A friend asked me to fill out a survey about psychotherapy and dealing with career issues for a dissertation. I filled it out myself, and I’m passing along a link in hopes that other people can help out as well. The survey takes maybe 15 minutes to complete.
Countries like China and Venezuela are offering foreign aid to other countries with no strings attached in hopes of buying influence. Moisés Naím describes the practice in a New York Times op-ed: In recent years, wealthy nondemocratic regimes have begun to undermine development policy through their own activist aid programs. Call it rogue aid. It is development assistance that is nondemocratic in origin and nontransparent in practice, and its effect is typically to stifle real progress while hurting ordinary citizens. ...
Slate once again lists the 60 largest philanthropic gifts of the previous year. I always link to the list because what rich moguls really yearn for is recognition from a blog, especially those who donated by way of bequest.
By way of Rebecca Blood, I found Reid Scott’s post about the political blogosphere, concerning the two bloggers working for John Edwards’ Presidential campaign who came under fire and eventually resigned because of controversial remarks they had made prior to working for the campaign. It’s like the phenomenon of someone who was “fired for their blog.” No, they were fired for saying or doing something they shouldn’t have. It just happened to be in their blog. But a blog is not a buffer from the real world. Your words there count just as if you’d said them to someone’s face, with the difference that they are archived for a very very long time. ...
Is there a real Pamela Jones? SCO can’t seem to track her down so that she can be served with a subpoena. As far as I’m concerned, SCO’s problems are its meritless legal claims, not Groklaw’s comprehensive coverage of their shenanigans.
Wow. The enterprisey folks are coming to accept the inevitable, I guess. Dave Johnson has the details.
James Governor made a great observation in his del.icio.us feed about how we’re getting spun on Iran. Take a look at this Newsweek photo gallery, Modern Life in Iran. It consists of black and white shots of old women in hijabs, anti-American slogans, and people who look like they face a dreary existence. Our cold-eyed enemies living in despair. Then take a look at the Flickr shots from iranpx. Iranians at picnics. Snowy days in Tehran. Iranians on the ski slopes. ...
Believe it or not, Salon magazine has turned a quarterly profit. I thought for sure that their day pass strategy would be the end of them, but I’m happy to be wrong.
Gnucitizen explains how to do so and why you’d want to.
Lots of good stuff about making money by giving stuff away: O’Reilly publishes books that get really widely pirated on the internet, because, they publish techie books, right? If there’s a form that’s well-suited to being published digitally, this is it. You get it digitally, and then you can scan it and search it and so on. And you can find just the right bit at the moment that you need that technical advice. And the people who are in a position to nick it electronically are already pre-qualified. That’s the audience, right? They’re all geeks. So O’Reilly says, “We monitor the trafficking in infringing copies of our work, and what we find is that the works that are most profitable are also the most pirated.” So that means – for most of our works – they’re not even popular enough for anyone to want to steal them. And for the works that are really popular, we’re already making tons and tons of money off of those works. So a little bit of piracy at the edge is just a form of progressive taxation on them. ...