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Wednesday, August 24, 2011

BookDaily Update

 
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BookDaily Update
Thursday August 25, 2011

The Gray Zone

By Daphna Edwards Ziman
ISBN: 9781608321100
 

“Go back to bed,” he commanded. “Don’t move an inch.” The timbre of his voice, deep with intensity, demanding obedience. The light from the hallway made it impossible for her to distinguish his features, but she remembered his form blocking the entire doorway, he appeared so big.

She covered her head with the blanket, knowing she would never forget the guttural sound that echoed in her ears.

An agonizing cry . . . A body crashing on the landing … Footsteps of someone running . . . Then silence. Broken by the sound of ambulance sirens.

The little girl rolled off the bed and crawled to the door, pushed it open. Her eyes ...

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Going In Circles

By L. A. Hollis
ISBN: 9781450226820
 

"Hey, Amber-over here!" yelled a light-skinned, African-American male in a white T-shirt and jeans as he neared the baggage claim at Oakland's International Airport.

Spying her brother, Amber ran right into his bear hug. Not satisfied with that display of affection, Bruce Jones lifted Amber off her feet and twirled her before bringing her to a soft, professional landing.

"Bruce, put me down you crazy fool. Can't you see everybody is lookin' at us?"

With his blue eyes flashing, he replied flippantly, "Girl, stop trippin'. These people don't know us, so who cares." He twirled her around twice more just to make his point.

Bruce Jones was a junior ...

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Today's Business & Economics Chapter

 
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Business & Investing
Thursday August 25, 2011
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
by Bill McKibben
 

Introduction

For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That’s why the centuries since Adam Smith have been devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. The idea that individuals, pursuing their own individual interests in a market society, make one another richer and the idea that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth has indisputably produced More. It has built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading this book. It is no wonder and no accident that they dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. That changes everything. Now, if you’ve got the stone of your own life, or your own society, gripped in your hand, you have to choose between them. It’s More or Better.

Some of the argument I’ll make in these pages will seem familiar: growth is no longer making most people wealthier, but instead generating inequality and insecurity. And growth is bumping against physical limits so profound—like climate change and peak oil—that continuing to expand the economy may be impossible; the very attempt may be dangerous. But there’s something else too, a wild card we’re just now beginning to understand: new research from many quarters has started to show that even when growth does make us wealthier, the greater wealth no longer makes us happier.

Taken together, these facts show that we need to make a basic shift. Given all that we now know about topics ranging from the molecular structure of carbon dioxide to the psychology of human satisfaction, we need to move decisively to rebuild our local economies. These may well yield less stuff, but they produce richer relationships; they may grow less quickly, if at all, but they make up for it in durability.

Shifting our focus to local economies will not mean abandoning Adam Smith or doing away with markets. Markets, obviously, work. Building a local economy will mean, however, ceasing to worship markets as infallible and consciously setting limits on their scope. We will need to downplay efficiency and pay attention to other goals. We will have to make the biggest changes to our daily habits in generations—and the biggest change, as well, to our worldview, our sense of what constitutes progress.

Such a shift is neither “liberal” nor “conservative.” It borrows some elements from our reigning political philosophies, and is in some ways repugnant to each. Mostly, it’s different. The key questions will change from whether the economy produces an ever larger pile of stuff to whether it builds or undermines community—for community, it turns out, is the key to physical survival in our environmental predicament and also to human satisfaction. Our exaltation of the individual, which was the key to More, has passed the point of diminishing returns. It now masks a deeper economy that we should no longer ignore.

In choosing the phrase “deep economy,” I have sought to echo the insistence, a generation ago, of some environmentalists that instead of simply one more set of smokestack filters or one more set of smokestack laws, we needed a “deep ecology” that asked more profound questions about the choices people make in their daily lives. Their point seems more valid by the month in our overheating world. We need a similar shift in our thinking about economics—we need it to take human satisfaction and societal durability more seriously; we need economics to mature as a discipline.

This shift will not come easily, of course. Focusing on economic growth, and assuming it would produce a better world, was extremely convenient; it let us stop thinking about ends and concentrate on means. It made economics as we know it now—a science of means—extraordinarily powerful. We could always choose our path by fixing our compass on More; we could rely on economists, skilled at removing the obstacles to growth, to act as guides through the wilderness. Alan Greenspan was the wisest of wise men.

But even as that idea of the world reigns supreme, with the rubble of the Iron Curtain at its feet as deserved proof of its power, change is bubbling up from underneath. You have to look, but it’s definitely there. A single farmers’ market, for instance, may not seem very important compared to a Wal-Mart, but farmers’ markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy. They’ve doubled in number and in sales and then doubled again in the last decade, suggesting new possibilities for everything from land use patterns to community identity. Similar experiments are cropping up in many other parts of the economy and in many other places around the world, driven not by government fiat but by local desire and necessity. That desire and necessity form the scaffolding on which this new, deeper economy will be built, in pieces and from below. It’s a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives. Eventually it will take form as legislation, but for now its most important work is simply to crack the consensus that what we need is More.

A word of caution, however. It’s easy for those of us who already have a lot to get carried away with this kind of thinking. Recently I was on a reporting trip to China, where I met a twelve-year-old girl named Zhao Lin Tao, who was the same age as my daughter and who lived in a poor rural village in Sichuan province—that is, she’s about the most statistically average person on earth. Zhao was the one person in her crowded village I could talk to without an interpreter: she was proudly speaking the pretty good English she’d learned in the overcrowded village school. When I asked her about her life, though, she was soon in tears: her mother had gone to the city to work in a factory and never returned, abandoning her and her sister to their father, who beat them regularly because they were not boys. Because Zhao’s mother was away, the authorities were taking care of her school fees until ninth grade, but after that there would be no money to pay. Her sister had already given up and dropped out. In Zhao’s world, in other words, it’s perfectly plausible that More and Better still share a nest. Any solution we consider has to contain some answer for her tears. Her story hovers over this whole enterprise. She’s a potent reality check.

And in the end it’s reality I want to deal with—the reality of what our world can provide, the reality of what we actually want. The old realism—an endless More—is morphing into a dangerous fantasy. (Consider: if the Chinese owned cars in the same numbers as Americans, the world would have more than twice as many vehicles as it now does.) In the face of energy shortage, of global warming, and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be, I think we’ve started to grope for what might come next. And just in time.

 

Copyright © 2007 by Bill McKibben. All rights reserved.

(Continues...)

 
 
 
 
 
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Can You Control Your Own Destiny with Print-On-Demand?

 
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Author Update
Thursday August 25, 2011
 

Can You Control Your Own Destiny with Print-On-Demand?

Barry Crowther

Going Down the POD Route

I keep considering whether it’s a good idea to use POD or not? That’s Print On Demand. A lot of people consider this to be giving in and not staying with the traditional method, but I have to say I’m really struggling with the downside here.

Consider the pain it takes to get down the traditional publishing method and the results don’t appear to be that different. What? That can’t be right. Let’s look at my current scenario. I have a very publishable book. Not just me and the dog agree with this, it’s been professionally edited and I have several “pros” who have backed me into saying this is good enough for publication. Just need to get an agent or an intro to a small press. So far so good. The hard part (writing the thing) is over. Not so fast. I get a copy of the first three chapters and mail them to several agents as well as blast off five or six emails and wait for the response. It’s not quick. Mostly rejections and some requests for the rest. This took on average six weeks to get to this stage.

Okay, hit the pause button here.

Two friends discuss this with me. One is now selling POD, the other is published with a small press. The one selling POD is doing okay, not financially rewarding but he has sold a few hundred and is gaining traction. The published author is complaining that the small press keeps messing up and although there was some upfront cash, it was nothing that could be called a huge success.

One thing that was clear from the contrast in the discussion was support, or a better expression: marketing. The distribution and marketing that is being applied to debut authors or even long running smaller authors is abysmal. If you don’t happen to become a big draw then there ain’t no marketing dollars coming your way. Period.

In On Writing by Stephen King he talks about the process of vanity publishing and how it’s a bad thing. I agree. You don’t want a garage full of your novel after shoveling over heaps of cash to someone on the end of a phone line in another country. But I also think that Steve hasn’t got as much perspective with his name being so well recognized. Also when On Writing was written POD didn’t really exist. Maybe I’m just talking myself into this POD thing??

If there is no marketing to support new authors or any form of career development with an agent then I may as well control my own destiny. What do I need them for? They read your work give a professional (subjective) opinion then shuffle onto the next thing. If you don’t work out, no problem, there’s a slush pile mountain out in the hallway. To me literary agents have become A&R men. The talent spotters of the music industry. These people don’t appear to be qualified to do anything. I recently read a great expose of the music business – if an A&R man was lucky and he get’s one band, maybe two to sell a few thousand copies of some tripe then he would be hailed as a genius. It’s American Idol all over again but without an audience voting bands off. Almost a coin toss on who gets to stay in and who gets thrown out.

That’s one thing that is cool about POD. It’s a little edgy, a little counter culture. I like that. I’m not part of the Simon and Schuster empire or Random house. Don’t get me wrong if they came knocking I would take the distribution … so long as there was some marketing back up, otherwise what’s the point.

Why not knock a book out, get it on Amazon and tell a load of friends on Facebook. What’s the betting if it sells a few thousand Random house might come knocking anyway. Food for thought.

About the Author:
Barry Crowther has made his home in San Clemente Southern California. Originally from Manchester England. He has had short stories published, Missing is first novel on the eBook platform. He continues to work and write on the follow up novel in the San Clemente sun with his three daughters, wife and chocolate lab Coney.

Read more from Barry's blog here

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The ONE Resource More Precious Than Gold or Oil

The Daily Reckoning
Dear Daily Reckoning Reader,

It’s the ONE resource more precious than gold, natural gas or oil.

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This little-known company, priced under $2 per share, is set to make a windfall of cash off its revolutionary discovery...as are a few early-in wealth builders.

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Good Investing,

Joel Bowman
Managing Editor, The Daily Reckoning

AGORA FInancial

The Daily Reckoning provides over half a million subscribers with literary economic perspective, global market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. In short, The Daily Reckoning shows how to live well even in uncertain times. We sent this e-mail to DWYLD.KWU.CAREERS@blogger.com because you or someone using your e-mail address subscribed to this service.

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How Predictive Analytics Is Supporting CyberSecurity

Webcast: Take a Bite Out of Crime with Content Analytics!
Date:
September 15, 2011 1:00 PM ET / 10:00AM PT

Content Analytics is revolutionizing Law Enforcement, Public Safety and Fraud Analytics.  Consider the impact of transforming free text descriptions residing in case files, investigative reports, and witness profiles into a series of structured facts.  The data extracted can:

  • Identify inconsistencies such as the sighting of a suspect vehicle at two different locations at the same time
  • Automatically cleanse and update personality databases
  • Recognize patterns of behavior that indicate criminal activity
  • Discover anomalies and correlations in the data that require further investigation

The end results: more effective enforcement, reduced effort to process data, and faster response times at a lower cost.  Join Federal Computer Week for this complimentary webcast and learn how government agencies are using analytics to thwart crime.

Featured Speaker:
James Luke,
Executive IT Specialist, Emerging Technology Services (ETS), IBM Software Group


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This Federal Computer Week and GCN exclusive webcast is sponsored by IBM

About Small Business Information: 10 Steps to Hiring Your First Employee

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From Alyssa Gregory, your Guide to Small Business Information

For the past month or so, many of you have been voting for me and Susan Ward (Small Business Canada Guide) in the Small Business Influencer awards. I am thrilled to announce that both Susan and I were among the top 100 small business influencers named in the contest.

This is a tremendous honor, so thank you so much for your votes and support.

In our newsletter this week, follow the steps to hiring your first employee, push through the temptation to quit, see what a recent American Express OPEN survey says about online marketing and discover what not to do when using social media for business.

Thanks for reading!
Alyssa


10 Steps to Hiring Your First Employee
Making the decision to hire an employee is the moment of truth for many small businesses. You may have been going along on your own for a while, being very... Read more

I Quit! What to Do When You Feel Like Throwing in the Towel
Owning a business is like swimming. You can't just stop moving and expect to stay afloat; it's a constant process that requires steady movement. That's part of the reason why... Read more

Survey Says: Online Marketing Is In for Small Businesses
American Express OPEN recently conducted a Small Business Search Marketing Survey, and if the small business owners polled are representative of the small business population, online marketing is a staple for small businesses... Read more

Fan Page Fails and Other Social Media Blunders
There are no "rules" to guide social media behavior, but there are certainly some fan- and follower-generating activities that are just horrible ideas... Read more

 


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