1. $1: putting the current president on the currency
2. $5: ranking the decimated populations of Native Americans nations
3. $10: listing “rights” without offering their explanations
4. $20: politicizing the currency (see $1, above)
5. $50: excluding DC and other territories required to use US currency
6. $100: politicizing the currency (see $1 and $20, above)

Or enabling counterfeiting.

Just sayin’, as they say.

NYT 2010-08-21 screengrab\

Previously, use of the term has been restricted to “quotations” in “articles” related to “China,” “Zagat’s-style”:

Patent Acquisition and Assertion by a (Non-Inventor) First Party Against a Second Party

Abstract

Methods for a first party to acquire and assert a patent property against a second party are disclosed. The methods include obtaining an equity interest in the patent property. The methods further include writing a claim within the scope of the patent property. The claim is written to cover a product of the second party where the product includes a secret aspect. The methods further include filing the claim with a patent office. The methods sometimes include offering a license of the patent property to the second party after the patent property issues as a patent with the claim. The methods sometimes include asserting infringement of the claim by the second party after the patent property issues as a patent with the claim. The methods sometimes include negotiating a cross-license with the second party based on the assertion of infringement of the claim, where under the cross-license the first party obtains a license to an intellectual property right from the second party. The methods sometime include attempting to obtain a monetary settlement from the second party based on the assertion of infringement of the claim.

By Halliburton.

(fs)

“We have people who would like to disinter Mom and Dad and sell the graves back to make some money,” said Richard Fishman, the director of the New York State Division of Cemeteries. There are state laws limiting the profits on resold graves, but the fact that people would be willing to go to such lengths, Mr. Fishman said, illustrates just how valuable burial plots have become.

Yeah, that’s what it indicates.

Are you familiar with the concept of a gift economy? It’s an interesting alternative to the market economy in a lot of less developed cultures. I’ll contribute something and give it to someone, and then out of obligation or generosity that person will give something back to me. The whole culture works on this framework of mutual giving. The thing that binds those communities together and makes the potlatch work is the fact that the community is small enough that people can see each other’s contributions. But once one of these societies gets past a certain point in size the system breaks down. People can no longer see everything that’s going on, and you get freeloaders. When there’s more openness, with everyone being able to express their opinion very quickly, more of the economy starts to operate like a gift economy. It puts the onus on companies and organizations to be more good, more trustworthy. It’s changing the ways that governments work. A more transparent world creates a better-governed world and a fairer world.

This time around if they ‘gift’ us smallpox-infested blankets, someone’ll blog it.

(sm)

In his internal memo announcing their closure, CIA Director Leon Panetta said:

Finally, let me take this opportunity to wish you and your families a Happy Easter and Passover.

(ps)

“When I was doing public speaking, people used to joke that I had better check under my car” for something planted by a junior associate angered by her views.[...]

Get it?!

Thanks for clearing that up.

Sentencing for white-collar crimes — and for child pornography offenses — “has largely lost its moorings,” according to the Justice Department, which makes a strong case that the matter should be re-examined by the United States Sentencing Commission.

This probably makes more sense when you’re wearing a magic green jacket.

BJ notes the end of Kodachrome: 1, 2.

For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the “blue screen of death.” “It would just turn blue,” he said. “You’d have no data coming through.” Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the disaster, he said.

I wouldn’t want to be on the WaPo‘s design team right now.

McClatchy (Blumenthal, “FDA nears approval of genetically engineered salmon,” 2010-07-11):

And the modified fish, all females, would be sterile so that they couldn’t breed with wild fish if any escaped, the company said.

You gotta be some sort of crazy liberal DFH to think that’s anything but either (a) awesome or (b) absolutely irrelevant. I mean, where else in our stewardship would we see a strong gender bias?

FB is not amused.

Ben, there is real food for thought in the article below. The submarine in the picture below looks pretty crude. Given the global cash flows generated by cocaine, traffickers should be able to afford much better equipment. And I think we, Tim Geithner, and congress should seriously consider helping traffickers to secure higher-grade weaponry. The cocaine industry is just as deserving of our support as banks and investment banks are. Cocaine cartels are far more efficient than banks, more tightly managed, and infinitely better at capital allocation and risk management. Unlike the banks, the cartels excel at adapting to a fast-changing regulatory environment. Cartels are also more meritocratic and more open to promoting entry-level employees. Also, unlike the banks, the cartels are ideologically aligned with us: they genuinely embrace no-holds-barred unregulated Milton-Friedmanesque free-market capitalism. No trafficking organization is too big to fail, and the very real penalties for failure keep them on their toes. Yes, they do occasionally torture people and kill them, but only for sound business reasons. And you have to balance that against the fact that they don’t suck money out of the pockets of innocent taxpayers. For all these reasons, we should consider a tighter working relationship with the cartels. A cocaine dealer arms race could have a major stimulative effect on the American economy. First we could have United Technologies build the dealers a bigger, fancier set of submarines, possibly armed with tactical nuclear weapons. Then we could have the Coast Guard give Raytheon a contract to build new narco-submarine detection and interdiction equipment. Voila — hyper-charged economic stimulus. Some of the technology that gets developed might even have civilian applications. Then we could have the Federal Reserve purchase five thousand tons of the white powder — it will hold its value a lot better than Maiden Lane II, let me tell you — and distribute it to investment banking prop desk traders and programmers, adding that little je ne sais quoi to the capital markets. Meanwhile, cocaine production has a much larger economic multiplier effect than most forms of stimulus: it increases the incomes of campesinos, narcotraficantes, policemen, judges, politicians and prostitutes, restauranteurs, and fine global corporations like LVMH, Ambev, BMW, Sturm Rueger, and Garmin. Moreover, cocaine also increases productivity, causing workers to zip around like foxes with their tails on fire and improving their ability to multitask. This initiative would play to our strengths. If there is one manufacturing industry where America still holds an edge, it is complex high-tech weaponry. Also, the cartels still have an inexplicable affection for the greenback. We should make every effort to encourage this quaint retro commitment to the dollar. We could start by introducing the cartels to the primary dealers and encouraging them to recycle their profits into treasury auctions. As you know, China is no longer pulling its weight in the treasury auctions, and the cartels are the perfect replacement. The cartels could also conceivably repo treasuries from the investment banks. Our shadow banking system may have had its little problems, but no one has ever questioned its complete opacity and imperviousness to regulatory oversight. Moreover, it would be a huge win to get the cartels to take some of that trillion dollars of mortgage-backed securities off our balance sheet. The cartels are better equipped than we are to straighten out the complex legal problems blocking liquidation of those assets. For example, the cartels have a particular expertise in foreclosure, collection of bad debts, and co-opting the judicial apparatus at the local level. My final point, strictly entre nous, is that we can’t all go to work for Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan when we leave the Fed (it would just look bad), and embracing the cartels would open up a whole new set of career paths for our people.

A day late and a dollar short.

Having said that, RBC’s Michael O’Hare gets it right when he writes, among other things, that “students see a lot of the hoops they are expected to jump through as unrealistic artificial exercises set to maximize the comfort of a bunch of stuffed shirts from another era, not to enable them (the students) to create value in the world.”

But he also notes that “students [might] have gotten the idea that parroting the thinking of others is what college is about from profs who reward them for repeating back true propositions they ladled out in lectures” — without asking where those profs got that idea.

I am very happy to announce the launching of the Journal of Journal Performance Studies.

Journal of Journal Performance Studies (JJPS) is a series of three interrelated works that engage with academic publishing. The project consists of a Firefox extension, an online radio, and a journal. The JJPS Firefox Extension overlays bibliometric data, graphs of journal ownership, and journal cost onto publisher websites. The extension also replaces advertisements on scholarly sites to provide a glimpse into the future of scholarly distribution. JJPS Radio is designed as a fully-automated internet radio station, presenting recitations of articles in our database of hundreds, translations of texts into sound, and news and views important for the study of journal performance. JJPS Radio suggests not only new methods for the dispersion of academic work, but also re-purposes academic texts as its source material. The Journal is an experiment in the propagation of scholarly work. The hope is that the journal will develop into an ongoing project on the limits of contemporary intellectual representation.

His less official announcement is a bit more obviously witty:

JJPS started as a result of my own disgust over the absurd prices for academic journals. Thinking about modes of distribution of digital content, and the fights over “piracy” started by the various media industries, I considered what would possibly be the logical conclusion of the crackdowns on the passing of files in their “native” formats. If the sharing of MP3 files, movies, and now PDFs continues to be criminalized, what other possibilities for distribution might exist? Given the textual nature of much scholarly publishing — and since authors often present their paper aloud at conferences — what would be the potential of an online radio station that consisted of nothing but recitations of academic articles?

This question lead to a myriad of directions, as the project itself shows. Because of my recent work with MAICgregator, a separate Firefox extension looking at the military-academic-industrial complex, I was interested in how a Firefox extension could contribute to our understandings of one potential future of scholarly publishing where the Google worldview dominates all. Thus the JJPS Firefox extension, software that not only provides information about the absurd journal costs as mentioned above, but also presents a myriad of “factors” and advertisement replacements that shows how bibliometrics and worry about Google’s influence might change how journals present and market themselves.

The resort town has been known for its vibrant nightlife and sex trade since the days of the Vietnam War, partly due to its proximity to an American air force base at the time.

The US pulled out of Vietnam in April 1975, so that’s be about thirty-five years of sex trade in a neighboring country.

Some enterprise users built internal line-of-business applications around IE6 — and are now stuck with it. Others are planning to run Windows XP into the ground — or at least until 2014, when Microsoft officially ends support for it. And because IE6 is what’s built into XP, that’s what these companies are going to allow their users to run. Still, other firms have opted to use IE6 as a kind of blocking tool. They’re counting on the Microsoft legacy browser to fail to work with some popular sites, such as Facebook, Google Docs and Google Reader, and serve as a passive-aggressive way to prevent their users from accessing these sites on their work machines and on the company’s dime.

(df)

“Copyrighting” his name

In December 2009, Ted Klaudt sent a “Common Law Copyright Notice” to the Associated Press and various state media outlets warning that use of his name, Ted Klaudt, without permission is a violation of a common-law copyright of a trade name or trademark and could result in a judgment against the offender of up to US$500,000.[5] Laura Malone, associated general counsel for intellectual property at The Associated Press, noted that the names of individuals, including Ted Klaudt, cannot be protected under copyright law.[1] The resulting publicity made his case more famous than ever, a syndrome sometimes termed the “Streisand effect”.

The AP story today:

The dependent NYT article today:

The Rapid City Journal seems to have been less impressed.

As a result, the big-name internship has become coveted capital — a reality that was showcased in the extreme when the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights recently auctioned media internships to help raise money for its cause. The opportunity to work — unpaid — went for some pretty big amounts: $2,900 at Vanity Fair, $9,000 at the Huffington Post — and an eye-popping $42,500 at Vogue.

Why pay someone to work when you can donate entrée to an unpaid job so a nonprofit can auction it off to the highest bidder?