped the subject of spelling altogether, as if we'd already moved on from missed words and lost opportunities, as if the specter of our common failure wouldn't follow us forever. We were told we could stay as long as we wanted.
In the years since, I've watched spelling bees from the other side of the camera, and it's always painful to see a speller fail. The first one out always prompts deafening applause; you can feel the sympathy gushing out of all those parents. But we keep watching these young people with so much skill and innocence, who haven't figured out how to be guarded on camera, who might possess five times the average kid's vocabulary but lack the ability to hide their relief or joy or disappointment when directed to the wings.
I take comfort in knowing what is found there — the crackers and Sprite of the Comfort Room and, eventually, my mother.
"Well," she said, "I guess you won't be doing this again."
I saw it then: the tarnished silver lining. Next year I would be 15 and forever ineligible.
Tania James is the author of "Aerogrammes: and Other Stories."
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 29, 2012, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Spelling Out the End.
Wednesday, 30 May 2012
An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness
Are your Facebook friends more interesting than those you have in real life?
Has high-speed Internet made you impatient with slow-speed children?
Do you sometimes think about reaching for the fast-forward button, only to realize that life does not come with a remote control?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, exposure to technology may be slowly reshaping your personality. Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cellphones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.
"More and more, life is resembling the chat room," says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford. "We're paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle."
We do spend a lot of time with our devices, and some studies have suggested that excessive dependence on cellphones and the Internet is akin to an addiction. Web sites like NetAddiction.com offer self-assessment tests to determine if technology has become a drug. Among the questions used to identify those at risk: Do you neglect housework to spend more time online? Are you frequently checking your e-mail? Do you often lose sleep because you log in late at night? If you answered "often" or "always," technology may be taking a toll on you.
In a study to be published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia subjected 173 college students to tests measuring risk for problematic Internet and gambling behaviors. About 5 percent of the students showed signs of gambling problems, but 10 percent of the students posted scores high enough to put them in the at-risk category for Internet "addiction."
Technology use was clearly interfering with the students' daily lives, but it may be going too far to call it an addiction, says Nicki Dowling, a clinical psychologist who led the study. Ms. Dowling prefers to call it "Internet dependence."
Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are, issues that Dr. Aboujaoude explores in a book, "Virtually You: The Internet and the Fracturing of the Self," to be released next year.
Dr. Aboujaoude also asks whether the vast storage available in e-mail and on the Internet is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse.
"If you can't forget because all this stuff is staring at you, what does that do to your ability to lay down new memories and remember things that you should be remembering?" Dr. Aboujaoude said. "When you have 500 pictures from your vacation in your Flickr account, as opposed to five pictures that are really meaningful, does that change your ability to recall the moments that you really want to recall?"
There is also no easy way to conquer a dependence on technology. Nicholas Carr, author of the new book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," says that social and family responsibilities, work and other pressures influence our use of technology. "The deeper a technology is woven into the patterns of everyday life, the less choice we have about whether and how we use that technology," Mr. Carr wrote in a recent blog post on the topic.
Some experts suggest simply trying to curtail the amount of time you spend online. Set limits for how often you check e-mail or force yourself to leave your cellphone at home occasionally.
The problem is similar to an eating disorder, says Dr. Kimberly Young, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York who has led research on the addictive nature of online technology. Technology, like food, is an essential part of daily life, and those suffering from disordered online behavior cannot give it up entirely and instead have to learn moderation and controlled use. She suggests therapy to determine the underlying issues that set off a person's need to use the Internet "as a way of escape."
The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Marylandasked 200 students to refrain from using electronic media for a day. The reports from students after the study suggest that giving up technology cold turkey not only makes life logistically difficult, but also changes our ability to connect with others.
"Texting and I.M.'ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."
A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.
Has high-speed Internet made you impatient with slow-speed children?
Do you sometimes think about reaching for the fast-forward button, only to realize that life does not come with a remote control?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, exposure to technology may be slowly reshaping your personality. Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cellphones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.
"More and more, life is resembling the chat room," says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford. "We're paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle."
We do spend a lot of time with our devices, and some studies have suggested that excessive dependence on cellphones and the Internet is akin to an addiction. Web sites like NetAddiction.com offer self-assessment tests to determine if technology has become a drug. Among the questions used to identify those at risk: Do you neglect housework to spend more time online? Are you frequently checking your e-mail? Do you often lose sleep because you log in late at night? If you answered "often" or "always," technology may be taking a toll on you.
In a study to be published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia subjected 173 college students to tests measuring risk for problematic Internet and gambling behaviors. About 5 percent of the students showed signs of gambling problems, but 10 percent of the students posted scores high enough to put them in the at-risk category for Internet "addiction."
Technology use was clearly interfering with the students' daily lives, but it may be going too far to call it an addiction, says Nicki Dowling, a clinical psychologist who led the study. Ms. Dowling prefers to call it "Internet dependence."
Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are, issues that Dr. Aboujaoude explores in a book, "Virtually You: The Internet and the Fracturing of the Self," to be released next year.
Dr. Aboujaoude also asks whether the vast storage available in e-mail and on the Internet is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse.
"If you can't forget because all this stuff is staring at you, what does that do to your ability to lay down new memories and remember things that you should be remembering?" Dr. Aboujaoude said. "When you have 500 pictures from your vacation in your Flickr account, as opposed to five pictures that are really meaningful, does that change your ability to recall the moments that you really want to recall?"
There is also no easy way to conquer a dependence on technology. Nicholas Carr, author of the new book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," says that social and family responsibilities, work and other pressures influence our use of technology. "The deeper a technology is woven into the patterns of everyday life, the less choice we have about whether and how we use that technology," Mr. Carr wrote in a recent blog post on the topic.
Some experts suggest simply trying to curtail the amount of time you spend online. Set limits for how often you check e-mail or force yourself to leave your cellphone at home occasionally.
The problem is similar to an eating disorder, says Dr. Kimberly Young, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York who has led research on the addictive nature of online technology. Technology, like food, is an essential part of daily life, and those suffering from disordered online behavior cannot give it up entirely and instead have to learn moderation and controlled use. She suggests therapy to determine the underlying issues that set off a person's need to use the Internet "as a way of escape."
The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Marylandasked 200 students to refrain from using electronic media for a day. The reports from students after the study suggest that giving up technology cold turkey not only makes life logistically difficult, but also changes our ability to connect with others.
"Texting and I.M.'ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."
A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.
Daddy, What Were Compact Discs?
By SAM GROBART
ONE day, when my children are a little older, I will gather them close and I will tell them about how I lived through the Great Format Wars.
I will recount to them a seemingly endless cycle of battles. From LP to cassette to minidisk (oh wait — not to minidisk) to CD. From Betamax to VHS to DVD to HD-DVD to Blu-ray. From punchcards to magnetic tape to floppy disks to zip drives to DVD-ROMs.
Some were dirty little skirmishes, like the Eight-Track Incursion of the late 1960s. But, oh, there are epic tales to be told as well: How my children's hearts will leap and dive (assuming they are not the kind to be bored to distraction by what Dad is droning on about) as they hear about VHS and Betamax, each bringing the other ever closer to oblivion, and how only one of them left the battlefield — only to fall victim to a far nimbler opponent, DVD, which was waiting in the wings.
And my children will hear of this and be amazed (see assumption above), for they know nothing of this kind of conflict. They will grow up in a world where physical storage of information is as outdated as rotary-dial telephones and mimeograph machines are now.
Indeed, they already live in that world, even if vestiges of the old remain (turntables, for example). We older people can enjoy this new world as well, what with streaming music and video services, cloud-based storage options and social networks that easily absorb our photos and ephemera. We may be hardened by battles past, but our future is digital, wireless, ubiquitous and, we hope, pacific. Here's what it looks like.
ONE day, when my children are a little older, I will gather them close and I will tell them about how I lived through the Great Format Wars.
I will recount to them a seemingly endless cycle of battles. From LP to cassette to minidisk (oh wait — not to minidisk) to CD. From Betamax to VHS to DVD to HD-DVD to Blu-ray. From punchcards to magnetic tape to floppy disks to zip drives to DVD-ROMs.
Some were dirty little skirmishes, like the Eight-Track Incursion of the late 1960s. But, oh, there are epic tales to be told as well: How my children's hearts will leap and dive (assuming they are not the kind to be bored to distraction by what Dad is droning on about) as they hear about VHS and Betamax, each bringing the other ever closer to oblivion, and how only one of them left the battlefield — only to fall victim to a far nimbler opponent, DVD, which was waiting in the wings.
And my children will hear of this and be amazed (see assumption above), for they know nothing of this kind of conflict. They will grow up in a world where physical storage of information is as outdated as rotary-dial telephones and mimeograph machines are now.
Indeed, they already live in that world, even if vestiges of the old remain (turntables, for example). We older people can enjoy this new world as well, what with streaming music and video services, cloud-based storage options and social networks that easily absorb our photos and ephemera. We may be hardened by battles past, but our future is digital, wireless, ubiquitous and, we hope, pacific. Here's what it looks like.
Tuesday, 29 May 2012
Patnaik is in London to...
"....promote investment in Odisha and discuss issues related to poverty alleviation in his state" ....
meanwhile there is revolt against him.
Revolt in BJD against Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik?
meanwhile there is revolt against him.
Revolt in BJD against Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik?
Monday, 21 May 2012
Print Media Ads
Reuters was wondering where the money for government ads comes from? Can it be used in a better manner? Are these ads really needed? It went on to add
And it's a collective effort of various ministries. From the Delhi government to the ministries of power, steel, environment, information & broadcasting, women & child development, commerce & industry — all have space reserved in national dailies to pay tribute in their own way.
Over the weekend, Mamata Banerjee, a key ally of the Congress-led government, had a centre spread in The Times of India as her government completed a year in office. The ad, titled 'One year towards a ray of hope' explained the recent initiatives of her state government in West Bengal.
And this is not restricted to the government. Last week, J.Jayalalithaa, whose party sits in opposition in parliament, celebrated a year in office as chief minister of Tamil Nadu with ads on the front page of many English dailies."
Well, being a media entity why is Reuters playing this naive?
This is not wastage of public money but money well spent ..... from the point of view of political party in power.
Every kid knows that these ads are a way of controlling the media through public funds and also using public money to build political capital.
Sunday, 20 May 2012
Following the footsteps of Steve Jobs in California
Steve Jobs was the ultimate tastemaster, but the Apple co-founder lived in surprising suburban ordinariness in Silicon Valley. Follow Jonathan Margolis on Guardian's interactive map as he follows Jobs's trail
Quick-fix Approach
I could not agree more with Jerry Rao on our government's quick-fix approach.
This is bound to happen if the most powerful member of the cabinet is know as fire-fighter.
Tuesday, 15 May 2012
Facebook snaps up mobile photo sharing firm Lightbox, decides Instagram isn't enough
We get the impression that Facebook is on a big mobile photo sharing kick: just weeks after it bought Instagram for a cool billion, the social network has just hired the staff behind Lightbox. The two-man team of Nilesh Patel and Thai Tran is bringing its mostly Android- and HTML5-focused knowledge over to Facebook, where it's hoping to reach many, many more people. You'll have to wait awhile to see what the Lightbox team brings to Facebook's ever more mobile platform, but you'll also want to hurry if you want to keep anything hosted on Lightbox: the service shuts down on June 15th. As a consolation for the shutdown, the startup's code is being posted to GitHub so that the fruits of its efforts live on in open-sourced form.
The original article appeared in engadget here
The original article appeared in engadget here
Monday, 14 May 2012
New wedding web app connects guests before the big day
By Natasha Baker
TORONTO | Mon May 14, 2012 2:34pm IST
(Reuters) - Planning a wedding? A new web app lets the bride and groom-to-be create a social website that connects guests with each other before the big day.
Called Weduary, the web app provides a simple way of creating a modern-looking wedding website, and allows the couple to invite guests using Facebook.
The site tells guests which of their Facebook friends will also be attending and points out people at the event who may have common interests and mutual friends.
If a guest is attending alone, the Flirt section of the site shows other singles who will be there.
"We're giving people a cheat sheet on who to meet at these big wedding events," said Brit Morin, CEO of Brit & Co., the digital lifestyle brand behind Weduary.
In addition to connecting guests, the site provides details about the date and time of the wedding, hotel information, and a link to the couple's registry.
Each guest also gets their own profile.
"It says which hotel they're staying at, when they are arriving to the event, their favorite story of the bride and groom and what their cell phone is," she explained.
Information on the site can be useful to help guests to co-ordinate travel plans, pitch in on registry gifts, or split accommodations.
Morin said that she came up with the idea while planning her own wedding last year.
"Not only were a lot of the templates, themes and web designs a little bit dated, but we also didn't find anything that was social in nature," she said, adding that couples are increasing opting for non-traditional wedding registries.
"We've seen a lot of websites catering towards inventive registries like donation registries, or registries to fund the purchase of the first house, or their honeymoon," she explained.
Morin believes the wedding industry is ripe for innovation. Her company is also working on an iPhone app that will harness real-time communication between other guests at weddings.
Other popular wedding websites include TheKnot.com, and WeddingWire, which provide free wedding website building tools, but without the social component.
An app called SocialTables connects with Facebook to let guests see other guests attending the event and allows hosts to create seating arrangements, but it is not exclusively targeted to weddings.
About 70 percent of brides create a personal wedding website, according to a survey conducted last year by websites TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com.
TORONTO | Mon May 14, 2012 2:34pm IST
(Reuters) - Planning a wedding? A new web app lets the bride and groom-to-be create a social website that connects guests with each other before the big day.
Called Weduary, the web app provides a simple way of creating a modern-looking wedding website, and allows the couple to invite guests using Facebook.
The site tells guests which of their Facebook friends will also be attending and points out people at the event who may have common interests and mutual friends.
If a guest is attending alone, the Flirt section of the site shows other singles who will be there.
"We're giving people a cheat sheet on who to meet at these big wedding events," said Brit Morin, CEO of Brit & Co., the digital lifestyle brand behind Weduary.
In addition to connecting guests, the site provides details about the date and time of the wedding, hotel information, and a link to the couple's registry.
Each guest also gets their own profile.
"It says which hotel they're staying at, when they are arriving to the event, their favorite story of the bride and groom and what their cell phone is," she explained.
Information on the site can be useful to help guests to co-ordinate travel plans, pitch in on registry gifts, or split accommodations.
Morin said that she came up with the idea while planning her own wedding last year.
"Not only were a lot of the templates, themes and web designs a little bit dated, but we also didn't find anything that was social in nature," she said, adding that couples are increasing opting for non-traditional wedding registries.
"We've seen a lot of websites catering towards inventive registries like donation registries, or registries to fund the purchase of the first house, or their honeymoon," she explained.
Morin believes the wedding industry is ripe for innovation. Her company is also working on an iPhone app that will harness real-time communication between other guests at weddings.
Other popular wedding websites include TheKnot.com, and WeddingWire, which provide free wedding website building tools, but without the social component.
An app called SocialTables connects with Facebook to let guests see other guests attending the event and allows hosts to create seating arrangements, but it is not exclusively targeted to weddings.
About 70 percent of brides create a personal wedding website, according to a survey conducted last year by websites TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com.
Books: Hitting Re-start: Bill Clegg's Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery
by Molly Creeden ( Vogue)
What happens after rock bottom? In Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery(Little, Brown and Company), a follow-up to 2010's riveting Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, literary agent Bill Clegg recounts the years following his decision to get sober after a decade plagued by alcohol and drugs. Like his count of days clean, Clegg starts from zero—his bank accounts, from rehab and binges are empty, his job and boyfriend are gone, the circles in which he previously moved are off-limits. In a manner that recalls a fledgling New Yorker's first days in the city, Clegg pieces together a new life, a new apartment, routine, and friends, always in the shadow of his personal transgressions and the lure of the cell-phone numbers and apartments that still hold the promise of a high.
Whereas Portrait was a thrashing, high-octane bender of a narrative, Ninety Days, it may come as no surprise, is a somber, steadier progression, marked by tiny victories and frenetic dips into relapse. Like many tales of recovery, Clegg's account emerges out of basements filled with strangers on squeaky folding chairs, friendships always tenuously tethered to the possibility of falling off the wagon, and unimaginable amounts of coffee. Relationships, rather than high drama, are the real focus of Ninety Days, and as a result there is a tenderness at its heart that balances out the navel-gazing intrinsic to the genre. And indeed, Clegg reveals it is people, not a program, that keep him afloat.
What happens after rock bottom? In Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery(Little, Brown and Company), a follow-up to 2010's riveting Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, literary agent Bill Clegg recounts the years following his decision to get sober after a decade plagued by alcohol and drugs. Like his count of days clean, Clegg starts from zero—his bank accounts, from rehab and binges are empty, his job and boyfriend are gone, the circles in which he previously moved are off-limits. In a manner that recalls a fledgling New Yorker's first days in the city, Clegg pieces together a new life, a new apartment, routine, and friends, always in the shadow of his personal transgressions and the lure of the cell-phone numbers and apartments that still hold the promise of a high.
Whereas Portrait was a thrashing, high-octane bender of a narrative, Ninety Days, it may come as no surprise, is a somber, steadier progression, marked by tiny victories and frenetic dips into relapse. Like many tales of recovery, Clegg's account emerges out of basements filled with strangers on squeaky folding chairs, friendships always tenuously tethered to the possibility of falling off the wagon, and unimaginable amounts of coffee. Relationships, rather than high drama, are the real focus of Ninety Days, and as a result there is a tenderness at its heart that balances out the navel-gazing intrinsic to the genre. And indeed, Clegg reveals it is people, not a program, that keep him afloat.
Books: Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
by Jonathan Van Meter
Vougue
Literary agent Bill Clegg was talented, successful and secretly addicted to crack. His arresting new memoir is a portrait of having—and losing—it all.When Robert Downey, Jr., was in the grip of his downward spiral many years ago and was asked in an interview about his drug of choice, he answered, simply, "More." That one word would have made an apt title for William Morris literary agent Bill Clegg's haunting, visceral new memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Little, Brown and Company). The first line—"I can't leave and there isn't enough"—is meant to sum up the insidious pull of crack, the drug that lays him low and nearly destroys his life. But it could just as easily be a warning to the reader: You won't be able to stop reading until it's all gone—and you will crave more. What makes Clegg's book especially riveting is the remarkable speed of his vertiginous fall from grace. Clegg was a New York golden boy, a young, good-looking gay man with a successful literary agency, Burnes & Clegg, that represented such A-list writers as Susan Choi and Nicole Krauss. Clegg was also a social animal, known for throwing lively parties at the chic apartment on One Fifth Avenue that he shared with his filmmaker boyfriend, whom he calls Noah in the book. But all of this was just barely masking a terrible secret: drug addiction, yes, but more to the point, crippling feelings of inadequacy. About one of his first trips to New York shortly after college for an interview with an editor at a publishing house, Clegg writes of being "nauseous with shame" after being told he doesn't have the academic training, let alone the Ivy League education, to get him in the door. At Brooks Brothers later that day, he is convinced that the security guards can see that he doesn't belong, "that this is a place for a sleeker, smarter, better-educated, and altogether finer grade of person." Flash-forward eight years, and despite the fact that his publishing dreams have come true, he still feels the same way. Clegg describes a 2001 party in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone to celebrate the launch of his agency, a party where, as usual, he drinks too much and tries to control his urge to call a drug dealer. "As I finally catch a gentle buzz, I look around the table and wonder how on earth I ended up here. Nights like these are for other people, people like Kate [his business partner] and Noah who—with their Ivy League degrees and supportive families—seem born for toasts and congratulations."
As an agent, Clegg had a reputation for being a bit of an operator, brokering high-profile book deals with big advances. Who knew that underneath the bravura he was a gifted writer himself? Portrait is a spare, elegant book, one that shows admirable restraint in the face of extreme, even pathological behavior. (A Million Little Pieces this is not.) Clegg may not have been able to control his demons, but he is utterly in charge of this material, with a voice that is knowing and self-deprecating in exactly the right measure. Though the book flickers with quick scenes from his difficult childhood (his complicated relationships with his mother, a distant woman who struggles with cancer, and father, a disapproving, verbally abusive figure), his college years, his triumph in New York City as he builds his agency with a friend, and his eight-year relationship with Noah, most of the action—indeed, the howling center of the book—is located during Clegg's final paranoid descent into squalor and self-destruction, a several-month period in which he holed up in downtown boutique-hotel rooms and went on epic crack and vodka (and anonymous-sex) benders that lasted for days. His friend the writer Cintra Wilson once described Clegg's meltdown as like "watching the space shuttle explode." He lost everything: his agency, his boyfriend, his clients, his good looks, his health. In the opening scene, Clegg recounts a six-day binge in a fellow fiend's crack den of an apartment with nightly visits from a dealer: "I don't know yet that I will push through these grim, jittery hours until evening, when Happy will turn his cell phone back on and deliver more. I don't yet know that I will keep this going—here and in other places like it—for over a month. That I will lose almost forty pounds, so that, at 34, I will weigh less than I did in the eighth grade." It is a relief, then, to meet Clegg, nearly 40, at the little café a couple of blocks from his apartment in Greenwich Village that makes an appearance in the book during the depth of his misery. ("We sit in the window at Marquet . . . and the day outside and everyone in it flashes like a taunt. This is a shiny world, I think . . . for people whose lives I can only see as unblemished and lucky. A place where I've been allowed to visit but cannot stay. A place I've already left.") Today he is greeted warmly, like the regular he still is. At five years into his sobriety, he is fit and tan, having just gotten back from a two-week trip to Mexico with John Bowe, one of his writers and a sober friend with whom he shares a house in upstate New York, where he did the bulk of the work on his memoir. Blond, blue-eyed, and wearing baggy brown cords and a black short-sleeved Izod on a beautiful spring day, he comes across as a bit of a surfer dude—but from New England (he grew up in Connecticut). He orders a giant chocolate-chip cookie and eats it in a way that tells you he's a man who has worked very hard to control his voracious appetites: one little bite at a time. Indeed, he makes the whole cookie last over an hour. When the waitress assumes he is done, he practically swats her hand. Every last crumb. It is one of the book's motifs. He writes, "There will never be a time when I smoke crack that doesn't end with me on my knees, sometimes for hours . . . fingering the floor, like a madman, for crumbs." One of the reasons Portrait of an Addict is so intense and so disturbing—and makes you feel like you yourself have gone on a binge—is that all of the druggy scenes are written in the present tense. This has mostly to do with the fact that when Clegg was in rehab, he began writing things down in composition notebooks. "At first, before I ever thought of this as a book," he tells me, "I wanted to reinhabit that time so I could remember what was said, what I saw, how it felt—so that I wouldn't forget. At that time those memories were so fresh, so vivid and yet they felt perishable. I had this sort of urgent fear that if I didn't write down everything I remembered from that time—and by 'that time' I mean the period when I had disappeared into hotel rooms and did drugs day and night—they'd be lost forever." (One can't help wondering why he wouldn't prefer to just let those memories fade. It is as if he doesn't want to completely disown them; that those awful days and nights still exert some sort of pull.) When the pages began to pile up and a couple of years later he realized he wanted to turn them into a book, he left those scenes as he originally wrote them. Clegg checked out of the Retreat, a rehab facility in White Plains, New York, in 2005. He came back to the city, moved out of his boyfriend's apartment, and rented a little studio, his living expenses paid for by the sale of some William Eggleston photographs he had bought during headier times. He gave himself a year to "just get sober." Entering what he calls "a fellowship of recovery," he attended meetings two or three times a day. "That piece of my life is still the most important thing, actually. . . . Everything else after that—my job, the book, relationships, even my family—is kind of the gravy that I get for staying sober. And what I do now to stay sober is also one of the most joyful parts of my life. Some people can't wait to get to their yoga class like I can't wait to dive into my routine. It's lucky that I love it as much as I do." It would be easy to imagine that some feelings of shame related to his sexuality played a role in Clegg's addiction, but he is reluctant to pin his problems on that. "Straight and gay people both come to New York to transform themselves," he says. "And I think a lot of people get here and wind up dealing with feelings of being a fraud after having success through luck or other circumstances. I thought at any given moment it would be revealed that I wasn't half as smart as I might seem to be. A lot of my fears, my anxieties, came from being very concerned about what people thought of me. But the fact is, I don't think people thought of me even a fraction of the amount I imagined they did." Not long after Clegg got through the first difficult stage of sobriety, he made a brief attempt to start up a new agency. But in December 2005, William Morris executive VP Jennifer Rudolph Walsh offered him a job, and slowly but surely many (though not all) of his writers came back to him. In August 2008, he told his boss that he had been writing something on and off for the past few years and wondered if she would take a look at it. He dropped pages off at her house on Labor Day, and that evening Walsh sent him an E-mail. "I just finished your breathtaking pages," it began. "They are pitch perfect—thrilling, relatable, funny, original, terrifying, poetic, heartbreaking, and totally riveting. I don't think I blinked for the entire time I was reading." Within a few days, Walsh submitted the manuscript to publishers. "So I went from this gentle bubble of a few friends who had read it," says Clegg, "to pretty much everybody I know in book publishing reading it. All the things that one might be worried about other people reading were in that chunk of pages, and it all happened so fast that I didn't have time to stew in the fear. But it was overwhelming, probably one of the toughest things ever. But now that the book is coming out, in a weird way, I feel like that Band-Aid's been ripped off my skin already." Clegg says that the people in his life who loved him even through his darkest days—his boyfriend, his family—have read the book and have all been "incredibly supportive." His mother, who has survived her cancer and is living in Maine, could not bring herself to get past the first few pages. One night over a family dinner she declared that she was never going to read it. Not surprisingly, their relationship remains "unresolved," he says. But it is his relationship with his father that has been redeemed by his near-death experience—and the subsequent documentation of it. "I spoke with him a lot on the phone when I was in rehab," he says, "and it was sort of from that conversation forward that we got to know each other as adults. You know, we are not going on golfing vacations like a lot of fathers and sons, but we talk every week. Where we are now is amazing." But it is perhaps Clegg who had the hardest time forgiving himself for the pain and suffering he caused everyone he knew. It has been more than five years ("both like yesterday and another lifetime ago," he observes) since he "left my life and everyone and everything in it—besides drugs and the desire to die." Getting sober and writing about the process seems to have brought Clegg some of the clarity that he'd been searching for all along. "If I help anyone with something I say or do or write or by just staying clean and being alive instead of dead," he says, "I can look back across the wreckage and begin to make peace with it."
May 25, 2010 2:23 p.m.
Vougue
Literary agent Bill Clegg was talented, successful and secretly addicted to crack. His arresting new memoir is a portrait of having—and losing—it all.When Robert Downey, Jr., was in the grip of his downward spiral many years ago and was asked in an interview about his drug of choice, he answered, simply, "More." That one word would have made an apt title for William Morris literary agent Bill Clegg's haunting, visceral new memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Little, Brown and Company). The first line—"I can't leave and there isn't enough"—is meant to sum up the insidious pull of crack, the drug that lays him low and nearly destroys his life. But it could just as easily be a warning to the reader: You won't be able to stop reading until it's all gone—and you will crave more. What makes Clegg's book especially riveting is the remarkable speed of his vertiginous fall from grace. Clegg was a New York golden boy, a young, good-looking gay man with a successful literary agency, Burnes & Clegg, that represented such A-list writers as Susan Choi and Nicole Krauss. Clegg was also a social animal, known for throwing lively parties at the chic apartment on One Fifth Avenue that he shared with his filmmaker boyfriend, whom he calls Noah in the book. But all of this was just barely masking a terrible secret: drug addiction, yes, but more to the point, crippling feelings of inadequacy. About one of his first trips to New York shortly after college for an interview with an editor at a publishing house, Clegg writes of being "nauseous with shame" after being told he doesn't have the academic training, let alone the Ivy League education, to get him in the door. At Brooks Brothers later that day, he is convinced that the security guards can see that he doesn't belong, "that this is a place for a sleeker, smarter, better-educated, and altogether finer grade of person." Flash-forward eight years, and despite the fact that his publishing dreams have come true, he still feels the same way. Clegg describes a 2001 party in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone to celebrate the launch of his agency, a party where, as usual, he drinks too much and tries to control his urge to call a drug dealer. "As I finally catch a gentle buzz, I look around the table and wonder how on earth I ended up here. Nights like these are for other people, people like Kate [his business partner] and Noah who—with their Ivy League degrees and supportive families—seem born for toasts and congratulations."
As an agent, Clegg had a reputation for being a bit of an operator, brokering high-profile book deals with big advances. Who knew that underneath the bravura he was a gifted writer himself? Portrait is a spare, elegant book, one that shows admirable restraint in the face of extreme, even pathological behavior. (A Million Little Pieces this is not.) Clegg may not have been able to control his demons, but he is utterly in charge of this material, with a voice that is knowing and self-deprecating in exactly the right measure. Though the book flickers with quick scenes from his difficult childhood (his complicated relationships with his mother, a distant woman who struggles with cancer, and father, a disapproving, verbally abusive figure), his college years, his triumph in New York City as he builds his agency with a friend, and his eight-year relationship with Noah, most of the action—indeed, the howling center of the book—is located during Clegg's final paranoid descent into squalor and self-destruction, a several-month period in which he holed up in downtown boutique-hotel rooms and went on epic crack and vodka (and anonymous-sex) benders that lasted for days. His friend the writer Cintra Wilson once described Clegg's meltdown as like "watching the space shuttle explode." He lost everything: his agency, his boyfriend, his clients, his good looks, his health. In the opening scene, Clegg recounts a six-day binge in a fellow fiend's crack den of an apartment with nightly visits from a dealer: "I don't know yet that I will push through these grim, jittery hours until evening, when Happy will turn his cell phone back on and deliver more. I don't yet know that I will keep this going—here and in other places like it—for over a month. That I will lose almost forty pounds, so that, at 34, I will weigh less than I did in the eighth grade." It is a relief, then, to meet Clegg, nearly 40, at the little café a couple of blocks from his apartment in Greenwich Village that makes an appearance in the book during the depth of his misery. ("We sit in the window at Marquet . . . and the day outside and everyone in it flashes like a taunt. This is a shiny world, I think . . . for people whose lives I can only see as unblemished and lucky. A place where I've been allowed to visit but cannot stay. A place I've already left.") Today he is greeted warmly, like the regular he still is. At five years into his sobriety, he is fit and tan, having just gotten back from a two-week trip to Mexico with John Bowe, one of his writers and a sober friend with whom he shares a house in upstate New York, where he did the bulk of the work on his memoir. Blond, blue-eyed, and wearing baggy brown cords and a black short-sleeved Izod on a beautiful spring day, he comes across as a bit of a surfer dude—but from New England (he grew up in Connecticut). He orders a giant chocolate-chip cookie and eats it in a way that tells you he's a man who has worked very hard to control his voracious appetites: one little bite at a time. Indeed, he makes the whole cookie last over an hour. When the waitress assumes he is done, he practically swats her hand. Every last crumb. It is one of the book's motifs. He writes, "There will never be a time when I smoke crack that doesn't end with me on my knees, sometimes for hours . . . fingering the floor, like a madman, for crumbs." One of the reasons Portrait of an Addict is so intense and so disturbing—and makes you feel like you yourself have gone on a binge—is that all of the druggy scenes are written in the present tense. This has mostly to do with the fact that when Clegg was in rehab, he began writing things down in composition notebooks. "At first, before I ever thought of this as a book," he tells me, "I wanted to reinhabit that time so I could remember what was said, what I saw, how it felt—so that I wouldn't forget. At that time those memories were so fresh, so vivid and yet they felt perishable. I had this sort of urgent fear that if I didn't write down everything I remembered from that time—and by 'that time' I mean the period when I had disappeared into hotel rooms and did drugs day and night—they'd be lost forever." (One can't help wondering why he wouldn't prefer to just let those memories fade. It is as if he doesn't want to completely disown them; that those awful days and nights still exert some sort of pull.) When the pages began to pile up and a couple of years later he realized he wanted to turn them into a book, he left those scenes as he originally wrote them. Clegg checked out of the Retreat, a rehab facility in White Plains, New York, in 2005. He came back to the city, moved out of his boyfriend's apartment, and rented a little studio, his living expenses paid for by the sale of some William Eggleston photographs he had bought during headier times. He gave himself a year to "just get sober." Entering what he calls "a fellowship of recovery," he attended meetings two or three times a day. "That piece of my life is still the most important thing, actually. . . . Everything else after that—my job, the book, relationships, even my family—is kind of the gravy that I get for staying sober. And what I do now to stay sober is also one of the most joyful parts of my life. Some people can't wait to get to their yoga class like I can't wait to dive into my routine. It's lucky that I love it as much as I do." It would be easy to imagine that some feelings of shame related to his sexuality played a role in Clegg's addiction, but he is reluctant to pin his problems on that. "Straight and gay people both come to New York to transform themselves," he says. "And I think a lot of people get here and wind up dealing with feelings of being a fraud after having success through luck or other circumstances. I thought at any given moment it would be revealed that I wasn't half as smart as I might seem to be. A lot of my fears, my anxieties, came from being very concerned about what people thought of me. But the fact is, I don't think people thought of me even a fraction of the amount I imagined they did." Not long after Clegg got through the first difficult stage of sobriety, he made a brief attempt to start up a new agency. But in December 2005, William Morris executive VP Jennifer Rudolph Walsh offered him a job, and slowly but surely many (though not all) of his writers came back to him. In August 2008, he told his boss that he had been writing something on and off for the past few years and wondered if she would take a look at it. He dropped pages off at her house on Labor Day, and that evening Walsh sent him an E-mail. "I just finished your breathtaking pages," it began. "They are pitch perfect—thrilling, relatable, funny, original, terrifying, poetic, heartbreaking, and totally riveting. I don't think I blinked for the entire time I was reading." Within a few days, Walsh submitted the manuscript to publishers. "So I went from this gentle bubble of a few friends who had read it," says Clegg, "to pretty much everybody I know in book publishing reading it. All the things that one might be worried about other people reading were in that chunk of pages, and it all happened so fast that I didn't have time to stew in the fear. But it was overwhelming, probably one of the toughest things ever. But now that the book is coming out, in a weird way, I feel like that Band-Aid's been ripped off my skin already." Clegg says that the people in his life who loved him even through his darkest days—his boyfriend, his family—have read the book and have all been "incredibly supportive." His mother, who has survived her cancer and is living in Maine, could not bring herself to get past the first few pages. One night over a family dinner she declared that she was never going to read it. Not surprisingly, their relationship remains "unresolved," he says. But it is his relationship with his father that has been redeemed by his near-death experience—and the subsequent documentation of it. "I spoke with him a lot on the phone when I was in rehab," he says, "and it was sort of from that conversation forward that we got to know each other as adults. You know, we are not going on golfing vacations like a lot of fathers and sons, but we talk every week. Where we are now is amazing." But it is perhaps Clegg who had the hardest time forgiving himself for the pain and suffering he caused everyone he knew. It has been more than five years ("both like yesterday and another lifetime ago," he observes) since he "left my life and everyone and everything in it—besides drugs and the desire to die." Getting sober and writing about the process seems to have brought Clegg some of the clarity that he'd been searching for all along. "If I help anyone with something I say or do or write or by just staying clean and being alive instead of dead," he says, "I can look back across the wreckage and begin to make peace with it."
May 25, 2010 2:23 p.m.
Wednesday, 9 May 2012
Distress of "Tehelka" Sting Journalist
Journalists in first episode of Satyamev Jayate were not the only ones to suffer the after-effects of their journalistic efforts.
The key journalist in Tehelka is undergoing the same fate:
"I have not done a single sting operation since 2001. I even discourage others from undertaking any sting, citing my own experience. The day after the Tehelka tapes were released, on March 13, 2001, my landlord in Delhi's Greater Kailash locality threw us out of his house. Police and Intelligence Bureau sleuths had turned up the heat and he could not bear it. My wife, who worked for a private firm, had to quit her job because it became impossible for her to continue, with police and the IB constantly arriving at her office to make inquiries. Sleuths from the IB even went to my village in Kerala and interrogated my father."
Still he finds a way to crack a small joke in a detailed account:
"It turned out to be more difficult to catch Jaya Jaitly on camera. Madam, I was told, would not allow any briefcase inside the defence minister's house. But she had no problem with cash, of course. She possibly knew about spy cams and the briefcase device. I was told that an Indian cricketer may have shown her how the briefcase-camera worked.
I therefore arranged for a spy cam on a tie-pin. The trouble was that the battery was tucked inside my underwear and the remote was in my pocket. And when I switched it on, the battery would start vibrating inside my underwear. The few minutes I spent in her presence were among the most uncomfortable moments I have ever had."
The key journalist in Tehelka is undergoing the same fate:
"I have not done a single sting operation since 2001. I even discourage others from undertaking any sting, citing my own experience. The day after the Tehelka tapes were released, on March 13, 2001, my landlord in Delhi's Greater Kailash locality threw us out of his house. Police and Intelligence Bureau sleuths had turned up the heat and he could not bear it. My wife, who worked for a private firm, had to quit her job because it became impossible for her to continue, with police and the IB constantly arriving at her office to make inquiries. Sleuths from the IB even went to my village in Kerala and interrogated my father."
Still he finds a way to crack a small joke in a detailed account:
"It turned out to be more difficult to catch Jaya Jaitly on camera. Madam, I was told, would not allow any briefcase inside the defence minister's house. But she had no problem with cash, of course. She possibly knew about spy cams and the briefcase device. I was told that an Indian cricketer may have shown her how the briefcase-camera worked.
I therefore arranged for a spy cam on a tie-pin. The trouble was that the battery was tucked inside my underwear and the remote was in my pocket. And when I switched it on, the battery would start vibrating inside my underwear. The few minutes I spent in her presence were among the most uncomfortable moments I have ever had."
Saturday, 5 May 2012
Shared Values
I am not the only one who is exasperated by our sense of traffic that is the lack of it.
One of the explanations offered is our society's lack of coordination for common good.
This extends to other areas of Indian social life where we invariably put self before common good.
Mint argues that "The entire debate on why the Indian government has been unable to spend enough on things that benefit all citizens may then have to be reconsidered in terms of our own social preferences, more specifically our historical inability to broaden the arc of cooperation. It is what could lie at the root of a common sight in our neighbourhoods: swank cars parked on broken roads or air-conditioned homes overlooking open gutters or loud music played outside the hospitals that treat us."
Is there any light at the end of tunnel?
Well... if at all there is any it is very far and very faint ...
"None of this means that things cannot change, as we can see in so many other countries in Asia that have climbed the ladder of prosperity. But weak political leadership, a soft state and opposition to reform of traditional social arrangements are serious obstacles in this necessary transition. Till then, we will continue to be the stag hunters who run off in search of a rabbit."
One of the explanations offered is our society's lack of coordination for common good.
This extends to other areas of Indian social life where we invariably put self before common good.
Mint argues that "The entire debate on why the Indian government has been unable to spend enough on things that benefit all citizens may then have to be reconsidered in terms of our own social preferences, more specifically our historical inability to broaden the arc of cooperation. It is what could lie at the root of a common sight in our neighbourhoods: swank cars parked on broken roads or air-conditioned homes overlooking open gutters or loud music played outside the hospitals that treat us."
Is there any light at the end of tunnel?
Well... if at all there is any it is very far and very faint ...
"None of this means that things cannot change, as we can see in so many other countries in Asia that have climbed the ladder of prosperity. But weak political leadership, a soft state and opposition to reform of traditional social arrangements are serious obstacles in this necessary transition. Till then, we will continue to be the stag hunters who run off in search of a rabbit."
Band-Aid Innovation
Usually band-aids are not associated with innovation but there are surprises sometimes.
Finally we have band-aids which need not be peeled-off... they are made of edible starch that dissolve on the skin once the wound heals.
Finally we have band-aids which need not be peeled-off... they are made of edible starch that dissolve on the skin once the wound heals.
what a relief... Ask a person who is having an injured finger and getting the dressing peeled off every other day
'Super Moon': Large Full Moon This Weekend
"The full Moon has a reputation for trouble," wrote Tony Phillips, an
astronomer who maintains NASA's Science News site. "It raises high
tides, it makes dogs howl, it wakes you up in the middle of the night
with beams of moonlight stealing through drapes.
(abcnews.go.com)
astronomer who maintains NASA's Science News site. "It raises high
tides, it makes dogs howl, it wakes you up in the middle of the night
with beams of moonlight stealing through drapes.
(abcnews.go.com)
the designer baby factory
Immediately on the heels of 'Vicky Donor' highlighting the penchant for handsome, beautiful and smart kids through sperm donation there is a story in 'dailymail' on designer babies through surrogacy.
And the economics:
Few American women are willing to act as surrogates — at least not cheaply — but impoverished Indian women are literally queuing up outside surrogacy clinics these days. It is cheaper to hire a womb here than anywhere else in the world, hence its dubious place at the centre of the sci-fi-style 'global baby' boom.
And the economics:
Few American women are willing to act as surrogates — at least not cheaply — but impoverished Indian women are literally queuing up outside surrogacy clinics these days. It is cheaper to hire a womb here than anywhere else in the world, hence its dubious place at the centre of the sci-fi-style 'global baby' boom.
Canada Stops Making Cents
Canada minted its final penny today as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the coin was too expensive to produce and no longer needed for business.
Why?
The penny, with two maple leaves on one side and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on the other, has lost 95 percent of its purchasing power since it was first produced by the mint.
(Bloomberg)
Newspapers are trying to avert economic disaster
The Who Needs Newspapers report says the keys to success include community-service-driven reporters and ethically managed reporting.
Afraid of Social Networks
Who?
Who lese?
The governments, the ruling classes....
Now its turn of Kuwait which says "Social Networks Must Be Regulated To 'Safeguard The Cohesiveness Of Society"
Is Facebook worth more than the $96bn valuation looking at the idea of freedom it promises to people who do not even know that something called Facebook exists?
Who are we, asks Kalki Koechlin...
...in this article in HT.
" We are an army of sheep" says she and goes on to explain why are we so and what can be done about this.
I want this birthday cake
The last time I had a full fledged birthday party was 65 billion years ago.
There was no vegetarian cake available in the city and I had to cut a slab of Milk Cake.
If I ever muster the courage to cut a cake it will be something like this !!!
Restore Dignity of President's Office
The entire nation will agree with the thought that "both the Government and the Opposition should ponder over how to restore the dignity of the President's office."
Is the government or the opposition listening or doing something to achieve this end?
Why does God create Musicians
"I believe — I still believe — that God sent him to this earth to be a special messenger, to make people happy" said Phoebe Jacobs of Louis Armstrong.
Reuters : Photos of the Week
Reuters' Photos of the Week are a mix of war, politics, sports and entertainment.
The photo on Sudan conflict is the one we would see but would still like not to see.
What It Takes To Innovate: Wrong-Thinking, Tinkering & Intuiting
Polaroid inventor Edwin Land explains in this article on the99percent.com what it takes to innovate:
Point number 3 is worth mentioning here:
3. Embrace failure.
True innovators are practically impervious to the notion of failure. Whereas the everyman might feel shame or embarrassment in making a mistake, the inventor sees an opportunity for learning.
True innovators are practically impervious to the notion of failure. Whereas the everyman might feel shame or embarrassment in making a mistake, the inventor sees an opportunity for learning.
Who is to blame for Siachen deaths - weather or mankind?
The Hindu says
"The weather and the inhospitable terrain have taken more lives on this side of the glacier as well as on the Indian side than the actual conflict, and now it is the most slowing factor of the rescue work."
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