Have you ever wanted to know when politicians are lying? A startup called RealScoop thinks it can nail it down for you in real-time with the help of voice analysis technology that it claims is used widely in law enforcement and fraud prevention.

Dubbed the Believability Meter, RealScoop’s analysis technology analyzes over 100 vocal elements of the human voice and performs over 1,000 calculations per second to find out if a politician or celebrity is telling the truth. On Thursday, RealScoop will cover the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, putting each one’s statements to its Believability test.

Announcing a Major New ReadWriteWeb Project: The Jobwire
Posted: 28 Oct 2008 10:59 AM PDT
We’re excited to introduce today the launch of a new content channel here at ReadWriteWeb. It’s called the ReadWriteWeb Jobwire and it’s a site dedicated to reporting on people who have been hired for new jobs in tech, new media and related companies.
We’ve been working on it for months, well before the current economic climate unfolded, but we’re hoping that a whole site of good news will serve our readers well in these troubled times. Companies are still hiring, people are still getting cool new jobs, and we’re going to report on it. We invite you to check out the new Jobwire site to meet the Jobwire team, learn about our special guest editors and check out some of the great new jobs people have landed lately! Click here to read more and meet the Jobwire team.

• “Principals in very small businesses take on IT in addition to other responsibilities, but are more likely to employ an IT professional as they grow beyond 50 employees”.
• The top two priorities for the next three years are to: “have a formal business continuity plan and have a data warehouse and business intelligence tools”.

A copy of the report is available upon registration at: www.cdw.com/driversseat.

I am quoting those two statistics because I am going back into the workforce. Having been a Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing (BI/DW) professional for the past 20+ years, I have seen DW solutions come and go. During that time, I have also seen SMB business platforms emerge and disappear, usually eaten up / beaten up by Microsoft. Here’s what is luring me back into the workforce.

I have found a business platform that is Linux-based and does not require Microsoft anywhere in the platform, yet it can interact seamlessly with Windows PCs or dumb terminals. It is a unique collage of best-in-class software and hardware, melded in what is currently termed an “appliance”.

• At the lower end of the SMB spectrum, it can delay the first acquisition of an IT staff member for one to three years or more.
• At the middle level of the SMB spectrum, it can free IT staff for other tasks and/or delay the hiring of additional IT staff as you grow.
• At the upper level of the SMB spectrum, it can reduce IT staff and delay the hiring of additional staff.

I have also found the perfect Business Intelligence solution to complement this platform. It is also “appliance”-oriented, meaning that you don’t require a large team to implement and maintain the solution.

Please get a copy of the CDW report and review their survey results. Many of the needs expressed in the survey will be satisfied with the solution I am preparing. In fact, if I step outside the two primary components described above, I can facilitate your achieving all of the goals expressed in the CDW report, and do that with a business case that is far less than any other proposal you might get from the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Teradata or IBM.

I would like to develop a list of SMBs that would be interested in hearing more about the solutions I am proposing. I will not share this list with other parties, period.

Please give me the opportunity to correspond with you via email by completing the form below.

Or send me an email by clicking here: boyd.carter@mybabyboomers.com

Thank you.

Boyd Carter

Even worse, however is the performance of the Fourth Estate.  It seems that the press is taking great pains to lead a candidate down a particular path then take his or her comments out of that context and use them in other areas to deliberately mislead the voters.  This is not “objective journalism”, it is “advocacy journalism”.

Media bias is so obvious that we don’t trust the media any more either.  What has become of “journalistic professionalism”?

Shame on you all!  Gabriel Heater and Edward R. Murrow must be rolling over in their graves.  All of you should revisit the definitions of your trade and follow them.  Here are some to get you started.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivity_(journalism)
Objectivity is a significant principle of journalistic professionalism. Journalistic objectivity can refer to fairness, disinterestedness, factuality, and nonpartisanship, but most often encompasses all of these qualities. Advocacy journalism is one alternative to objective journalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_professionalism
Journalism ethics and standards comprise principles of ethics and of good practice as applicable to the specific challenges faced by professional journalists. … While various existing codes have some differences, most share common elements including the principles of — truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability — as these apply to the acquisition of newsworthy information and its subsequent dissemination to the public.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism
Advocacy journalism is a genre of journalism that intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint, usually for some social or political purpose. Because it is intended to be factual, it is distinguished from propaganda. It is also distinct from instances of media bias and failures of objectivity in media outlets, which attempt to be—or which present themselves as—objective or neutral.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias
Media bias is a term used to describe a real or perceived bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media, in the selection of which events will be reported and how they are covered. The term “media bias” usually refers to a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
Political correctness (adjectivally, politically correct; both forms commonly abbreviated to PC) is a term applied to language, ideas, policies, or behavior seen as seeking to minimize offence to gender, racial, cultural, disabled, aged or other identity groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_estate
The term Fourth Estate refers to the press, both in its explicit capacity of advocacy and in its implicit ability to frame political issues. The term goes back at least to Thomas Carlyle in the first half of the 19th century.

Look at this compilation of a CSPAN2 recording covering the 2004 hearings.

http://www.hyscience.com/archives/2008/09/shocking_video.php

Thanks, HyScience for the link.

Katie, your tactic of linking the McCain campaign to “the Great Depression” by asking Sarah Palin a leading question (If this doesn’t pass, do you think there’s a risk of another Great Depression?) then going to McCain and asking “And using rhetoric like the Great Depression, is that the kind of language Americans need to hear right now?” had you ahead of Lehrer. Well done!

However, Lehrer took it away from you by taking half of McCain’s sweet spot time last night and handing it to Obama.

Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center. I read his post yesterday (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2008/09/26/jim-lehrer-not-bias-free-moderator) in disbelief. How could a moderator be so biased. I watched for the clues Tim provided.

Lehrer really had his guerrilla tactics together this time! I barely noticed the leading questions and the speech setups, but they were there. The coup d’é•tat, however, was the manipulation of the topic of the debate. Taking half the time allocated to Foreign Policy, McCain’s sweet spot, and giving it to Domestic Policy, Obama’s sweet spot, was sheer genius.

Katie, learn from the pro! Lehrer is way ahead of you in influencing this election campaign.

Kudos to the liberal press for applauding the successes of Couric and Lehrer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If I wanted to enter the political dialogue, I could think of no better way than to find a quote and comment to it.  Zemanta makes this easy to do.  I went to Zemanta’s site, found an article on Sarah Palin and am quoting from part of the article.

I found this fascinating quote today:

A week ago, in my post “The Palin Pick Spurs National Organization For Women To Endorse Obama“, I drew attention to the fact that NOW was driven to endorse Barack Obama for president by John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.Todd Beeton , The Humane Society Cites Sarah Palin as Reason For Endorsing Obama/Biden, Sep 2008

You should read the whole article.

It never occurred to me that a humane society would take a political position since political commentary is not their “reason for being”.

Comments, anyone?

Boyd Carter

For over 300 years, we have believed that rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world. Could an even simpler set of physical rules explain creation (where we come from)? Could a simple rule, repeated an infinite number of times with a single variation applied to it create the natural universe?A New Kind of Science

Here is the whole article.

I freely acknowledge that I don’t have any idea where we come from, but it could be something as simple as varying a single element of a physical rule.

For over 300 years, we have believed that rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world. Could an even simpler set of physical rules explain creation (where we come from)? Could a simple rule, repeated an infinite number of times with a single variation applied to it create the natural universe?

Could we replicate part of that rule in a computer program and see patterns that occur naturally in nature? Wolfram did, using a class of programs known as cellular automata. (I’ve used the title of Stephen Wolfram’s 1197-page (quarter-million+ words) book as the title of this post.) Visit his web site with an open mind – you will be amazed. http://www.wolframscience.com

Boyd Carter

I was looking for a specific HTML ASCII code and came across a table of all them as part of an eBook package by Shelley Lowery.

The HTML book alone was well worth the price of the package ($49), but it was only one of a set of 8 eBooks, plus a number of bonus materials.  Based on the content of the HTML eBook alone, I am confident that all the other content is first-class.

Here is more information about the package.

Over two years in development, the Web Design Mastery course is your complete guide to learning professional Web Design…Over 500 pages packed with the exact information you need to succeed. No filler, no fluff — just solid information. Nothing is left to the imagination…Web Design Mastery takes you step by step through the entire process with eight powerful volumes:

Click here to visit Shelley’s site for more information

Watch this posting for additional comments as I get through the rest of the package.

To my surprise, when I started posting a few days ago, I was pleased to see that Zemanta was helping me with the tags and permalinks. I took advantage of that and let Zemanta provide the content. I was even more pleasantly surprised when I saw the post show up on the blog. (Notice the orange tab that invites you to “reblog”?) Try it out. It will help you quote the content of my posting in an article you may be writing in your blog. Fantastic! More on this in a later posting, I want to add this quickly as a short “sticky note”.

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. A click on an eBook link may get you a short succinct review of that book. On the other hand, it may get you a hard sell that goes on and on, with pie-in-the-sky promises of how great it is. When you are presented with a hard sell, look for value in the sell itself.  Search on some of the terms. You may learn more from the searching than you would learn from the eBook.

For example, I received a long hard-sell email recently that extolled the virtues of a health product.  I searched on a variety of the terms found in the email and discovered that I could buy locally the same product that was being offered through mail order. However, the local product was about one fourth the cost of the mail order product.

Another example. For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard of offers that will tell you how to turn a hundred dollars into a million. Some are better than others, but an example of the worst is to send them your money and get a short note back saying, essentially, “Take a hundred dollars, invest it at 5% and wait 150 years.” Buyer beware; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

On the other hand, you may find a gem among the stones. I’ve found a number of ebooks that did provide value, some of them provided far more than I expected. Look for the gems, and learn from the stones.

Are you finding any gems or applying wisdom to get value from the stones? Tell us about it - leave a comment.

You may have noticed that I went from the past tense to the present tense.  I’m at the point where the first iteration of the site is ready to present to the web community.  I am about to “Market” it and maintain it.

Both this book and the web site are a “Work In Progress” (WIP).  This booklog will evolve into something that may resemble what I’m writing in this series of postings; I’m sure the site will also evolve.

My first thought processes were as follows.

Like most Baby Boomers, I approached retirement without really planning for it. I had a successful career as a Banker, retiring early to pursue another successful career as a Management/Technology Consultant.  If you want to know more, see my LinkedIn Profile.  At the age of 65 I was still working as a consultant and expected to do so to the age of 70 in order to achieve the financial independence I wanted.

Last year, at the age of 66, I concluded that my approach to achieving this goal should be enriched with other streams of income. I started researching streams of income that I could pursue without having a “job” that demanded my daily presence.  Ideally, I wanted to be able to launch streams of income and have them automatically generate income without requiring my constant attention. This goal has been the focus of my research for most of 2007.

The “streams of income” concept is not mine. It is exceptionally well-defined by Robert G. Allen in several books on that topic. I urge you to investigate his approach to “Multiple Streams of Income”.

I have identified four broad categories of relatively passive streams of income that are achievable through a web site. These will be the initial focus of the web site content. In order of priority, they are:
• Affiliate Income (Notice the links to Amazon books.)
• Self-published Books (This first one will be free.)
• Advertising (After the web site becomes successful.)
• Joint Ventures (Not yet fully defined.)

Next, Part 2, an informal business case.

This Long Tail was described by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine ,, when he wrote an article (and subsequently a book) entitled The Long Tail to show how the Internet provides access to products that do not have sufficient mass appeal to be stocked in your local store.

An excerpt from his blog, www.longtail.com/about.html describes the long tail as follows.

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a
relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

The term, The Long Tail, refers specifically to the orange part of the sales chart, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The orange part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the
likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the long tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

Our goal is to provide articles of interest to you and from those articles, provide associate links into the long tail.

This link will take you to a partial list of articles on our site that have links connecting you to corresponding content in the long tail.

This link will take you to our Amazon Mini-Store

While this web site was originally intended to be of interest to the Baby Boomer generation, many of the articles are of interest to all generations.  If you know of anyone who would be interested in our content, please click on File/Send Link or File/Send Page (top left corner of your browser window) and tell them about us.