World Bank Research - Working Papers:

Title:Greed and Grievance in Civil War

Authors: [alphabetically]Paul Collier, and Anke Hoeffler
Pub. Date:March 1, 2002
Full Text:Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [233 KB]

We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. Rebellion may be explained by atypically severe grievances, such as high inequality, a lack of political rights, or ethnic and religious divisions in society. Alternatively, it might be explained by atypical opportunities for building a rebel organization. Opportunity may be determined by access to finance, such as the scope for extortion of natural resources, and for donations from a diaspora population. Opportunity may also depend upon factors such as geography: mountains and forests may be needed to incubate rebellion. We test these explanations and find that opportunity provides considerably more explanatory power than grievance. Economic viability appears to be the predominant systematic explanation of rebellion. "

Half Staff

Military District of Washington - News:: "When the president directs that the flag be flown at half staff at military facilities, on Naval vessels and at stations abroad, it will be so flown whether or not the flag of another nation is flown at full staff alongside the U.S. flag.

When a president, former president or president-elect dies, the flag will be flown at half staff for 30 days from the date of death during the period of reveille to retreat.

When a vice president, chief justice or retired chief justice of the United States or speaker of the House of Representatives dies, the flag will be flown at half staff for 10 days from the day of death during the period of reveille to retreat.

There are specific guidelines for flying the flag for other individuals, ranging from an associate justice of the Supreme Court to retired enlisted service members. The flag might fly at half staff at all installations or only at the military installation while the funeral is being conducted.

The extent of the flag flying at half staff depends on the rank and or position of the deceased person."

Military District of Washington - News::

Origins of the 21-Gun Salute

The tradition of saluting can be traced to the Middle Ages practice of placing oneself in an unarmed position and, therefore, in the power of those being honored.

The cannon salute might have originated in the 17th century with the maritime practice of demanding that a defeated enemy expend its ammunition and render itself helpless until reloaded ? a time-consuming operation in that era.

In the Anglo-Saxon Empire, seven guns was a recognized naval salute, seven being the standard number of weapons on a vessel. Because more gunpowder could be stored on dry land, forts could fire three rounds for every one fired from sea, hence the number 21. With the improvement of naval gunpowder, honors rendered at sea were increased to 21 as well.

Beginning in our colonial period the United States fired one shot for each state in the Union. This was continued until 1841 when it was reduced to 21 from 26. Although it had been in use for more than 30 years, the 21-gun salute was not formally adopted until Aug. 18, 1875. This was at the suggestion of the British, who proposed a 'Gun for Gun Return' to their own 21-gun salute. "

Hail to the Gipper

: "Examples of Infopoll Question Types
Infopoll supports a diversity of question types to meet your needs. Many of the question type are unique, such as matrix/spreadsheet questions. "

C&EN: LATEST NEWS - Paving the Way For Nanotech:

"Paving the Way For Nanotech

Institute of Medicine roundtable hosts forum to assess field, find ways to avoid misconceptions

SUSAN R. MORRISSEY

Nanotechnology has been billed as the next great technological revolution--sometimes referred to as the "second Industrial Revolution." It holds great promise in a number of areas, including medicine, energy, and materials science. But as the science advances and applications begin to emerge, researchers and policymakers fear that unintended health and environmental implications and a backlash of negative public opinion will stop the field in its tracks.

To guard against such a backlash, a push is under way to make sure that, as the science moves forward, issues related to the environmental and safety implications and the ethical concerns of nanotechnology also are studied. This latter group of studies was the topic of discussion at an Institute of Medicine workshop held in Washington, D.C., on May 27. Sponsored by IOM's Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research & Medicine, the meeting assessed the current state of research on nanotech implications."

DelphiGroup.com - About - Site Map: "Home > About > Site Map "

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Digital Domain: What's Google's Secret Weapon? An Army of Ph.D.'s:

"What's Google's Secret Weapon? An Army of Ph.D.'s

By RANDALL STROSSPublished: June 6, 2004

Mostly, Google has concentrated on recruiting those with a background in what you would expect: computer science. Founded by two near-Ph.D.'s who have purposely placed Ph.D.'s throughout the company, Google encourages all employees to act as researchers, by spending 20 percent of their time on new projects of their own choosing.
...
Microsoft has 56,000 employees, but its research group, with 700, is separate. Google has 1,900 employees, and no separate research group, so all 1,900, effectively, are charged to "boldly go where no one has gone before" (its words). You have to like Google's chances.
...
In 1991, Microsoft established its separate research organization, following contemporary orthodoxy, and sought Ph.D.'s to conduct research full time. Its mainstream recruiting, however, remains focused on undergraduates and master's students.
'We're not heavy into Ph.D. recruiting,' explains Kristen Roby, Microsoft's director of recruiting at colleges in the United States. 'We're huge believers in hiring potential.'
Advertisement


Google, however, prefers those who have been trained for the maximum time setting on the university's dial and who have experience in organizing their own research agenda. The company has not released data about its Ph.D's for two years, but based on its history, the number is probably more than 100."

Legal Media Group - informing global counsel for over 15 years

"Record companies retain CD protection right

Stephanie Bodoni, London - 06 June 2004

Four of the world's largest music companies have scored a victory in a case that could have damaged their anti-counterfeiting efforts.

In an 11-page judgment on May 26, a Belgian court rejected demands by Belgian consumer watchdog Test-Achats to halt the record labels' production of copy-protected CDs and remove all such CDs from the market.
The court ruled that EMI, Sony, BMG and Universal Music had the right to produce anti-copying CDs, delivering a blow to Test-Achats, which had collected more than 200 complaints from disgruntled individuals. . . ."

Google Web APIs - Getting Help: "Getting Help
Google Web APIs is a free beta service, so support is somewhat limited. However, there are three ways for you to find additional information or get help with problems you encounter:
Discussing problems on the google.public.web-apis Google Group. Google employees monitor the group and occasionally will participate and post responses.
Emailing api-support@google.com. While we can't promise we'll be able to respond to every question that comes in, Google staff read all the email we receive.
Reading the FAQs. "

How does Gmail search work?

Answer

With Gmail, you have the full functionality of Google search in your email account. By saving your messages and using Google search, you don't have to spend time filing or creating an elaborate folder system to keep yourself organized. Choose your search terms, and Google will do the rest for you.
The simplest type of search involves entering a word (or multiple words) that appears anywhere within the message for which you're searching. For example, if you're looking for a message from a friend that contains the word shopping, then simply type in the search query shopping.

Gmail search is just like Google's web search -- it supports several advanced operators, or query words, that have a special meaning. Typically, these operators modify the search in some way, or even tell Google to perform a different type of search. For instance, from: is a useful Gmail operator. Let's say your friend's email address is listed as "Jennifer Smith" . To find messages from Jennifer, you could search for from:jennifer or from:googlegal (note that the query from:jen would not work because the word jen does not appear in the listed email address).

Once you get more comfortable with searching, you may want to combine terms or use more advanced operators to make your searches more accurate. Suppose you're planning to go shopping with Jennifer and you want to review conversations only about shopping. You can then use the query from:jennifer shopping. Or, suppose you want to find a message you sent to Jennifer, and to which you've applied the label "fun-stuff". Then you can use the query to:jennifer label:fun-stuff.

There are many more options available. If you're interested in finding out more, check out advanced search operators. Don't worry if you can't remember every single special operator. You can always click 'Show search options' just below the Gmail search box to refine your search without having to remember any special operators.

It’s important to note that, at this time, Gmail search doesn’t recognize matches to partial strings or matches that are 'similar' to your query, including plurals and misspellings. If you search for 'travel,' Gmail returns emails containing instances of 'travel,' but does not return emails including 'travels' or 'travles.'

updated 5/28/2004

NetDocs NewsLink
Simplified access list display.

AllStocks.Com The Investor and Stock Traders Web Site
Welcome to
Allstocks.com “The Investor and Traders Web Site.”
Just about everything an Online Investor or DayTrader needs.

findability.org | findability research#InformationSeekingBehavior: "Research

If only we knew what we already know.

Information Seeking Behavior
The study of users as finders and seekers.
Information Seeking - by C. Choo, B. Detlor, D. Turnbull
Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques - by M. Bates
Information Foraging - by Peter Pirolli, Stuart Card of Xerox PARC
Keeping Found Things Found - at University of Washington iSchool
Genres and the Web - by Andrew Dillon, Barbara Gushrowski
From IR to Information Interaction - by Gary Marchionini
Effective View Navigation - by George Furnas
What Do Web Users Do? - by Andy Cockburn, Bruce McKenzie
Key Research Findings Related to UCD - from HFI

Taxonomies & Facets
The design of hierarchies.
Depth vs Breadth in the Arrangement of Web Links
Faceted Metadata for Image Search and Browsing - BAILANDO
Web Page Design: Implications of Memory, Structure and Scent for Information Retrieval - by Kevin Larson, Mary Czerwinski
Taxonomy & Content Classification - report from Delphi Group

Information Retrieval
Seek and ye shall find (maybe).
Stuff I've Seen - from Microsoft Research
Optimizing Search by Showing Results in Context - by Susan Dumais, Edward Cutrell, Hao Chen
A Multi-Dimensional Approach to the Study of Human- Information Interaction: A Case Study of Collaborative Information Retrieval - by Raya Fidel, Annelise Mark Pejtersen, Bryan Cleal, Harry Bruce
TREC - publications from text retrieval conference
Conceptual Links Trump Hyperlinks - by Kimberly Patch
Information Retrieval Research - links from Search Tools

KMWorld 'Best Practices' White Papers Series: "Search & Discovery ? Focus on Convera"

http://www.kmworld.com/publications/whitepapers/search_discovery/ConveraWP.pdf

The Truth About Federated Searching: "FEATURE

The Truth About Federated Searching

Source: WebFeat (http://www.webfeat.org)

Federated searching is a hot topic that seems to be gaining traction in libraries everywhere. As with many technologies that are rapidly adopted,there are some misconceptions about what it can do. WebFeat, a provider of federated search technology to more than 900 public, academic, and corporate libraries, including more than half of the top 10 U.S. public libraries, has compiled this list of the five most commonly repeated misconceptions about federated searching. "

ia/ : Hello world: "Hello world
initial test message
please delete/ignore
? By oldfox at 05/29/2004 - 13:05
? Filed under Information organization
? edit this blog entry ? Add new comment ? trackback url
? Blogs citing this entry (Technorati)"

Information architecture, usability and interaction design issues, plus the odd thought: "You are here. (where is here?)
eleganthack.com is a one-person website devoted to exploring and furthering the emerging art of user experience design and information architecture on the web. "

Technorati: Top 100: "Top 100 Technorati
Ranked by number of blogs who link to the site
Last updated 2004-05-26 23:00:12 PST "

Conference programme - ISKO 2004: "
Provisional Conference Programme
Click here to browse abstracts of the papers"

Dewey Decimal Classification: "DDC's numbers formed the basis of the more expressive but complex Universal Decimal Classification, which combines the basic Dewey numbers with selected punctuation marks (comma, colon, parentheses etc.). Despite its frequent revision, DDC is widely considered theoretically inferior to other more modern systems which make freer use of alphabetical characters to produce shorter classmarks for concepts of equal complexity, though it continues to offer a more expressive format than the simpler enumerative alphanumeric Library of Congress classification developed shortly afterward. "

Ananova - Potato gun lands German men in stew

Potato gun lands German men in stew

Three German men are facing weapons charges after being caught with a home-made potato gun.

The men were seen by a police patrol driving away from a lake in Kirchhain-Niederwald at speed.

Officers gave chase and stopped the men who told them they'd been trying out the potato gun in front of spectators.

The men said they'd got instructions on how to make the gun from the internet.

They'd used bits of piping and a fuse from a gas stove. They'd also used several spray cans to fire the weapon.

The men were also carrying a number of potatoes, and told officers their gun could fire potato pieces more than 300 yards.

The potato gun is classed as a firearm and none of the men had a permit to own or carry one."

Chambers Online Reference: "Search Results for 'conrad hilton'

Hilton, Conrad Nicholson 1887-1979
US hotelier

Born in San Antonio, New Mexico, he helped his father turn their house into an inn. He became a cashier in New Mexico State Bank in 1913, and was president and partner in A H Hilton and Son, General Store by 1915. He took over the family inn on the death of his father in 1918, and bought his first hotel, the Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas, in 1919, building up a chain of hotels in the major cities in the USA. After World War II he formed Hilton Hotels Corporation (1946), and Hilton International (1948). He continued to expand the company until his son, Barron Hilton, took over as president in 1966. He published his autobiography, Be My Guest, in 1957. "

LRRW: How to Synthesize:
"WHAT SYNTHESIS IS NOT
10. Synthesis is not a collection of case annotations or analogies. As Neumann points out, describing a series of cases is nothing but an amplified listing; 'the raw materials are held up to view but they are not sewn together.' The essence of synthesis is a search for collective meaning which can be found only a collective evaluation of the cases. "

Solutions: Teragram Taxonomy Manager: "Traditional Constraints
One difference between popular World-Wide-Web directories and directories that companies want to build is the fact that the WWW directories are usually built entirely by hand. In other words, each category will have its own editor or set of editors that will be responsible for the content on this category. While this solution generally provides very high quality data organization; it has two main drawbacks:

The cost of building a good directory may be prohibitive because of the labor involved;

The speed at which the directory can be updated with new data is limited by the speed at which new information can be processed. "

One of several great images of a yogi girl. 

I know the answer is here somewhere staring me right in the face! 

Chautauqua: "Before Monday Night Football, before talk radio, before web surfing and chat rooms, there was Chautauqua.

At the turn of the century, there were more than 10,000 Chautauqua venues in small towns and rural areas across the United States. People gathered to enjoy the famous authors of the day, the best musical ensembles, and art exhibits usually available only in major cities. After a stimulating presentation, participants wandered back to their porches and living rooms to discuss, debate, and reflect on what they had experienced together. The Chautauqua movement was all about learning in community"

BuzzPhraser (tm):

BuzzPhraserTM

A TechnoLatin phrase generator by Doc Searls.
BuzzPhrases are built with TechnoLatin, a non-language that replaces plain English nouns with vague but precise-sounding substitutes. In TechnoLatin, a disk drive is a 'data management solution.' A phone is a 'telecommunications device.'

For more information, see the BuzzPhraser Story, or try making some BuzzPhrases yourself. Just click on the New BuzzPhrase button. You can use the parameters on the control panel to tweak the exact form of your buzz phrases. You can also print your accumulated phrases.

BuzzPhraser 2.1 is an OSI Certified Open Source Javascript application, written by Charles Roth. The source is available as the tarfile buzz.tar. Please let us know about any interesting uses of or changes to the BuzzPhraser. "

When I was coming up in school, Martin Luther King Jr. espoused the power of non-violence.

But this [guy/gal/opponent/idiot/debater] is espousing nothing but vile nonsense!


(c)2001 OldFox.com
It works best with a cymbel crash rather than a bass drum.

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: SELF-PARODY ALERT: My favorite correction from the New York Times in a long time. Almost makes me nostalgic for the Captain Queeg era:

"An article on Monday about the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that ended school segregation misstated a word in a paraphrase from President Bush, who attended a ceremony in Topeka, Kan. He called for a continuing battle to end racial inequality -- not equality."

You couldn't make this up. Speaking of which the cover story in Sunday's New York Times Magazine is a Susan Sontag essay. Yes, she's going to write about Abu Ghraib. And - yes! - the headline is: 'The Photographs Are Us.'
- 4:55:27 PM

The write stuff

Have you got it? Take a quiz based on The Economist's Style Guide... more"

Semantic Interoperablity book excerpt

From ColabWiki
http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage

COLAB - cwe: "WHAT'S IN A NAME?
... in our case, a way to convey what we do best
For years, business and government entities have strived to improve results. Traditionally, they have worked to optimize performance within vertical functional structures (silos). Today, with an increasing customer focus (citizen focus for the government) and significant technology advances, they are finding organizational 'silos' are barriers to increased effectiveness. Organizations must work across functional boundaries to see dramatic improvements in all measures of performance.

These are the silos that we 'smash.' We work with clients to break down walls that exist within and between organizations, divisions, government agencies, and companies. We bridge communication gaps, fix broken processes, and most importantly, build collaboration and consensus into our clients' cultures. By managing the 'white space on organization charts,' we help our clients operate at Peak Performance.




Copyright ? 2003 by SiloSmashers, Inc. All rights reserved."

COLAB - cwe: " 1992, SiloSmashers was founded by Angela Drummond as Structured Solutions Inc. (SSI), a woman-owned firm. SiloSmashers was started as an entrepreneurial venture to meet a need in the marketplace for collaborative management consulting services. At that time, the Federal Government was undertaking a number of large projects related to information technology, downsizing, 'right-sizing' and restructuring, and process improvement. SiloSmashers saw the need to implement buy-in and commitment from all levels within organizations in order for these projects to succeed. SiloSmashers' first engagement, for the Department of Defense (DoD) Corporate Information Management Office, was to build and run the first DoD Center for Process Improvement.

In 1994, while still doing work with the DoD and other agencies within the Department, SiloSmashers branched off to other Federal clients. In addition, SiloSmashers began work on its methodology, originally called Rapid Action Redesign, and now updated as the Peak Performance Index. SiloSmashers also developed an internal analysis tool called ReCap, used for gap analysis.

In 1995, SiloSmashers moved to larger offices in Alexandria, VA and built an Electronic Meeting System (EMS) room to support collaborative facilitation efforts.

In 1999, SiloSmashers embarked on a branding campaign, and changed the firm's name to SiloSmashers. SiloSmashers was selected as the result of company discussions as to what we do best and the biggest benefit to our clients.

In 2000, SiloSmashers hired Charles Mudd as Chief Operating Officer (COO). In 2001, he became a Partner in the firm.

In late 2001, SiloSmashers again expanded offices and moved to our current location in Vienna, Virginia, where the firm leases on two floors of a modern office building next to the Dunn Loring-Merrifield Metro "

ColabWiki: TerrySeale: "Terry Allen Seale is a Legal Taxonomist with Dorsey & Whitney, a preeminent international law firm based in Minneapolis MN. Terry is resident at the Washington DC office although his role is firm wide. He is concerned with knowledge management tools and practices as applied to the practice of law and the administration of justice. "

Old Foxon another Wiki

PmWiki - Main.OldFoxBlotter: " Main /
OldFoxBlotterSearchWiki
Main.RecentChanges
Edit Page
Page Revisions


Describe OldFoxBlotter here.
Old Fox is now expewimenting to wearn WikiWriting?. He knows wittle about it at this juncture.

There is a webbwog (http://www.0ldfox.blogspot.com) hewre. And another here about Kylie



Edit Page - Page Revisions - WikiHelp - SearchWiki - RecentChanges
Page last modified on May 23, 2004, at 08:11 AM"

BBC NEWS In Pictures
British students attempt to set a record for the most people to ride a roller coaster naked.

protonic.com : fast free technical support: "protonic.com is an online community that provides technical support to computer users for free. We prefer to call our users 'Clients,' because we have the philosophy that, despite our service being free, you should still receive the highest quality technical support.

Each protonic.com support Technician is a volunteer. We have been featured in many media publications including USA Weekend, Yahoo! Internet Life and .net magazine.

If you have a computer problem - anything from hardware to HTML problems - then submit your question to us for help! We support nearly everything: PCs, Macs, Unix and PDAs. "

Anti-Spam Your Inbox: "While no filtering system is perfect, you can greatly reduce the number of spam and junk e-mails that you receive using your mail program's filtering function.

You may have noticed that a lot of spam does not contain your actual e-mail address in the To: field. Spammers put some bogus address in there to hide the recipient list. Your actual e-mail address is hidden in the message header. You can take the practice the spammers use and use it against them to filter out their garbage. "

Personal Fund | Home Page:

Mutual Fund Cost Calculator

Enter the five letter ticker symbol for your mutual fund@the site.

More News
July 9, 2002
Our new study, Mutual Fund Costs: Risk Without Reward looks at the last ten years of mutual fund returns. The paper sheds new light on the relationship between expense ratios, turnover and performance. It illustrates even more clearly what this site has been saying all along: Low cost funds tend to have higher average returns, greater odds for superior performance, and a lower risk of inferior performance than do high cost funds.

Using some of the results of the study, we also update this web site to give improved estimates of transaction costs for different types of funds. See the study for more details"

The Curse of Thamus: An Analysis of Full-Text Legal Document Retrieval- 2/18/98: "Full-text computer-assisted research systems have become standard tools for searching large quantities of legal documents. Yet there remain questions as to the relative effectiveness of full-text searching. Mr. Dabney reviews recent research into these questions and discusses the implications the results for computer-assisted legal research systems. He concludes that the performance of currently available systems could be improved. "

About WebChoir: "About WebChoir
WebChoir, Inc., an information organization and retrieval platform company, was founded in April 2000 as a Delaware Corporation. Using open standards and technologies, WebChoir develops and builds information organization platforms and related information retrieval tools for the global market.
The Company's core products, targeting the key business functions of information storage and retrieval, are marketed as TermChoir?, ViewChoir?, LinkChoir? and SeekChoir?. Each product is a robust, modular and scalable application that can be used as a standalone product solution, or used together with other WebChoir products to provide a total solution. WebChoir fully supports the standardization efforts of XML, MARC, and NISO standard z39.19, and our products are compatible to these standards. Research is underway to support traditional classification systems and other standard vocabularies. "

Thinkmap Taxonomy Browser Demonstration -- Launch Page