Goals and chemicals

Why we felt like dying when we fail....why love can keep us awake....check this article at for an interesting take on the chemical side of setting up goals.....and love is a goal for sure...isn't it?

Should we drive or eat?

I was driving fast through the countryside and suddenly felt hungry..turned on my radio and heard .."144 USD per oil barrel.."...I thought to myself ..nothing new as oil prices these days are going up...I wondered why so expensive? Maybe because someone is making a couple bucks (as Paul Krugman explains)..?.. or because now is time to get serious about oil-based economy and is time to shift for green sources.. then...what about corn..and ethanol...(check for this article "Six Ethanol Myths" at Wired).

Nowadays..we have more great news as food prices are up 3% (according to Edward Lazear - ethanol-only estimate) excuse me ..75% due to biofuels (according to The Guardian) well make your own conclusions..I think we need more studies...

Let's go and get something to eat...

A recipe for FUN!!!!!

Don't miss it ...check this link for a recipe on how to have FUN!!! in your life, you might want to download the article as well...a very clever approach from Michael Bungay Stanier

World Statistics - Facts and GapMinder

Gapminder Foundation has developed a tool that help us to better understand statistics on world economic indicators by expressing them as dynamic and interactive graphics based on the software Trendalizer. Google has acquired Trendalizer in 2007 and is developing a Gadget called Motion Chart.

Clouds, Sun, Moon ...the Stars and Computing Power

Geva Perry at Gigaom is posting an interesting proposition on cloud computing and economies ofscale where a strategy to balance supply and demand curves for computing power consumption, data center location, energy savings based on the 24 hour cycle create a powerful equation thatworth to take a look.

Cyclic Bubbles..

This article from Jeremy Grantham from GMO explains why the credit bubble and the subprime crisis isn't over and how we are the verge to see a major and prolongated impact on the international financial markets. We should be reading carefully the last Federal Reserve reaction (Jan 21 2008) cutting federal fund rates to 3 1/2 and the "financial instability hypothesis" developed by Hyman Minsky.

ECM, WEB2.0 & Enterprise 2.0

ECM and Enterprise 2.0

From: Frappaolo, 3 months ago

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Overview of the role of ECM in Enterprise 2.0, with a further focus on content security


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Macholtz Comet approaching

We got a nice visit from Macholtz comet. Located somewhere near Taurus and Pleiades and 32 million miles away makes the perfect sky watch for the first days of January.

2005: Seize every day the best you can…

As we ran into 2005 some news have made us think about how fragile life is on Earth. Thousands of miles away from our places, brothers and sisters traveling with us in this small planet, bear with pain personal loses from December 26 Indian Ocean Earthquake, for them my respect and condolences.

As I checked for something to help me forget this crude reality, well I found something interesting in the sky that made me remember when Mr. Robin Williams in the Death Poets Society Film said “Seize the day”.

Now it makes sense: take very minute during 2005 and enjoy it.

This is what I found: NASA group has upgraded asteroid 2004 NM 4 to category 4 on Torino Scale, meaning that now we got a 1/60 chance of having a collision by April 13 2029. Jay Manifold has made some numbers and calculates 1.600 megatons impact with 250.000 casualties should the asteroid impact US territory or 2.5 million souls in the case of India given the population density. Fortunately, we still have high probabilities of getting more information in few days that may change this announcement.

The Origin of Complexity

I found this interesting article from Evan Ratliff and published by Wired Magazine titled “Crusade against Evolution” showing that some smart guys in Columbus, OH are pushing the envelope and breaking what we consider to be the absolute truth: the 140 years old Darwinian Evolutionist paradigm. With their proposal, public schools are about to teach evolutionist concepts using the ‘teach the controversy’ approach. <>

What makes interesting this approach, besides opening minds and room for debate, is that Creationism which has foundations in many antique traditions and religions is now using science, although some claim it to be pseudo-science, to explain why complexity must have a maker. These ideas are hard to conciliate, but it seems that the stage will be ready for our kids learn to deal with the dichotomy matter-spirit. Philosophers have made for centuries huge contributions to these subjects, so I leave these words from Einstein:

"I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. [He was speaking of Quantum Mechanics and the breaking down of determinism.] My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance -- but for us, not for God." ["Albert Einstein: The Human Side", Princeton University Press]

The Art of War

“Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting..”, using the old Sun Tzu chinesse principle, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is taking the lead over Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) by extending the already universal Google search algorithm to the common PC desktop (still dominated by Microsoft). With this new tool, Google enables everyone, with just a browser, to gain control over the large amount of files that we already have in our computers. Desktop search tools are not new, some solutions has been out there for some time: Copernic, X1, and Microsoft Explorer search companion, among many others. But now we got Google that is serious about leading this market niche and here is why:

• Pros: easy to use interface that is integrated into http://www.google.com/, enable index and search for any type of files including: doc, ppt, xls, txt, pdf, jpg, gif, mp3, Outlook mail files, web history files, favorites, AOL IM, etc., offers options to exclude directories, and the best of all..it is free;
• Cons: security concerns because it is so easy to index and search that your entire computer becomes transparent to other users if you don’t set up minimum security controls; although Google says that they will provide password protection sometime soon. Does not provide thumbnail views for jpg and other graphic formats, it is not possible get more than 10 results per page, and to order results based on other criteria such as files size, type, etc.

Having said that, Google Desktop Search (beta) will be the new killer application on the block, and along with Gmail, the new 1-Gigabyte free mail service originally introduced with the slogan “Don’t throw anything away” and “Search, don’t sort”, are about to set five star prospects for the company. Recent news indicate that for mail Yahoo, Lycos and Spaymac are rising their offers to 1-Gigabyte too, while some IT specialists claim that Google has been giving 1-Terabyte to some users.

The “Storage War” seems to have no limits, and because it depends only on technology limitations and costs per MB we will see storage capacity to grow sky-high for services like e-mail; instead, the real challenge in the “Search Engine Wars” is to set up a new paradigm for the final user, how to search and retrieve contents already lost in our large array of computers and storage media that we use everyday. The most critical issue now, is how to give sense, order and context to the huge amount of information and files, mapping content to ideas and categories by making the computer work and display information not in the linear old-fashioned and folder-like way, but in the "n-dimensional" space that is suitable and unique for our particular minds and thinking process. In few words, the question is: how can computers become transparent extensions of our minds and languages?

Bill Gates on technology @ Microsoft CEO Summit - May 20 2004...

This year Bill Gates started the 8th Microsoft CEO Summit 2004, presenting some thoughts on how technology advances can impact business strategy in the years to come:

-In the software industry big things take around 5 years to make market impact.

-Processing power with chips now running at 64bit is opening the road for huge memory address space that means more to run apps and new software.

-Increasing use of wireless networks with something called Personal Area Networks using Ultra Wideband instead of more restricted technologies like Bluetooth.

-Using wireless technologies over long distances like the WiMax standard (802.16) with allow massive adoption of broadband Internet access on the consumer side.

-Storage will continue to provide cheaper disk space and is not a limitation.

-Photography will be entirely digital within the next five years.

-Increasing adoption of WI-FI technologies is already a fact. The challenge for households is to have bandwidth for video.

-High definition displays getting cheaper. RFID technologies to improve business abilities to track goods or assests.

-Mobiles phones + better screens resolutions + digital camera + speech recognition + small keyboards + PDA capabilities + GPS sensors will be the standard. Here is what J. Dvorak thinks of convergence.

-Internet advertising increasingly will continue to be boosted by technology and not by M&A activity.

-Digital reading coming with things like: one magazine comes, shows only those articles that the reader likes, and allows to make annotations and to share thoughts with other readers.

-On the business side, enabling employees to organize their works in ways appropriate
to execute their functions instead of being locked in the uniformity of the IT platform.

-Blogging as a new phenomenon where a social network can interact and increase
productivity by simplifying publishing and subscription tasks over an easy to
maintain personal web site. Here are some quite opposite thoughts about what will
happen to blogging: John Dvorak and Dave Pollard.

-Building communities around web sites and products as a way to increase interactions and productivity.

Abraxas and humanity general sense of things...

In ancient mythology (Assyrian) Abraxas was a Hermetic Gnostic deity and his name was derived from Abracadabra. Carl Gustav Jung defines Abraxas as "..more indefinite still than god and devil... it is force, duration, change". Hermann Hesse in his book Demian, defines Abraxas as "The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas”. Abraxas was also the symbol and name of the inner Order of Templars.


ABRACADABRA,


By Abracadabra we signify
An infinite number of things.
'Tis the answer to What? and How? and Why?
And Whence? and Whither? -- a word whereby
The Truth (with the comfort it brings)
Is open to all who grope in night,
Crying for Wisdom's holy light.


Whether the word is a verb or a noun
Is knowledge beyond my reach.
I only know that 'tis handed down.
From sage to sage,
From age to age --
An immortal part of speech!

Of an ancient man the tale is told
That he lived to be ten centuries old,
In a cave on a mountain side.
(True, he finally died.)
The fame of his wisdom filled the land,
For his head was bald, and you'll understand
His beard was long and white
And his eyes uncommonly bright.

Philosophers gathered from far and near
To sit at his feat and hear and hear,
Though he never was heard
To utter a word
But "Abracadabra, abracadab,
Abracada, abracad,
Abraca, abrac, abra, ab!"
'Twas all he had,
'Twas all they wanted to hear, and each
Made copious notes of the mystical speech,
Which they published next --
A trickle of text
In the meadow of commentary.
Mighty big books were these,
In a number, as leaves of trees;
In learning, remarkably -- very!

He's dead,
As I said,
And the books of the sages have perished,
But his wisdom is sacredly cherished.
In Abracadabra it solemnly rings,
Like an ancient bell that forever swings.
O, I love to hear
That word make clear
Humanity's General Sense of Things.

Jamrach Holobom

Excerpts from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Credits are from Blackmask Online.

Christians, Jews and Politics

During centuries Jews and Christians have been separated by their beliefs, and although sacred texts come from the same sources, indeed, there is a separation rooted the approach and interpretation of faith and values. After the Holocaust, some researchers point fingers to Eugenio Paccelli (Pope Pio XII) who was supposed to support Hitler’s plans for the Final Solution, through non intervention in politics, in exchange for protection to the Catholic Church powers. With all these differences that might go from anti-Semitism to rational or mystical interpretations, we are living in a world were Islam is present more than ever, and in fact bringing crisis and threats to Israel. What’s next? Will Jews and Christians take a different approach and solve old differences?

Proxies for the global economy upturn

After the failures during the 1999-2000 period and the effects of global corporate scandals, the IPO market (Initial Public Offering) specially in the Pacific Rim is growing at a fast pace; if this trend continues, 2004 is expected to end with $ 75 billion in new IPOs compared to $45 billion recorded in 2003. This is a good sign for fresh money coming from investors because the IPOs fever is said to be correlated with market peaks.

The M&A (Merge & Acquisition) activity also shows a big deal of improvement during March, especially on overseas transactions, with Q1 activity mainly concentrated on Euroland and Emerging Markets (i.e Telefonica offer to acquire BellSouth Latin America, and BBVA to acquire Bancomer).

Similarly, if we look into corporate performance we find global and diversified companies such as GE that recently posted better than expected earnings (of 32 cents per share), with sales coming mainly industrial orders. Immelt (GE CEO) says that future is bright and GE expects double digit earnings next year. Clearly, we are not taking these facts as proxies for global economic improvement, but we must said that something is already happening, despite of the lack of strength of some fundamentals for large economies around the globe.

Tales of Innovation III: Hewlett Packard

Last October 2003 at Gartner ITExpo (NYSE:IT) I had the opportunity to listen to Carly Fiorina (HP CEO) talking about HP (NYSE: HPQ) challenges on corporate strategy and how the company has redefined its way to deliver value to the customers. The core concept is contained in what she called HP Adaptive Enterprise which links three key architectures of the IT Strategy: deliver real time to the enterprise by integrating processes, applications and infrastructures horizontally. Fiorina joined HP in 1999 coming from AT&T where she was responsible for the spin-off and transformation of Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) . She is the first woman to held the CEO position in the DOW 30 Index, and was selected among other 300 candidates. Although, the previous HP CEO, Lewis Platt, was responsible during the 90's for making HP in a more global and diverse company, he failed to speed up the company during the Internet bubble and compete with other industry giants such as IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW). Fiorina came to reinvent the company leading the successful acquisition of Compaq Computer for $19 billion, and developing a new business line based on consulting services. There are many success stories showing how other companies benefit from the new HP vision; as an example, the online retailer Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has managed to reduce 20% IT costs by using HP technologies, New York Stock Exchange handles more than 2000 messages per second on non-stop infrastructures, BMW WilliamsF1 uses HP technology to control the car performance during the race, and so on.

Who killed Jesus?

I came across this interesting analysis on the new $30 million Mel Gibson's production. I felt curiosity about this movie, as some said that the movie takes you though cruel and violent moments. Obviously, it is not a film to entertain, but to recreate the suffering of Jesus, and does not have the common historical take that other movies take on this theme. What is left to our judgment is the answer to the old question, who killed Jesus: Romans or Jews?

Tales of Innovation II: General Electric

With one year EPS of $1.55, and strong financials coming from sales in aerospace, transportation, electronics, consumer and industrial appliances and lighting, medical equipment, advanced materials, infrastructure including water and automation, amazingly GE (NYSE: GE) is one of the largest financial companies in the US providing commercial finance, consumer finance, insurance services, and equipment management. This company is not the result of some smart guys surfing the Internet bubble, but accounts for 124 years of innovation supported by leaders that run from Thomas Edison to Jack Welch who took over as CEO in 1981. Admittedly, we must say that Welch is responsible for what the company is today, as he crafted the strategy to drive the business from industrials into services. GE has $134 billion on revenues (54% Europe, 24% pacific basin, 13% Americas), $15 billion net earnings, $647 billion in assets with $55 billion coming from intangible assets including goodwill from acquisitions, R&D expenditures are around $2.7 billion, 218,000 employees. GE focus on innovation promises lots of things, including products that we would never notice, such as water treatment technologies, the polycarbonate Lexan resin which is probably protecting your cell phone, and the GE90 the most powerful engine ever built (Guinness Book 2002: with 127,900 pounds of thrust) that is used on the new Boeing 777, which is ready to flight this year.

Tales of Innovation I: Xerox

As part of a business case analysis on Competitive Strategy I had the opportunity to read “Fumbling the Future”, the story of Xerox (NYSE:XRX) Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and how a team of R&D directed by Alan Kay invented the first personal computer known, including the laser printer, mouse, Ethernet and the “what you see is what you get” windows-like environment. ALTO was released in 1979 with a price tag of $32,000. Later in 1980, a more advanced computer named Star was created but without commercial success. Steve Jobs from Apple Computer took these ideas and created LISA the Macintosh predecessor with a price of $9,995; the rest is history. Nowadays, with a $400 million effort Xerox is unveiling new document technologies based on more than 300 patents. Will Xerox repeat the story?

Me ...Karl Barth?

"It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is."

You are Karl Barth! You like your freedom, and are pretty stubborn against authority! You don't care much for other people's opinions either. You can come up with your own fun, and often enough you have too much fun. You are pretty popular because you let people have their way, even when you have things figured out better than them.

What theologian are you?

A creation of Henderson

Happy Valentine’s Day with Diamonds in the Sky…

The biggest diamond ever known was found by a team of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Indeed, the diamond is the core of a crystallized WD (White-Dwarf type) star called BPM 37093 that is located 50 light-years from Earth in Centaurus constellation. The core is about 2500 miles wide and can make a diamond with 10 billion trillion trillion carats. For some time scientists have believed that cooling WD stars should have a crystallized cores. In the case of BPM 37093 that is also a pulsating star, it is possible to calculate the core size by measuring the space between radial overtone modes. The size of the diamond core is in turn the lead to determine the age of the star and somehow the age of the galaxy. Coordinates are R.A. (J2000) = 12 38 50.3, Dec. (J2000) = -49 48 00, mv = 13.5, mb=14.1. Anyone interested?

Excerpt from Dante’s Vita Nuova

So long has Love held power over me
and accustomed me to his lordship,
that as he seemed harsh to me at first,
so now he seems sweet in my heart.
And so when he takes away my courage,
and my spirits seem to fly away,
then I feel throughout my soul
such sweetness that my face pales,
and then Love holds such power over me,
that he makes my spirits go speaking,
and always calling on
my lady to grant me greater welcome.
That happens to me whenever I see her,
and is so humbling, no one can understand.

Vita Nuova, XXVII, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

MARS: “Holy Grail for Geologists”

Spiegel has posted an interesting project with panoramic views of Mars from Viking 1 (1982) to Opportunity (2004). Mars day is called “sol” and is only 39 minutes and 35.2 seconds longer than terrestrial, mars solar year is around 668.52 sols or 1.881 Earth years.

ERP-conomics

Oracle Corp (NASDAQ:ORCL) made its third bid in less than a year, a $9.4 billion offer to acquire PeopleSoft (NASDAQ:PSFT) in an attempt to polarize the ERP market by incorporating Peoplesoft customer base to Oracle’s market share. If this happens sometime soon then we will see ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution prices soar as market for large scale companies will be shared mainly with SAP Aktiengesellschaft (NYSE: SAP). PeopleSoft has rejected the offer claiming the bid does not reflect the current company value (Market Cap around 8.13B, EPS 0.25) and Oracle is using this momentum to create confusion and erode relationships with customers. Question: Now, would you buy any of the following products or services?

How to make money by just having some “Patience” …

As predicted, today FOMC - Federal Open Market Committee left federal funds rates unchanged at 1%, and also surprised the market when decided to change the wording “considerable period” for “can be patient in removing its policy accommodation". Instead of sending signals for a change in policy they sent the message for a possible dollar defense sometime soon, especially against Euro, in fact USD rallied 2% vs. EURO late in the afternoon. US Stocks felt almost 2%, so portfolio managers playing short on CBOT:DJ Index future must be taking profits now. The end of dollar decline seems to be close but will depend on 4Q GDP announcement, and manufacturing and labor reports coming in the next days.

Second Opportunity…

The second Mars Rover named Opportunity landed last Saturday 24 on a region called Terra Meridiani (Meridiani Planum) which is believed to have sedimentary rocks and could have some surface water formations. The rover named Spirit landed on the opposite side of mars. Here is the first high-resolution picture taken by Opportunity. Surrounding rocks are gray hematite which is found in three places on Mars: Meridiani Planum, Aram Chaos and Valles Marineris, most theories propose that hematite was formed by a hydrothermal process.

Now we are 6,344,153,755 living on Earth …Confirmed: water found in Mars…

As we reach more than 6 billion souls on Earth according to projections of the US Census Bureau thoughts about how to deal with overpopulation come to our heads. In 1750 Johann Peter SuBmilch estimated that Earth could feed up to 10 billion people, later Malthus’s prophecies on population and food supply sent a relevant message to make us look for new ways to change this fate. SuBmilch and Malthus never imagined how biotechnology and genetic engineered crops could help, nonetheless, even with the extensive application of these technologies the problem will still be here, as economic growth, geographic distribution of the population, age and productivity, access to resources, and many other issues are part of the equation.

Could it be possible that the solution is not here on Earth?. Mankind has always wanted to reach the stars. This old romantic idea is hopefully to become part of the solution in the years to come, now that the Mars Express mission from the European Space Agency has confirmed the existence of ice water in Mars. This image contains three
views, from right to left of one region in the southern polar cap: ice (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), and visible light.

MIT: Top ten emerging technologies

MIT Technology Review has published the top 10 emerging technologies that most probably will change our lives in the next 10 years. The nominees are:
-Universal Translation: real-time natural language processing tools that allow people to communicate in any language.
-Synthetic Biology: using DNA manipulation to create or alter cell states and responses, building synthetic organs, programming bacteria to create living sensors for almost any purpose, and so on.
-Nanowires: are microscopic wires that allow building small scale solutions, such as medical devices, future Intel processors, and flat panel displays.
-Bayesian Machine Learning: allows programs based on Bayesian probabilistic approaches to process data and deduce dependencies. Possible applications are on robots, building new drugs, gene regulation, Web search engines techniques.
-T-Rays: or terahertz radiation that enable to penetrate materials without the hazards of the X-rays. Applications are on production lines inspection devices, scanners, and identifying skin cancers.
-Distributed Storage: this technology will allow users to manage, store and retrieve data across multiple sites and machines without worrying about location. Using Internet as a filling cabinet for files is the fist step.
-RNAi Therapy: using RNA to treat diseases or gene behavior. Possible applications could be on pharmaceuticals, and special medical therapies.
-Power Grid Control: is a software-based control created by ABB engineering that allows to sample power grids 30 times per second and to determine when adjustments due to peaks, overload, or failures should be made. Power disruptions will be 100 times less likely.
-Microfluidic Optical Fibers: by pumping fluids into optical fibers it is possible to change its physical properties, correct distortions due to material properties, and boost bandwidth of communications. The adoption of this technology will depend on next generation of Internet applications and the associated demand for speed.
-Personal Genomics: the dream of personalized medicine in 3 billion DNA letters. Genetic test to determine the effects of certain drugs are among many possible uses of this technology.

Bush @ State of the Union Address

After listening Mr. G. W. Bush third speech at the State of the Union Address I was surprised on how weak Mr. Bush presented his points. With emphasis on homeland security, and Irak, failed to "bring the nation together", as Bill Richardson put it, and was short on domestic issues. Interestingly, as a prevention measure in case of possible terrorist attacks on DC, four members of the Congress and one of Bush’s Cabinet did not attend the address.

Summary: no big new proposals, unfinished issues, health care and insurance, no steroids, economy doing good??, appeal to conservatives, tax cuts permanent??.

Funny: If you still need more arguments against Bush reelection next November, check this automatic Conspiracy Theory Generator....

STARDUST Flying by Comet P/Wild-2

On Jan 2 the STARDUST Team at Jet Propulsion Lab captured these images of the Comet Wild-2 nucleus at 100 Km. from the comet. STARDUST mission began on February 1999 and will be returning sample debris from the comet to the earth in 2006, after flying by the comet's tail at 13,600 mph.

Dell: The next CISCO challenge

Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) is looking into new sources of revenues. Michael Dell is now focusing on a real complex market, initially on Layer 2 and 3 switching devices threatening Mr. John Chambers from CISCO (NASDAQ: CSCO) with a business model that continues to be difficult to imitate.

Dell success is related to the value and quality delivered by a direct model based on a per-unit inventory system, and with extremely optimized supply chain processes that provide 20% gross margins and 10% operating expenses.

JP Morgan Chase + BankOne = No. 2 Financial Institution in US

JP Morgan Chase (Nyse: JPM) will be paying approximately a 14% premium over the market price to acquire BankOne (Nyse: ONE). This merge will create the second largest financial institution in the US after CitiGroup (Nyse: C) with assets around $1.1 trillion. This will allow JP Morgan Chase to achieve a balanced business mix by diversifying into retail financial services to account for 33% of its business operations.

The Knowledge Worker and the 2015 Corporation

Dave Pollard presents us a vision of how will workers and companies operate in the future. Technological advances in information and knowledge management will drive intense structural changes on how companies will operate and how managers will develop their strategies. After learning lessons from early-years outsourcing experiences, companies will tend to get rid of processes that no longer offer value added and differentiation to products and services, focusing instead on what the knowledge worker can do and what the conscious-consumer requires. Adjusts on the corporate side will create preference for protecting reputation and small business will take market share from the big ones by applying a sort of "judo strategy" based on knowledge and agility.

Links are the currency of the Web

Traffic on web nodes and pages are related directly to the relevance of the content, or simply to the number of links pointing to one particular Web page. The former model was used by the first generation of search engines, while the second one, based on link analysis independent of the content, is currently used by Google. With this in mind then we can say that web links have monetary value in the Web economy. Using this fact Boris Galitsky and Mark Levene from the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck College, University of London, have simulated an artificial world of Web links where you can buy and sell web links as a way to increase visibility, concluding that control of over links in the equilibrium state is polarized, as most agents end up with no resources to buy more links, in a classical example of the "rich get richer" phenomenon.

MARS: Spirit's first panoramic

On Jan 12, The Jet Propulsion Laboratory received the first 360-degree panoramic of the reddish Martian surface. Hills Complex on far east are 3 Km. away from the rover, this picture depicts details as far as 27 Km. Notice that an even red sky is predominant. Shadows of the rocks nearby the rover tells us that this panoramic was composed early in the "Martian afternoon" with the sun located somewhere around 310-degrees azimuth. Also check this interactive QTVR from NASA.

Novell and the new Linux market

On Jan 13, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) completed a $210 million cash acquisition of the SUSE LINUX. IBM (NYSE: IBM) is also investing $50 million on Novell to cover arrangements for commercial use and distribution of Linux on their eServer series.

Low Carbs: "Offering you less, for the same price!"

For those interested on diets and healthy options, low carb hamburgers are finally here: giant fast-food chains McDonalds (Nyse:MCD) and Burger King are now offering bunless burgers.

Central Bank of Venezuela and reserve assets…

The last controversial request from the Venezuelan Government of 1 Billion USD in reserves from The Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) has created lots of reasonable thoughts and opinions against it, as Central Bank’s Reserves exists not to finance government policies and social programs but to act as a collateral to sustain the country's legal currency. This is not about politics and neoliberalism as the Government followers claim, the reasons are rooted in the definition of what is the role of any Central Bank on managing reserve assets. What will be the destiny of Venezuelan reserves and its Central Bank under the pressure of the regime? Time will tell…

USD: another opportunity?

I should have played some speculative short on US-Forex derivatives last November when the bullish dollar started to show its face. Now is too late, as some may argue that the 1.30 EUR/USD resistance will be the point to adopt a strong dollar policy. How will the G7 policy makers deal with this situation? US rates at 1% for a “considerable period”, according to Mr. Greenspan are likely to create conditions for a recovery to happen. It is very soon, but some numbers are not helping, check the last US unemployment reports for instance, or read this interesting paper by Mr. P. Orszag, R. Rubin and A. Sinai from the Brookings Institution on what can happen under huge budget deficits in the years to come. Good news for an electoral year, chances for new promises?

In the beginning...

After reading Dave Pollard’s ideas about blogging as a social phenomenon I decided to take a walk in the blogsphere and started this window. So let's see how it goes...