1. What's the carbon footprint of Fiji Water delivered to San Francisco (it comes via LA, right?) How does that compare to the footprint of Dasani -- or any other brand that is from municipal water?
   
   Stuei: We have a triple-negative carbon footprint! We've bought options for future forestation on the land that we are now clearcutting. Given our assumption that carbon sequestration will be 10x more valuable in 20 years, we are going to replant 30 percent of the current area in 10 years, allowing us to make money now and you to drink our water guilt-free. Dasani? Crap from the tap -- don't drink that poison!
   
   
2. How much water does FW extract from the aquifer in Fiji per year? How many bottles is that? How much comes out of the spring (it's artesian, right) in the average year?
   
   Stuei: We take about 50 percent of that aquifer. 80% of our extractions go for the water slide (employee perks!); the rest goes into bottles that are handblown with the finest plastic, giving our water a fresh, new-car taste. The spring's flows go up and down, but our extractions don't. This is a business, not a nature show!
   
   
3. How much FW is sold/donated in Fiji? What are the top five countries, with share of your total sales?
   
   Stuei: We donate over 400 bottles of water per year in Fiji. The President Dictator Our Friend love those little bottles. We sell water in Fiji, at the same low price that LA celebs pay. Most of our water sells in the US, where people are too worried about their health to exercise, too paranoid to believe that tap water is drinkable, and too uneducated to see through our clean crisp marketing. My favorite place to sell Fiji is in Aspen -- I love to ski on that snow, but hate to drink it.
   
   
4. How much does FW pay the Govt of Fiji per bottle for water? If not per bottle, is there an annual license fee? Does FW pay taxes (income, property) in addition to this?
   
   Stuei: Nothing. Duh. We pay bribes, but only to people. Governments are NOT people. Get that straight. Our license fee of $1,000 is quite expensive, but our tax credit of $50,000 more than makes up for it. Since we employ 200 workers, that rebate allows us to pay them $250/year more. (We don't, of course. Have you seen the unemployment stats for Fiji?) We pay property taxes based on our land-footprint. It's about 500 sq feet around our pumping facilities. The rest of our facilities are on stilts, so we only pay taxes on "unimproved land." (I got that idea from the kosher pig folks; their pigs don't touch the ground, so they are "clean." Get it?)
   
   
5. How many Fijian citizens work for FW? How many non-Fijians (in Fiji and LA...)
   
   Stuei: We bought passports for our foreign staff, so we are 100% Fijian on the ground. Even I celebrate on October 10th. 90 percent of our wages go to the 20 people who work in marketing in LA. The other 10 percent of our wages go to the day-laborers we have in Fiji. I understand that some of them work upto 50 days a year, so we even remember their names. (Well, we remember who gets what nametag.) Employees who pass 200 days of employment with us are "retired" -- they get a free bottle of Fiji water and a place on our shoot on sight list.
   
   
6. What's the most-common question from anti-bottled water people? What's your answer?
   
   Stuei: "Why are you evil?" I kinda like its directness, but I don't tell them that. I just say Fuck You -- and the horse you rode in on. Hahhaaha
   
   
7. What's the hardest question for FW to answer from anti-bottled water people? What's your answer?
   
   Stuei: "Which do you love more: money or marketing?" I still flip coins on that one, but our marketing is so bad-ass that Eskimos buy our ice! Fiji-ice, of course!
   
   
8. Where are your plastic bottles made? Virgin or recycled plastic? Is there a bottle recycling program on Fiji? What % of bottles does it pickup? Any recycling stats for FW bottles in the US?
   
   Stuei: We make 'em in China, where it's easy to get 8 year olds on the lines, and we can dump our waste next to the road. Although I hate to say "Virgin" (Fucking Branson), I LOOOVE virgin costs. We take blood oil from Iran and Sudan, refine it in to bottles with slave labor from Burma, and then ship the empties to our plant on North Korean ships that just delivered missiles to Yemeni freedom fighters. How are the bottles so clear and square? We take crutches from all those one-legged Afghanis and use them to pull the bottles through a solution of butterfly wings, shark fins and rhino feet. Gotta love that quality. Recycling? Yeah, we do that. We dump the bottles in the ocean and then wait 400 million years for plate-tectonics to turn those suckers into new oil. Bam!
   
   
9. What's the relationship between FW and the government of Fiji? Does FW have any position on political coups? Does FW have any formal or informal relationships with police, military or other security branches of the Fiji Government?
   
   Stuei: They're our bitches. All of them. The only crime that we don't control is that $12 mai-tai at the resorts. We tend to do quite well off the pedophiles and guys fencing stolen cameras and laptops, but we need to pull back on supply a bit. Low prices do not help the bottom line at FABS (Fiji's Ass Belongs to Stuei).
   
   
10. What % of FW costs are for production, transportation, head office, marketing/sales, science. Do these sum to 100%?
    
    Stuei: Science? Damn, this is just water. There's no science! We spend 80% of our money on packaging, marketing and transport. We break-even on wages. Those costs eat into our profits, but we are able to maintain those at 75 percent of revenues. The only boys who make money than us (water! it's just water!) are Bill Gates ($200 cds!) and the US Mint ($100 for $0.01?! Awesome!).
    
    
11. Why should people buy FW? Why FW instead of Aquafina (muni water) or Perrier (spring)
    
    Stuei: Because they are shallow poseurs afraid of their plumbing. Oh, and our bottles are square!
    
    
12. Thanks Mr. Resnick Stuei!
    
    Stuei: No worries kid. I love the media. Have a bottle to go, 50 percent off for you, amigo.

Shared by Martha
Whoa, this is sorta fascinating! And I also laughed at how they put love in quotes.

"This brain imaging study of individuals who were still 'in love' with their rejecter supplies further evidence that the passion of 'romantic love' is a goal-oriented motivation state rather than a specific emotion" the researchers concluded, noting that brain imaging showed some similarities between romantic rejection and cocaine craving. "The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that romantic love is a specific form of addiction."

The study also helps to explain "why feelings and behaviors related to romantic rejection are difficult to control" and why extreme behaviors associated with romantic rejection such as stalking, homicide, suicide, and clinical depression occur in cultures all over the world, the researchers wrote.

Anguish of romantic rejection may be linked to stimulation of areas of brain related to motivation, reward, and addiction [Science Daily]

Graph by:

TheStig1214

Mmmm, science is delicious. Ms. Fix-It

Earlier this month I reported on bloggers leaving scienceblogs.org because the publisher sold a presence on the site to bloggers from PepsiCo.

One of the rationales for bundling all the science bloggers together in one place was the synergy that comes from aggregation. Of course, with RSS you can achieve the same effect, without putting them all on the same server. So I put it on my to-do list to set up an science blogs aggregator, and yesterday I had some time to do it, so here it is.

http://science.newsriver.org/

As always, the OPML for the site is public so if you want to feed it into your aggregator you're welcome to. You should reimport the OPML from time to time, or ask your aggregator developer to do it for you -- because that list will be updated dynamically as the site grows.

And if you know of science blogs that should be included in the list, please post a comment here.

Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according to Woopra CEO John Pozadzides, Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures." (emphasis ours)

Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community.

Sponsor

Slashdot Has Lost Users to Competitors

Much of the reason why Slashdot isn't impacting the social Web community is its focus on heavy duty tech. Slashdot's byline is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." That captures not just who its core audience is (nerds), but its attitude to what is newsworthy (only stuff that "matters" to technical people). Slashdot founder Rob Malda wrote on his web site that typical topics include "Linux, Open Source Software, Legos, Games, Star Wars, Science [and] Technology."

Slashdot is targeted to engineers and programmers - and makes no apologies for it. However this relatively narrow focus means that Slashdot has not grown to have broader appeal, like StumbleUpon and Digg in particular. However, why then is Hacker News - which is also targeted to programmers - doing so well in Woopra's statistics?

The obvious answer is that Slashdot has lost users to Hacker News and other tech news communities. The following monthly traffic chart from Quantcast suggests that users have migrated from Slashdot to other sites. The trend over the past few years has mostly been a downward pattern (although note that these are estimated figures only).

Do You Still Read Slashdot?

We asked our community via Twitter: do you still read Slashdot?

The following responses were from ex-Slashdot users who have either reduced the time they spend there or drifted away from the site entirely:

@Transition: "On occasion. I've been on /. since 1998, but don't follow it as much anymore. Never got into the others, but I should."

@peterc: "Still visit /. once a week or so but no longer contribute (used to be a heavy user). Use HN & Reddit mainly now, never Digg."

@morganpyne: "I was a longtime Slashdot reader (5-digit ID, lurker way before signing up), but it became irrelevant a few years ago. So... no."

@ceesaxp: "/. always was a much different place from digg or reddit. But you're right I'm reading it much less, hardly once in a month these days."

@jezlyn: "I haven't read /. in many years. Got tired of the snotty attitude and comment wars.

Others Still Loyal, But Frustrated By Slow Social Media Take-up

Another reason for Slashdot's decline in the social Web has been its slow uptake of social media technologies. It only recently introduced Facebook and Twitter integration, many months after similar news communities had added them. In addition, Slashdot has historically favored stories submitted from traditional media, over 'new media' such as blogs. Both of these things have made Slashdot seem behind the times and a bit too closed minded.

However, Slashdot obviously still has a core and dedicated audience. For example Adam Monago, a VP at a California IT company, said via Twitter that he still reads Slashdot. "It continues to have a community feel that the other sites you mention do not have," he commented. By that he meant that the other sites (like Digg, Hacker News and Reddit) "do not have [an] identifiable set of traits or ideals that bind their users in the same way as Slashdot." Certainly, Slashdot's audience shares a common set of values around open source and scientific discovery.

Some people also complained that Slashdot was too slow to feature breaking news. "I catch a Tweet from @slashdot now and then," remarked freelance web developer @pluc, "[but] it didn't ride the realtime wave like others." Likewise, library student @battmutler commented that Slashdot "seems to always be 12-36 hours behind the curve." Although to be fair, a story can sometimes take 12 or more hours to hit the Digg frontpage too.

Slashdot continues to have a passionate, intelligent community. However the impact that this community has on the social Web is minimal, according to Woopra's statistics. Slashdot is no longer the powerhouse it once was.

Let us know in the comments if you still use Slashdot; and if so, whether you are happy with the experience there or would like to see it improve.

New Labour, the FCC, and G.K. Chesterton are known for third ways. But when it comes to copy ownership, there's no such thing. The mostly-awesome Copyright Office 1201 report wishes there was, however.

Imagine a booksay, The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams. The copyright to this literary work is owned by Teddy Ballgame, or his ghostwriter, heirs, and assigns. Now imagine the physical copy of this book that I have right here in front of me. This one. I own itnot the ghost of Ted Williams, not Fireside publishing. Me. While my ownership of this copy does not entitle me to make a movie out of the book, or scan it and put it up on the web, it does mean that if I sell the book I do not infringe the distribution rights of the author. The first sale doctrine hinges on this distinction between copy ownership and copyright ownership.

This distinction is also important in the world of software. If you own a copy of software, you're specifically allowed to run it under the law, without needing to get special permission from the copyright owner. But you don't need permission to read a book or listen to a record. So why do you need special legal permission to use a copy of what you own? Because under our law, running a program is considered making a copy of it in the computer's RAM, and copyright owners have the exclusive right, with limited exceptions like the one I just mentioned, to authorize the making of copies of their works. If for some reason you don't own the copy (say, you're leasing it), you can only run the program if you have a license (that is, permission) that allows you to make RAM copies.

Software companies have taken this notion of a license to ridiculous levels, to the extent that they claim that, when you walk into a store and pay money for a physical good (the CDs software comes on, for instance), you don't really own those physical CDs. You only license them. It's never been totally clear what that means, since you can't license a physical gooda license refers to legal permission to do something you otherwise couldn't do. (Okay, it sometimes means the piece of paper or other legal instrument that embodies the actual license.) But when it comes to physical goods, there aren't many options. You can own them, borrow them, or lease them. Maybe you're a bailor. But the concept of license is totally separate from and orthogonal to any form of dominion over a physical piece of property. In fact, Public Knowledge is involved in a case that hinges on whether you actually own copies of software that you buy. Software owners should have the same rights as other copyright ownersbut they shouldn't have the extra super-right of claiming that the hundreds of millions of physical copies of things that they've sold over the years don't actually belong to the people they sell them to.

Because the law in this areas is in flux, the Copyright Office ducks and ducks hard when it comes to the issue of whether you actually own the physical copy of the software that's installed on your mobile phone. First, let's review: I have an iPhone. Apple owns the copyright to iOS. But the phone is minenot AT&T's and not Apple's. Mine, mine, mine. Thus, if there are any copies of software embedded in that phone, I own them. If I own a slab of vinyl, I own a copy of the music on it. Those little grooves are mine. If I own some bound pages with ink squiggles on them, I own a copy of a book. Phones are no different. But the Copyright Office kind of wishes they were. In the Recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, it writes:

The Register concludes that the law relating to who is the owner of a copy of a computer program under Section 117 is in flux. In light of this uncertainty, the Register is reluctant to take a firm position on whether a purchaser of an iPhone is, or is not, the owner of the copy of the computer programs on the device. Where the law is unclear, the regulatory process (as distinguished from the legislative process) should be used to resolve difficult issues only as a last resort, especially when the issue is to a large degree a matter of contract interpretation.

Page 90. Later, it continues that

[T]he state of the law with respect to who may be an owner of a copy of a computer program under Section 117 appears to be in flux, and the determination whether the owner of a handset is also the owner of the copies of computer programs contained in that handset may depend on an evaluation of a number of circumstances.

Page 167. There is also similar language in the Federal Register notice:

The Register cannot determine whether most mobile phone owners are also the owners of the copies of the computer programs on their mobile phones.

The problem with this reasoning is that there is no difference between the ownership of the mobile phone, and the ownership of any software copies embedded in it. There is no third way. If you own the phone, you own the copy. If you don't own the copy, then you can't own the phone. Copyright is an intangible right, but copy ownership definitely isn't. It's a flesh and bones idea: copy ownership can't be metaphysically separated out from the ownership of the physical hunk of stuff.

I appreciate that the Copyright Office doesn't want to make a stand on pending litigation, but that litigation is about who actually owns some hunks of plastic after an economic transaction. It is not about the creation or destruction of a new kind of intangible copy ownership right that floats unmoored from both copyright and the ownership of physical copies. Maybe such a new kind of intangible right is a good idea that would better comport with the law. But it isn't the law. If the Copyright Office is satisfied that iPhone owners actually own their mobile phones, then it should also be satisfied that they are also the owners of the copies of the computer programs on their mobile phones, because one necessarily follows from the other. Elsewhere in the Recommendation, the Copyright Office does indeed find that "[t]he fact is that proponents ... have made a prima facie case that owners of mobile phones are also the owners of the copies of the software that are fixed on those phones and that as owners they are entitled to exercise the Section 117 privilege." (pg. 132). In fact, when it comes to copy ownership, there is no third way.

Everyone should know at least one woman who can code her way out of a wet paper bag.

While women developers, computer programmers and hackers of all stripes are by far outnumbered by men in their field, they're hardly nonexistent. They blog, they tweet, and they do fantastic work to keep the Internet afloat. We've chosen to highlight 15 reader-recommended tech women here; if you know of others who should be on our radar specifically women with coding skills please do let us know about them in the comments section.

Some of the women on our list are Internet famous. Some, less so for now at least. Some have worked at big tech companies like Google and Apple and Adobe. Some are startup employees or fly solo. Some are hardcore hackers, some are web design-focused. We've even got a hardware geek on our list.

With a big hat-tip to all our friends on Twitter who recommended these women, here are 15 technically skilled women (in no particular order) to follow.

1. Pamela Fox

Pamela Fox is a graduate from the University of Southern California Computer Science Department, where she earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees with minors in 3D animation and linguistics. She lives in Sydney, Australia and works for Google as a Wave API Developer Advocate.

2. Jeri Ellsworth

This woman is a self-taught computer chip designer and expert electrical and mechanical engineer. She taught herself to program as a kid by reading Commodore 64 manuals. Ellsworth lives in Oregon, works as a consultant, and has a serious penchant for pinball machines, of which she owns 60 or so.

3. Emily Chang

Emily Chang lives in San Francisco and works at Ideacodes, a web dev/design shop she co-founded with husband Max Kiesler. She's a nationally recognized expert in user experience and interaction design. In addition to her Twitter account, we also recommend her personal blog.

4. Hilary Mason

This data-loving lady is a computer science professor with a thing for machine learning. Mason does research at Johnson & Wales University and also works as a scientist for Bit.ly. She occasionally posts code on her personal website.

5. Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is the Wikimedia Foundation's CTO. She's also a huge open-source advocate; in fact, she's affectionately known as The Open Source Diva in certain circles. She worked for the Peace Corps, on the floor of a stock exchange, and even at a law firm before making the move to tech, where she began at Apple in 1991.

6. Leah Culver

Leah Culver is a software engineer specializing in web apps and Django development. In 2007, she co-founded Pownce, a social networking site, and sold it in late 2008. These days, she's a freelancer in San Francisco, where she cranks out applications and speaks on a number of topics relevant to web devs and designers. Culver is also an open-source advocate; we recommend checking out her blog.

7. Amanda Wixted

Amanda Wixted is a game programmer and an iPhone tech lead at Zynga. In fact, she's the one responsible for FarmVille for iPhone. Before she went to Zynga, she was a lead programmer for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man for iPhone. And how's this for street cred: Each of the iPhone games Wixted has worked on has been in the Top 10 Free Apps in the App Store.

8. Sarah Allen

Sarah Allen has helped to develop such products as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video and OpenLaszlo, a development framework for web apps. Formerly an employee at Apple, Adobe and Macromedia (pre-dotcom crash), she now acts as CTO of mobile startup Mightyverse, does some consulting on the side, and reaches out to women in the Ruby on Rails developer community. You can keep up with Allen's goings-on via her blog.

9. Jenn Lukas

Jenn Lukas says she loves three things in life: Coffee, kittens and XHTML. Judging from her website, we'd guess that unicorns are a close fourth. She's done web design projects for such big names as ESPN, Johns Hopkins University, United Healthcare, ABC Sports and Microsoft. Lukas lives in Philadelphia and works at Happy Cog, a web design and UX consultancy.

10. Nicole Sullivan

As a performance engineer and international evangelist for Yahoo, Nicole Sullivan does as much communication and research as she does actual app building. She's an engaging, readable, and regular blogger, and a CSS expert to boot. Sullivan lives in Menlo Park, California.

11. Laura Thomson

Laura Thomson is an Internet engineer, a self-applied job title we don't see thrown around too often. But given her position as a senior software engineer at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, we can't argue with the description. She's a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) advocate, and she wrote the book on PHP and MySQL web development. She's an Australian who lives in Maryland.

12. Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer was one of the first 20 engineers at Google; in fact, she was hired in the same month that Google got its first round of funding. Currently, she's the company's VP of search product and user experience, which means she basically green-lights every product that gets released to the general public, including Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps and many other apps and features.

13. Sara Chipps

This software developer is one of the minds behind Girl Develop IT, a low-cost program for women who want to learn how to code. Chipps posts regularly on her personal blog, including code samples, and she's particularly skilled in .NET development. She lives in New Jersey and works on contract.

14. Alison Gianotto

Alison Gianotto has been blogging for 15 years, give or take that means she started out before blogging was called blogging. She co-authored a few books on PHP/MySQL, too. Gianotto is currently working in New York City as the director of information architecture at a creative agency.

15. Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani is a programmer, but she's perhaps best-known for founding Lifehacker, a blog that we at Mashable like to read, ourselves. She tapered off her Lifehacker leadership in January 2009 and recently wrote a thorough guide to Google Wave. She's currently developing ThinkTank, a web-based platform for crowdsourcing insights via social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. Trapani resides in San Diego, California.

BONUS: Women Developer Lists on Twitter

Fifteen geeky, nerdy, technically talented women not enough for you? Check out these Twitter Lists of women developers and engineers:

• Terri Oda's Technical Women
• Anita Borg Institute's Women to Follow
• Grace Hopper Celebration's 2010 Speakers
• Nicole Sullivan's Grrl Geeks
• Jolie O'Dell's Coding With Ovaries
• @DevChix's Dev Chix

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[img credit: johncarney, briansolis, 4nton, adactio, allaboutgeorge]

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Sumo stable in Tokyo, Japan: you don't need to be a superstar to use the Superstar Effect.

The following is a guest post by Cal Newport, MIT Ph.D and all-around whiz on competing against the odds.

His discussion and suggested uses of the superstar effect and corollary are mirrored in what I tell first-time start-up founders:

Most of the time, it's not enough to be better. You need to be different.

Enter Cal Newport

###

Earlier this year, just 2,300 of 32,000 applicants to Stanford University were accepted a rate of 7.2%, the lowest in the school's history.

The students who survived this screening are phenomenally accomplished. A quarter had SAT math scores higher than 780, and over 90% had high school G.P.A.'s above 3.75, which works out, more or less, to straight A's over four years of schooling. And these weren't easy A's: the average applicant to a top-tier university takes an overwhelming volume of demanding AP or IB-level courses. (Not surprising, considering that the Stanford admissions departments ranks the "rigor of secondary school record" as "very important" in their decision.)

If you eliminate recruited athletes and the children of the rich and famous from this pool categories that receive special consideration these numbers become even starker. In short, for the average, middle-class American high school senior, applying to Stanford is like playing the lottery.

Which is why Michael Silverman proves baffling.

When Michael, a student from Paradise Valley, Arizona, applied to Stanford, his G.P.A. put him in the bottom 10% of accepted students. His SAT scores fell similarly short. "Standardized testing isn't my strong point," he told me. Perhaps more surprising, Michael avoided the crushing course load that diminishes the will of so many college hopefuls, instead taking only a single AP course during the dreaded junior year. He kept his extracurricular schedule equally clean joining no clubs or sports and dedicating his attention to no more than one outside project at any given time.

Michael's rejection of the no pain, no gain ethos surrounding American college admissions is perhaps best summarized by his habit of ending each school day with a 1 2 hour hike to the summit of nearby Camelback Mountain. While his peers worked slavishly at their killer schedules, Michael took in the view, using his ritual as a time to "chill out and relax."

Despite this heretical behavior, Michael was still accepted at Stanford. To understand why, I will turn your attention to a little-known economics theory that changes the way we think about impressiveness. To get there, however, we'll start at an unlikely location: the competitive world of professional opera singers.

The Opera Singer and the Valedictorian

Juan Diego Florez cemented his reputation as a top operatic tenor during a 2008 performance of Gaetano Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment. Among professional singers, Donizetti's masterpiece is known as "the Mount Everest of opera"; a reputation due, almost entirely, to a devilishly tricky aria, "Ah! Mes amis, quel jour de fete," that arrives early in the first act. The aria demands the tenor to hit nine high C's in a row a supremely difficult feat. To avoid embarrassment, most performers resort to the far easier natural C.

Not Florez.

In his 2008 performance of Donizetti, at the Metropolitan Opera House, Florez hit all nine notes. The acclaim was so overwhelming that he was summoned back to the stage for an encore, overturning the Met's long-standing ban on the practice.

As a top opera singer, we can assume that Florez does well for himself financially (likely on the order of 5-digit paydays per performance), but not lavishly well. Put another way: he's well-off but not wealthy.

Then there are the superstars.

In 1972, a young tenor by the name of Luciano Pavarotti also made a name for himself performing Donizetti at the Met. Like Florez, he too hit the high C's. But there was something extra in Pavarotti's voice. The audience at the Met in 1972 did more than demand an encore from Pavarotti, they weren't content until he had returned to the stage seventeen times! In writing about Florez's 2008 performance, the New York Times noted: "If truth be told, it's not as hard as it sounds for a tenor with a light lyric voice like Mr. Florez to toss off those high C's[I]n the early 1970's, when Luciano Pavarottilet those high Cs ring out, that was truly astonishing."

In other words, both Florez and Pavarotti are exceptional tenors, but Pavarotti was slightly better the best among an elite class. The impact of this small difference, however, was huge. Whereas we estimated that Florez was well off but not wealthy, when Pavoratti died in 2007, sources estimated his estate to be worth $275 to 475 million.

In a 1981 paper published in the American Economics Review, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked through the mathematics that explains why superstars, like Pavarotti, reap so many more rewards than peers who are only slightly less talented. He called the phenomenon, The Superstar Effect.

Though the details of Rosen's formulas are complex, the intuition is simple: Imagine a million opera fans who each have $10 to spend on an opera album. They're trying to decide whether to buy an album by Florez or Pavarotti. Rosen's theory predicts that the bulk of the consumers will purchase the Pavarotti album, thinking, roughly: "although both singers are great, Pavarotti is the best, and if I can only get one album I might as well get the best one available." The result is that the vast majority of the $10 million goes to Pavarotti, even though his talent advantage over Florez is small.

Once identified, The Superstar Effect turned up in a variety of unexpected settings, from the sales of books to CEO salaries. It was found to apply even in settings that have nothing to do with financial transactions. In a particularly compelling example, a researcher named Paul Atwell, publishing in the journal Sociology of Education in 2001, studied the Superstar Effect for high school valedictorians.

Atwell imagined two students both with 700s on their various SAT tests. The first student was the valedictorian and the second student was ranked number five in the class. Rationally speaking, these two students are near identical the difference in G.P.A. between the number one and number five rank is vanishingly small. But using statistics from Dartmouth College, Atwell showed that the valedictorian has a 75% of acceptance at this Ivy League institution while the near identical fifth-ranked student has only a 25% chance.

In other words, in many fields, it pays disproportionately well to be not just very good, but the best.

Hacking the Superstar Effect

Taking a step back, we likely agree that it's an interesting finding that being the best has a hidden advantage. If reaping this advantage, however, requires becoming class valedictorian or honing a brilliant singing voice both staggeringly difficult feats it's doesn't seem all that applicable.

This is where Michael Silverman reenters the picture.

The details of his story reveal a crucial addendum that makes the power of the Superstar Effect available to most people. I call this addendum The Superstar Corollary, and it's here I turn your attention next.

I discovered The Superstar Corollary in an unlikely setting: the extracurricular lives of high school students. I was researching a book on students, like Michael, who get accepted to outstanding colleges while still living low-stress and interesting lives. During this research, I kept noticing the same trait in these teen-aged lifehackers: they had accomplishments that triggered The Superstar Effect, but which revealed on closer examination to not require a rare natural talent or years and years of grinding work.

For example, consider the details Michael's story. Starting as a freshman, he focused all of his extracurricular energies on a serial string of environmental sustainability projects. He started by submitting a model of a green house to a competition. This led him to discover that a local energy company offered a grant program for local high school students. He won a modest grant, and used it, with the help of a retired engineer from his hometown, to retrofit a golf cart to run on biofuels. Leveraging this success, he earned another grant which he used to install solar panels on his school's maintenance shed. This earned him press coverage, and the resulting Superstar Effect helped wow the Stanford admissions department into overlooking his borderline scores.

Notice that nothing about Michael's rise to stardom required a rare natural talent or overwhelming work load. His projects required, on average, less daily time investment than participating in a varsity sport. Yet, he was the best at what he did among all applicants to Stanford, and the resulting Superstar Effect earned him a disproportionate reward.

Michael wasn't alone in his success at hacking The Superstar Effect. Consider, for example, Maneesh Sethi (featured recently inTim's lifestyle design case study competition), who got into Stanford on the strength of having written a popular computer programming book, or Steve Schwartz, who got into Columbia by taking on the role of press officer for a student-run environment advocacy group. Both found uncontested niches that required only a reasonable amount of effort investment to conquer, but still triggered the full impact of The Superstar Effect.

I formalize this idea with the following corollary:

The Superstar Corollary
Being the best in a field makes you disproportionately impressive to the outside world. This effect holds even if the field is not crowded, competitive, or well-known.

In other words, becoming valedictorian or a sustainability guru both generate the same Superstar Effect, but the former is much harder than the latter.

The Superstar Corollary and Lifestyle Design

Let's move beyond high school students and broaden the applicability of this powerful idea. The Superstar Corollary hacks the neural circuity responsible for producing feelings of respect and impressiveness, yielding a huge return on effort invested. As detailed below, this makes it a perfect tool for lifestyle design.

For the employee seeking liberation

Triggering The Superstar Effect in your employer provides a valuable bargaining chip when trying to inject mobility and flexibility into your work schedule. Employers don't mind upsetting hard workers, but they fear losing stars. The Superstar Corollary gives you an efficient route to this workplace stardom.

Imagine, for example, a programmer in a web development shop. The Corollary might inspire her to become a top contributor to some new, up and coming, open source technology. Becoming known as a world expert yields more impressiveness than if she had invested the same hours into simply working overtime on her existing projects.

To give another example, imagine an entry-level employee at a non-profit. By taking on responsibility for tracking the organization's web site visitors, and then mastering enough Google Analytics to present beautiful analyses to the board, the employee will be seen as the technology guru of the organization a star who is helping them understand their audience in new ways. This aura of stardom outstrips what's achievable if he had instead invested his efforts only into being a conscientious, efficient, hardworking, and replaceable employee.

For the owner of a muse looking to increase his rewards-to-effort ratio...

For the post-liberation, muse-owning lifestyle entrepreneur, The Superstar Corollary provides a powerful tool for ramping up returns without ramping up the work invested.

Writer Chris Guillebeau, from The Art of Non-Conformity blog, provides a perfect example of the Corollary at work in a lifestyle business. Instead of starting yet another site offering generic lifehacking hints, Chris found an uncontested corner of his field to conquer. Specifically, he set out on a mission to visit every country in the world. The scope of this quest transformed him into a star among travel/lifehacking bloggers, and his site quickly become a lucrative success.

Applying The Superstar Corollary

Applying The Superstar Corollary in your own life can be tricky. Here are some ideas to facilitate this effort.

Idea #1: Sloganize.

To sloganize is to transform your conquest into an easy-to-describe and immediately interesting quest. For example, Chris Guillebeau, mentioned above, sloganized his conquest of the adventure travel writing by focusing on the catchy goal of visiting every country in the world. Similarly, in my above example of a web programmer mastering a new open source technology, she might sloganize her efforts by writing a definitive eBook on the subject. To say that she literally "wrote the book" on the technology gives the expertise extra power.

The power of sloganizing is clear: it maximizes the superstar impact of your conquest.

Idea #2: Apply the $1000 Wager Test.

Two years ago, I had a series of conversations with my friend Ben Casnocha about the possibility of writing an eBook. Both Ben and I had written and published successful books on the side, and we were exploring the idea of a guide on how successful part-time authors manage to juggle their full time job with their writing. Ultimately, we abandoned the idea. The problem: there wasn't enough to say. The part-time authors who have the easiest time writing books tend to be those who know enough about the industry to be confident in the success of their project. This confidence is what allows them to keep finding time in their schedules to write; fancy scheduling rules and productivity systems prove irrelevant.

This same observation carries over to the quest to conquer an uncontested niche in your field. To follow through you need confidence in your success; otherwise, your efforts will diminish over time, regardless of the complexity of your productivity systems or the fervor of the inspirational quotes you read. Here's a simple rule: If you're not willing to bet $1000 on your success within 6 to 12 months, then either your goal is quixotic or you don't know enough about the field yet. In both cases, you're not ready for the project. A blind adherence to the flawed idea that getting started is the most important step is best left to cheesy motivational speakers winners make plays with confidence.

Idea #3 Follow Steve Martin's Brand of Diligence

In his memoir, Born Standing Up, the comedy superstar Steve Martin provides insight into his rise to prominence. I've written in-depth about his method, but perhaps the most important concept is Martin's redefinition of "diligence." He notes that diligence was crucial in his rise to comedic fame, but he's quick to redefine the term away from it's standard definition of "hard work applied consistently over time." To Martin, the key to diligence isn't the work applied to your pursuit, but instead the work you don't apply to other pursuits. He succeeded in reinventing comedy because he kept his focus on comedy, even when other, more shiny and interesting side projects presented themselves.

The same concept applies to The Superstar Corollary. When conquering your uncontested niche, it can be tempting to divide your attention. Here is where Martin's diligence is key. The bonus reward you get for being the best far outweighs any small benefit that a shiny new side project can provide. On the large scale, therefore, maintaining a relentless focus on your conquest maximizes your total overall reward.

Concluding Summary

We're wired to be disproportionately impressed with someone who is the best at what they do. This effect, however, is blind to the competitiveness of the pursuit. The writer who is traveling to every country in the world, for example, can earn as much attention as the Rhodes Scholar with a PhD in international relations.

Is there's an uncontested corner in your own working life where you could apply the Superstar Corollary to gain a huge return on investment?

About the Author:
Calvin Newport is author of How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 2004 and earned a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2009. Newport's work and findings on student success have been featured on ABC, NBC, and CBS.

###

Odds and Ends: Birthday Give-Back Results and Winners

You all are amazing human beings and should be so, so proud. The birthday give-back experiment raised more than $45,000 in a little over three days, which means $90,000+ to schoolkids in need, since I'm matching. This means you impacted more than 9,300 kids, and together we will impact closer to 20,000.

Check this image out to put things in perspective, that's about 20,000 people. Holy $#%&!

If you donated by midnight on Sunday, you should have received the following e-mail from Donorschoose.org:

Subject line: Gift from Tim Ferriss

Wow!

Thank you so much for celebrating Tim Ferriss's birthday by supporting a classroom on DonorsChoose.org. This short email contains a gift, so please read all the way through.

Thanks to you, students will have the opportunity to take interesting field trips to amazing places, including sea research vessels and Shakespearean plays! The students you helped will have access to reading activities, word games, listening centers and most important books for improving literacy skills. Through the Great Give-Back Birthday, you have brought valuable resources to more than 8,600 kids [Tim note: this has since increased] incredible!

Not only are you passionate supporters, but, as you know, Tim Ferriss has agreed to match your donations, bringing even more supplies to high need schools. But here's the cool part: he wants to give it back to you! You get to decide where to put Tim's money, whether in your hometown elementary school or into music programs across the country.

So please use the below $50 gift code from Tim Ferriss to select a classroom project of your choice on DonorsChoose.org. Just find a project that speaks to your heart and enter the code when you checkout. Your gift code expires on September 30, 2010, so don't forget to fund a great classroom!

[UNIQUE CODE]

On behalf of all the students and teachers you have touched with this gift, thank you very much!

Your friends at DonorsChoose.org

P.S. Here is a note from Tim:

You rock!!!

It's hard to describe how amazed, overjoyed, and touched I've been by you all, and your selfless contributions to kids who need it most in our schools. PLEASE use your gift code! I suggest you either use it today (it just takes a few minutes), or put it in your calendar for this week so you don't forget. It makes an incredible gift as well.

Just don't forget to use it! Chances are, if you don't use it this week, you will forget. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed this incredible experiment. Wow.

All the best to you and yours thank you, thank you, thank you,

Tim

And that's the damn truth.

But let's not forget out prize winners (though I hope you all feel awesome after the experience, which you should):

The lucky winner of the round-trip ticket is Brian Brereton. Please contact amy-at-fourhourworkweekdotcom when you know your timing for the trip!

For the Maui Jim gift card and glasses, the winners are Ty Kroll (VIP gift card), Douglass Lodmell, and Jesse Walters. Please allow a week or so for them to arrive.

This has been the most wonderful birthday I could ask for. Thank you all.

You may want to stand up to read this. According to a new study from the American Cancer Society, spending too much time sitting down can increase your risk of death, even if you're otherwise physically active. The study apparently did not address the risks of lying down, so we assume it's okay to replace our office chair with a couch in order to improve our health.

Science Daily took a look at the study, which appears in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

To explore the association between sitting time and mortality, researchers led by Alpa Patel, Ph.D. analyzed survey responses from 123,216 individuals (53,440 men and 69,776 women) who had no history of cancer, heart attack, stroke, or emphysema/other lung disease enrolled in the American Cancer Society's Cancer Prevention II study in 1992. They examined the amount of time spent sitting and physical activity in relation to mortality between 1993 and 2006.

They found that more leisure time spent sitting was associated with higher risk of mortality, particularly in women. Women who reported more than six hours per day of sitting were 37 percent more likely to die during the time period studied than those who sat fewer than 3 hours a day. Men who sat more than 6 hours a day were 18 percent more likely to die than those who sat fewer than 3 hours per day. The association remained virtually unchanged after adjusting for physical activity level. Associations were stronger for cardiovascular disease mortality than for cancer mortality.

When combined with a lack of physical activity, the association was even stronger. Women and men who both sat more and were less physically were 94% and 48% more likely, respectively, to die compared with those who reported sitting the least and being most active.

The study's authors recommend that people who sit too much "stand up and walk around." Guess that rules out the couch.

More time spent sitting linked to higher risk of death; Risk found to be independent of physical activity level [Science Daily]

The last two months have seen some important developments in the way data is made available. First, Infochimps created a web API for publishing data. The number of datasets is relatively limited; there are five available now, of which four have to do with Twitter data, and one maps IP addresses to census data (and that one appears not to be available yet). Their site allows you to request (or vote on requests) for new datasets. Pricing is reasonable. You can do significant experimentation, or even run a useful low-volume application, without running up any charges.

"Data as a service" is not a new term, by any means. There have been any number of data services over the years. But this is something different from the many services that have sold data -- or even the more recent services that have sold data via the Internet. Data as a service is another part of the cloud computing alphabet soup, on par with "infrastructure, software, or platform as a service" (IaaS/SaaS/PaaS). Infochimps makes possible applications where data lives in the cloud. Granted, you're not going to access terabyte datasets over the Internet. But neither do you have to download (or have shipped) a giant dataset for the few Kilo- or Megabytes that interest you. Infochimps is pushing a bit beyond simple data access. Their Twitter APIs aren't raw data, but implement trust metrics, influence metrics, and more. So perhaps it's better to call this "algorithm as a service" (AaaS), not unlike the Prediction API (machine learning using Google's algorithms) that was announced at Google I/O.

The second new data service that has impressed me is Google's new Public Data Explorer. I assume that everyone reading this article has seen the latest spectacular data visualizations, in the New York Times, Nathan Yau's Flowingdata blog, and elsewhere. Here's one example from GE (created by Ben Fry's Fathom Information Design). Public Data Explorer lets you create your own visualizations, based on Google's data.

Here's one of their examples (nicer than anything I came up with on the fly). It's an animation of per-capita income in California counties that shows how the individual counties have fared from 1969 to 2007. I've highlighted a few interesting counties -- let's see how they perform:

Not surprisingly, the difference between the richest and poorest counties has drastically increased. Google provides many datasets, and gives you interesting ways to arrange and animate the data. I've displayed a fairly simple bar graph animation, but you can also do bubbles on a map and several kinds of Cartesian plots. You can slice and dice regions in many different ways, frequently down to the county level. They've got data from the European community, from Australia, the World Bank, and other sources. None of this is exactly new: the data has been around for years. What Google Data Explorer does is enable you to explore the data yourself and paste the result into your own sites and blogs.

Wolfram Alpha's Widgets provides yet another way to interact with data -- potentially the most flexible yet. (You'll have to create an account and sign in.) Widgets are web components for interacting with Wolfram Alpha's data back-end. You can do pure Mathematica queries, but you can also interact with the extensive data Wolfram has been collecting. There's no programming required (unless you want to submit Mathematica queries). There's a web-based widget builder where you start with an Alpha request, like "US Unemployment," parameterize it, specify the layout you want and how you want to embed it (lightbox, popup, and iFrame styles are supported), and finally test it. At the end, you get a link or a clump of Javascript that you can paste into a website or a blog, and you can include the widget in a public gallery. You can also post directly to Facebook, Twitter, and most other social sites.

Here's an example: a simple widget to compare two stocks. You can select your own stocks or just use my defaults (Apple and Google):

It took me about five minutes to whip up this widget, starting with the simple Alpha query "APPL GOOG." But there are many ways to look up stock prices and histories. What about something more esoteric? Alpha knows an incredible amount. The other day my wife and I couldn't remember what a half-diminished seventh chord was. Alpha knows, and can show you a piano keyboard, guitar fingerings, and even play the chord. Here's the result:

You'll confuse it if you try really odd chords; don't try fancy jazz ninths and thirteenths, and remember to specify "triad" if you want your basic three-note chord.

Alpha's weak point is that you frequently end up playing "guess what Alpha wants." I suppose that's what you trade off for flexibility; but it was surprisingly difficult to build an interest calculator. Building the widget was simple enough, but coming up with the initial query was difficult. Alpha would either assume I was paying off a loan, or doing a present value calculation, or something else, until I juggled the terms into the right order, which happened to be "10% interest $100 initial value 7 years." Not illogical, but neither were any of the other attempts.

That's a minor problem, though. Widgets makes it fun to explore data and computation, and makes it trivial to share the results. With "data as a service" APIs like Infochimps, and embeddable data components like Google Public Data Explorer and WolframAlpha Widgets, we're seeing the democratization of data and data visualization: new ways to access data, new ways to play with data, and new ways to communicate the results to others.

Related:

• Data science democratized
• What is data science?
• A data science cheat sheet
• Data visualization primer: What they are and why they're important

Watch this video. If you're confused about how it works, check the diagram above.

If you're still confused, don't worry--you're in good company.

Nederlander Jan Ridders, who is something of a legend in the model engineering world, built what he calls his Thermo Pulse Mobile without really understanding how it works, basing his model solely on a YouTube video demonstrating another one in operation. At first it didn't work. Then...

After a lot of random experiments, which I shall not enumerate here because of their irrelevance, I almost gave up until I took a closer look at the video. I noticed a kind of restriction at the place were the brass cylinder was fixed in the glass tube... Because I hadn't the slightest idea how the restriction should look, I used numerous small brass cylindrical plugs from my scrap box, including those with and without all kinds of bores in them and other deformities. I started random experiments, putting all kinds of plugs in the glass tube at the place where it is fixed in the stand...

By far, most of the plugs didn't bring any positive effect, but with some of them the engine started to show some sign of life. I was pleasantly surprised and at the same time extremely astonished when I found one plug that caused the engine to keep running, although yet not fully reliable. Using the typical characteristics of this "reference plug" I made a new plug, adding step by step changes to the geometries of the reference plug. This was still a random way of working, but at least somewhat more systematic. Finally I succeed in making a restriction that allowed the engine to run reliably.

Even though they've now got a working model, Ridders and his fellow model engineers have been unable to come to a consensus explaining the thermodynamics.

If you're interested in this or any of Jan Ridders' engines, he will e-mail you high-resolution technical drawings for free upon request. Apart from this remarkable curiosity, Ridders' more traditional model engine work is not to be missed.

More:

• Measure the power and efficiency of your Stirling Engine
• Soda can Stirling engine
• Teacup Stirling engine
• Boyd's tin can Stirling hot air engines

[Via 9gag]

Related posts:

1. Science vs. Faith [Pic]
2. Typical Tourist Photo [PIC]
3. World's Most Expensive iPad Stand [PIC]

Interesting article in the New York Times today about how the radical media activist group Free Press is now working with an organization called The Harmony Institute toward the goal of Adding Punch to Influence Public Opinion. The way they want to add punch is through entertainment propaganda. The Times article notes that Harmony's mission is aimed at getting filmmakers and others to use the insights and techniques of behavioral psychology in delivering social and political messages through their work. And now they want to use such behavioral psychology and political messaging (read: propaganda) techniques in pursuit of Net neutrality regulation.

More on that agenda in a second. First, I just have to note the irony of Harmony's founder John S. Johnson citing The Day After Tomorrow as a model for the sort of thing he wants to accomplish. According to the Times interview with him, he says the movie's global warming message [and] rip-roaring story, appeared to alter attitudes among young and undereducated audiences who would never see a preachy documentary. I love this because The Day After Tomorrow was such a shameless piece of globe warming doomsday propaganda that it must have even made the people at Greenpeace blush in embarrassment. After all, here is a movie that claims global warming will result in an instantaneous global freeze (how's that work again?) and leave kids scurrying for the safety of New York City libraries until a quick thaw comes a couple of weeks later. (Seriously, have you seen that movie? That's the plot!) So apparently we can expect some pretty sensational, fear-mongering info-tainment from Harmony and Free Press.

But here's what's better: Do you know who produced The Day After Tomorrow? Oh, that's right Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation financed and distributed that movie!! The man that Free Press casts as the nefarious media overlord set to take over all media and program our brains gave us the greatest piece of radical environmental propaganda of modern times. Now, which does that prove: (A) Rupert Murdoch is hell-bent on programming our minds to embrace a sweeping global warming regulatory agenda, or (B) Rupert Murdoch is out to entertain people and make money? If you answered B, congratulations for being a sensible person. If you answered A, then click here now to start giving money to the Free Press!

OK, so let's get back to Free Press and what they are up to with the Harmony Institute (which I originally thought was an online dating site). Free Press apparently hired Harmony to research public attitudes about Net neutrality and how to influence them. Harmony's Johnson tells the Times they got interested in the Net neutrality because Free Press and the Pacific Foundation paid them handsomely to do so. And it appears Free Press got their money's worth.

The Harmony Institute's report for Free Press is entitled, Net Neutrality for the Win: How Entertainment and the Science of Influence Can Save Your Internet. It is the kind of document that would make Machiavelli and Saul Alinsky proud. According to the Times, the report promises a sophisticated attempt to change attitudes on a range of issues by using applied behavioral science. That ain't the half of it. The report is a shameless effort to completely distort the reality on the ground, which is is that, as the Harmony Institute itself admits, The public tends to have a favorable view of their current telephone company, cable or satellite provider, mobile provider, and ISP. (pg. 10) Currently the public likes the way the Internet works, the Harmony report goes on to note. Internet users and businesses generally have a positive relationship with their ISP and believe they can access what they want, when they want it. (p. 16) More generally, the report finds that the public just isn't all that interested in Net neutrality regulation but that Those who responded to the November 2009 poll generally had a favorable view of their ISP, but were split in their view of the government's role with regard to the Internet. (p. 11)

Yikes! This sure doesn't sound like the Free Press doomsday narrative, which says that the public is absolutely clamoring for comprehensive regulation of the Internet via Net neutrality. And that's where the Harmony Institute's propaganda machines kicks into high gear. On its website, Harmony explains how it will accomplish such behavior conditioning by claiming that:

Although the open Internet is vital to enabling ideas like Facebook and Ebay to flourish, without federal regulation, the Internet is vulnerable to discriminatory practices and corporate gate keeping that will dramatically alter its role in public life. As the web continues to permeate society, the issue of' net' neutrality has become integral to the preservation of the country's most basic liberties.

I want to congratulate the folks at Harmony for at least admitting what Free Press never does, namely, that Net neutrality is a form of regulation. An essential part of the Free Press Net neutrality narrative has always been how Net neutrality is not a form of regulation since they realize that most average Americans will not take kindly to the idea of increasing government control of the Internet. I guess the Harmony Institute people didn't get the Free Press memo on that one. [BTW, let's see how long the word "regulation" remains on the Harmony site! I bet it disappears shortly.]

Anyway, the rest of the Net Neutrality for the Win document is essentially a blueprint for re-engineering public opinion and to get the public panicky about various Chicken Little scenarios of corporate control. The report talks about getting to the persuadables on the issue and changing their minds. Of the checklist of ways to accomplish this, Harmony stresses how important it is to Challenge How People View the Internet. Well of course you want to challenge how people view the Net when most of them are perfectly happy with it! We can't have that, after all. They must be reprogrammed to understand they are really not all that happy with their broadband service, regardless of what they currently think.

The document also goes on to note that Most people think of the Internet in terms of private ownership, but The ultimate goal of a narrative campaign should be to update the image of the Internet from a privilege like property ownership, to a public resource like telephone networks. Of course, this fits in all too perfectly with the vision set forth by Free Press co-founder Robert McChesney, the prolific Marxist media theorist. McChesney has made it clear that the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control. What we want to have in the U.S. and in every society is an Internet that is not private property, but a public utility. So, at least the Harmony folks got the Free Press memo about media and infrastructure control. And killing property rights will be at the heart of this mission. No shock there.

But, according to the Harmony website, the Net Neutrality for the Win document is just the beginning of the Harmony-Free Press propaganda campaign:

The second phase of this project will employ the messaging recommendations outlined in the Entertainment and Messaging Guide to Net Neutrality in a six-part animated web show that informs and persuades online audiences of the need to support net neutrality. By consulting with the show's writing and production team, HI has helped embed issue statements and calls to action within the show's narrative to further inform the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of the audience. The end goal is to persuade individuals to take quantifiable steps to positively impact the cause. Each episode is between three-to-ten minutes long, and will be released once a week, over the course of six weeks beginning early 2010.

This is all part of what Harmony calls its Harmony Institute Method for Entertainment Education, which seeks behavior change through narrative entertainment. (p. 25) Oh, I can't wait to see how terrifically entertaining this propaganda will be! With a mission of harnessing entertainment to create transformative action in mainstream audiences, I can only imagine how Harmony will stop at nothing to help Free Press spread lies, rumors and innuendos in their by-any-means-necessary crusade to impose a comprehensive regulatory regime on the Internet.

The only interesting question is whether Hollywood and other entertainment providers will take the bait or if the Harmony-Free Press propaganda machine will consist mostly of homemade videos of Free Press lackeys shouting at web cams in Mom's basement. Only time will tell. But I, for one, am hoping for a big screen blockbuster The Net After Tomorrow in which nefarious corporate schemers block all online speech until trusty Federal Internet Commission regulators played by Leo DeCaprio and Megan Fox (since all regulators are that hot) swoop in to foil the wicked scheme and put the State back in control of our media and communications infrastructure. You know, because we can trust Big Government to do the right thing once we hand them the keys.

A new municipal law aimed at protecting minors from the prying eyes of adults (including parents) has been passed in Chongqing, China. Yes, you read that right: children in Chongqing can legally tell their parents to stay out of their digital lives.

The law, the first of its kind in China, was passed on Friday by municipal authorities and means that, parents will be forbidden from secretly searching through children's computers or cell phones for emails, diaries, web chats or short messages, according to the China Daily. Ah, the freedoms a teenager in central China has

Even though 42% of an online survey of 2,500 adults done by Sina.com opposed the regulation, Lu Yulin, a professor at the China Youth University of Political Science, said, [The regulation] will bring little change, as parents who habitually check such information won't stop due to the regulation, but that nonetheless it is a major step forward in child privacy protection (again, from the China Daily report).

Notes: We said provincial in the original title, however, municipal is probably the more correct term and we've changed it to that, as Chongqing is technically a municipality though that means it holds the same administrative status as a province in China and is nearly as big as one (if you really want to learn more about all this, check out Wikipedia). Also, the People's Daily piece called it a regional law so we're assuming that it is therefore a municipal law, and not restricted to just Chongqing city proper.

Original title and link for this post: New municipal law in China: adults can't spy on kids' digital lives