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Week 25, 2005
THE BEST SELLERS (recent popular articles):
1) On the Media:
Whose books? Our books! [Entretien radio avec JN Jeanneney sur le projet
de Google de mettre en ligne des bibliothèques entières.
AUDIO disponible sur le site indiqué. VOIR AUSSI L'ARTICLE 2.]
2) The Economist: Google à la
française [Un autre point de vue sur l'affaire Googlée.
VOIR AUSSI L'ARTICLE 1.]
3) The Economist: Relax! It's the law
[Pourquoi il est parfois préférable sur un plan de rentabilité
économique que l'Etat impose les vacances. VOIR AUSSI L'ARTICLE
4.]
4) CNN/Global Office: Row over Europe's
working week [Débat européen (franco-britannique) sur les
horaires de travail. VOIR AUSSI L'ARTICLE 3.]
5) The Economist: It's Chirac, stupid
[Le véritable responsable de l'échec du référendum,
c'est Chirac.]
6) The Economist: Financing German companies
[Proposition de créer une 'usine à crédit' en Allemagne
pour faciliter les prêts aux PME.]
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THE REGULARS: Summary
7) Le texte
plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic: The fastest roller coaster [Le
grand huit le plus rapide du monde.
8)
Car Talk/The Puzzler: Two decks [Un casse-tête. Probabilités
et jeux de cartes.]
9) The
Washington Post/Miss Manners: Address book etiquette
[Conseils sur les bonnes manières. Cette
semaine, une lettre demandant à quel moment on peut enlever de
son carnet d'adresses les coordonnées d'un ami défunt.]
10) CNN/Global Office: Enduring the
killer question [Un nouveau type de question d'entretien d'embauche fait
surface.]
THIS WEEK'S TEXTS
12) Things Asian: Dubai's Islands [Un promoteur de Dubaï crée un archipel d'îles artificielles qui représente le monde entier, chaque île représentant un pays. Qui va acheter la France ?]
13) The Economist: The alchemist of paper [Le patron d'Adobe ambitionne de transformer la gestion des documents, et même d'internet.]
14) Mid-Day: Ludicrous hype [Marre du tapage de Londres sur sa candidature aux JO.]
15) The Washington Post: Cash, charge or fingerprint? [On remplace les caisses enregistreuses et les cartes de crédit par un lecteur d'empreinte digitale.]
16) USA Today: More sell homes to lock in big gains [Les Américains commencent à vendre leurs maisons avant le krach de l'immobilier.]
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1) On the Media: Whose books? Our books! [Entretien
radio avec JN Jeanneney sur le projet de Google de mettre en ligne des
bibliothèques entières. AUDIO disponible sur le site indiqué.
VOIR AUSSI L'ARTICLE 2.]
Whose Books? Our Books!
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_052005_books.html
May 20, 2005
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, was devised during its developers’ early attempts to digitize libraries. With the search business booming, Google has returned to its roots in an ambitious endeavor to digitize the world's books. The project, called Google Print, is beginning with the collections of four colleges and the New York Public Library, but Google is not stopping there, which is raising some eyebrows internationally. Leading the chorus of anxiety, predictably enough, was the president of the National Library of France, who fears a super search engine of the world's books controlled by an American company will inevitably exacerbate American cultural imperialism. Jean Noel Jeanneney's concerns prompted the European Commission to fund its own European digital library, and he joins us now from Paris. Jean Noel, welcome to the show.
JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: Thank you for welcoming me.
BOB GARFIELD: When did you first learn of Google's plans, and what, what was your immediate reaction?
JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: Well, reaction was satisfaction. It was obvious for me that it was one important step in the direction of what we all dream of, which is the possibility to give to a world audience access to huge parts of human culture.
BOB GARFIELD: But you clearly are no longer quite as sanguine about the plans. What is your principal objection?
JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: You must understand – I have nothing against it. I think Google is quite a precious invention, and we all use Google. But I think you in America know very well how dangerous it could be to have only this private-owned and American searching engine dominating all over the world. You are the country who has invented the Sherman Act against monopoly.
BOB GARFIELD: How does the storage of book pages – pages that ultimately will be accessible to anyone in Europe and elsewhere, how does that threaten France?
JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: It's a question of hierarchy. It's a question of page ranking. We believe that it will be quite normal to expect American libraries to organize that page ranking in a way which would be, of course, influenced by the American civilization. I didn't want this American mirror to be proposed all over the world to all the peoples. I wanted them to be able to choose and to make their own opinion, forgetting to – the different possibilities of the cultural look to, to the – our history and our actuality.
BOB GARFIELD: You're just suggesting that the tendency of Americans to look at American works will automatically relegate French authors and other non-American authors to a lower page rank, and thus become a kind of perpetual motion machine for over-emphasizing works most interesting to Americans.
JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: As you know, Google's algorithm is mysterious. We do not know it. It's a kind of industrial secret, like the way you create Coca-Cola. But what is clear, as far as normal Google is concerned, is that there is a tendency to go to sites which are already well-known.
BOB GARFIELD: Isn't it possible that the Google technology will actually be a force to defeat American cultural imperialism, because it will reflect the usage patterns of people worldwide?
JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: I know that the motto of Google is the ambition to "organize the information of the world." When you say you organize, you are not only a passive mirror. Google is bound to propose things as a kind of an enormous dictionary, with a coagulation of facts, facts and facts. Of course if you want to know what Lincoln said, you will probably find it easily. But if you want to think on the question of relationship between democracy and capitalism, for instance, then you need to have a thread; you need to be helped. You need to have an organized corpus. We don't want to have only bits of information, but to propose our own organization of the culture of the world. For instance, we have created and maintained the French cinema. We don't want to have dumping, to invade our screen, so we have protected ourselves. In the field of internet, it's not possible to have a defensive attitude, but it's possible to have an offensive attitude. I mean to go on and digitize ourselves and the whole world will be richer because of that type of competition.
BOB GARFIELD: Very well. Well, Jean Noel, thank you so much.
JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: Well, thank you very much.
BOB GARFIELD: Jean Noel Jeanneney is president of the National Library of France. Susan Wojcicki is Google's director of product management, and she's spearheading Google Print. She says there is no most favored nations status when it comes to Google searches, so the nations of Europe have nothing to fear.
SUSAN WOJCICKI: We have a technology called Page Rank, and what Page Rank does is the page looks to see who links to that page, and so if a lot of pages have linked to a specific page, then we count that like a vote. It's a very democratic way of trying to understand what is important to our users, and so it's not Google coming in saying these are the most important pages. It's actually what the web has selected to be the important works. So different languages or different collections will link to their own material that they see most relevant for them, and so the net result is whatever is most relevant for an English-speaking audience would come up to the top, as opposed to whatever is most relevant for a French-speaking audience.
BOB GARFIELD: But is the use of Google so heavily influenced by American users and linkers at this stage as to defeat, at least in the beginning, the ultimate promise of Google's evenhandedness?
SUSAN WOJCICKI: Over 50 percent of Google's traffic is non-English traffic. And so, if Google were to do something in some way bias the results to be more English or more American, and that wasn't the right thing for our users, we would expect our users to go somewhere else to do their searches. In order to remain competitive, from a business standpoint, it makes sense for us to offer the right results to the users, regardless of what country or language they're in.
BOB GARFIELD: Google, the search engine, sustains itself by selling placements on search result pages to advertisers who have paid for their messages to come up based on certain key words.
SUSAN WOJCICKI: Uh-huh.
BOB GARFIELD: What is the business model for Google and the books of the world?
SUSAN WOJCICKI: The business model for Google Print is exactly the same as our business model for our main search, and the goal of the program as well is that you're able to come to Google, you're able to type in any word, and we are able to present books that would be relevant to your search, and when you actually go to that book, and click on it, you can either find a library where you can find it, or you can actually find where you could purchase that book. And we would show advertising on the right hand side, just like we're doing today.
BOB GARFIELD: On the subject of business, I think one of the things that makes the French queasy is that so many pages from so many works from so many libraries around the world will be, in effect, owned – at least the, the digital images – will be owned by a for-profit American company.
SUSAN WOJCICKI: Our focus and our passion is on making information available that otherwise would have been unavailable. I think what Google can bring to the table that will be valuable is Google can do this at scale. So no one has been able to digitize an entire collection. No one has been able to digitize in the Harvard volume range of 14 million volumes. We're bearing significant financial costs to do this, and we believe that it's the right thing for our users and for our search and for seekers of knowledge, so if there really is real concern about one company doing this, then I would expect that the market forces would come into play, and there would be another provider who would step in and do this.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay. Well, Susan, thanks very much.
SUSAN WOJCICKI: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Susan Wojcicki is Google's director
of product management. She's spearheading Google Print, which is digitizing
the libraries of the world.
^RETURN TO TOP^
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2) The Economist: Google à la française [Un autre point
de vue sur l'affaire Googlée. VOIR
AUSSI L'ARTICLE 1.]
The French language: Google à la française
Mar 31st 2005 | PARIS
The latest French v English battle
IN THE dimly lit cyber-café at Sciences-Po, hot-house of the French elite, no Gauloise smoke fills the air, no dog-eared copies of Sartre lie on the tables. French students are doing what all students do: surfing the web via Google. Now President Jacques Chirac wants to stop this American cultural invasion by setting up a rival French search-engine. The idea was prompted by Google's plan to put online millions of texts from American and British university libraries. If English books are threatening to swamp cyberspace, Mr Chirac will not stand idly by.
He asked his culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and Jean-Noël Jeanneney, head of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, to do the same for French texts—and create a home-grown search-engine to browse them. Why not let Google do the job? Its French version is used for 74% of internet searches in France. The answer is the vulgar criteria it uses to rank results. “I do not believe”, wrote Mr Donnedieu de Vabres in Le Monde, “that the only key to access our culture should be the automatic ranking by popularity, which has been behind Google's success.”
This is not the first time Google has met French resistance. A court has upheld a ruling against it, in a lawsuit brought by two firms that claimed its display of rival sponsored links (Google's chief source of revenues) constituted trademark counterfeiting. The French state news agency, Agence France-Presse, has also filed suit against Google for copyright infringement.
Googlephobia is spreading. Mr Jeanneney has talked of the “risk of crushing domination by America in defining the view that future generations have of the world.” “I have nothing in particular against Google,” he told L'Express, a magazine. “I simply note that this commercial company is the expression of the American system, in which the law of the market is king.” Advertising muscle and consumer demand should not triumph over good taste and cultural sophistication.
The flaws in the French plan are obvious. If popularity cannot arbitrate, what will? Mr Jeanneney wants a “committee of experts”. He appears to be serious, though the supply of French-speaking experts, or experts speaking any language for that matter, would seem to be insufficient. And if advertising is not to pay, will the taxpayer? The plan mirrors another of Mr Chirac's pet projects: a CNN à la française. Over a year ago, stung by the power of English-speaking television news channels in the Iraq war, Mr Chirac promised to set up a French rival by the end of 2004. The project is bogged down by infighting.
France's desire to combat English, on the web or
the airwaves, is understandable. Protecting France's tongue from its citizens'
inclination to adopt English words is an ancient hobby of the ruling elite.
The Académie Française was set up in 1635 to that end. Linguists
devise translations of cyber-terms, such as arrosage (spam) or bogue (bug).
Laws limit the use of English on TV—“Super Nanny” and “Star
Academy” are current pests—and impose translations of English
slogans in advertising. Treating the invasion of English as a market failure
that must be corrected by the state may look clumsy. In France it is just
business as usual.
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3) The Economist: Relax! It's the law [Pourquoi il est parfois préférable
sur un plan de rentabilité économique que l'Etat impose
les vacances. VOIR AUSSI L'ARTICLE 4.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3987228
Economics focus: Relax! It's the law
May 19th 2005
Would Americans like to work as little as Europeans? What's stopping them?
MOST people greet the weekend with gratitude. But some economists view it with puzzlement. Why, they wonder, does the bulk of the population rest on the same two days each week? Why does everyone's week end at “the” weekend? From an economic point of view, it would surely be more efficient to stagger days of rest throughout the week. That way, expensive pieces of equipment would not lie idle for two days in seven, and infrastructure would be less congested the other five.
One person impressed by this logic was Josef Stalin, who rationalised the Soviet calendar in 1929. Workers were given every fifth day off, but their shifts were staggered, so that factories could run without interruption. The staggered week appealed rather less to the people who worked it, however. According to Witold Rybcynski's 1991 book about leisure, “Waiting for the Weekend”, Stalin's four days on, one day off, was unpopular, even though it was less onerous than the six-day week that preceded it. Families and friends rarely had the same day off; administrative staff rarely worked at the same time. After less than three years, the staggered working week was abandoned.
Echoes of Stalin's discovery can be found in a recent paper* by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, both of Harvard, and Bruce Sacerdote, of Dartmouth College. The authors begin from the premise that Stalin unwittingly proved: people complement each other at work, and perhaps at play too. Couples want to go on holiday together; parents want time off when schools are out. As a result, the economists say, people do not make solipsistic decisions about how much labour to offer in the marketplace. Their choice depends on everyone else's. Knocking off early carries less of a stigma if others do the same. Jobless youth find unemployment more tolerable if their friends are also out of work. Conversely, an ambitious underling will want to put in at least as many hours as his boss, whatever time she clocks off.
Messrs Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote think this principle might help to explain why Europeans work so much less than Americans. The gap is quite striking. According to the Luxembourg Income Study, the typical American worker puts in 1,820 hours over the course of a year. Meanwhile, according to the OECD, his German and French counterparts clock up a mere 1,480 and 1,467 hours respectively. They put in five or six fewer weeks per year, and three fewer hours per working week.
Edward Prescott, a winner of the Nobel prize for economics, blames these transatlantic differences on tax. Europeans would like to work more, but are deterred by the high percentage of their extra earnings the state would confiscate. Olivier Blanchard, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, puts it down to transatlantic differences in taste. Europeans, he says, put a higher implicit price on their leisure. “There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Europeans enjoy their leisure more than their American counterparts,” he writes.
But why? Some speculate that Americans, being the cultural heirs of the industrious Puritan settlers, are still gripped by a Protestant work ethic. However, as recently as 1970, Europeans worked more each year than Americans. Why should their work ethic have lapsed since then?
Rather than blaming culture or taxes, Messrs Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote instead credit trade unions. The strength of organised labour peaked in Europe in the 1970s, about the time that work hours started falling. After the first oil shock of 1973, the authors write, Germany's unions marched to the slogan “work less, work all”, and the same mantra, in different languages, was recited across the continent. In France, the unions eventually won an agreement in 1981 to cut the working week to 39 hours. The government then took up their battle, culminating in the national 35-hour week implemented in 2000. Indeed, their cause has gone continent-wide. The European Union's working-time directive, first issued in 1993 and subject to fierce debate again this month in the European Parliament, insists that workers toil no more than 48 hours each week on average (see article).
Let's all go home
There is an obvious liberal objection to any regulation of work hours: workers should be free to sell as much or as little of their labour as they wish, and employers free to buy as much as is profitable. Union demands and working-time directives are unnecessary encumbrances, stopping workers and employers striking deals to their mutual advantage.
But Messrs Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote float an alternative possibility. Such regulations might solve a co-ordination problem, they suggest. If Europeans complement each other at work and rest, they may prefer to work shorter hours and fewer weeks provided others do the same. If so, the authors write, “national policies that enforce higher levels of relaxation can, at least in theory, increase welfare.” Perhaps Americans would also like to work less, if their family, friends, or bosses worked less also. But in a competitive economy there is no way to co-ordinate their decisions. The individual American can act with others, but not too far ahead of them.
By recent evidence, however, Europe's unions got
ahead of themselves. By demanding shorter working weeks with no loss of
pay, they raised the cost of labour and undermined employment. In the
past year or so, the French government has backed away from the 35-hour
week, and German unions, most prominently at Siemens and DaimlerChrysler,
have agreed to work longer for no more pay. The unions that once marched
to the slogan “work less, work all”, have now conceded the need
to work more, if they are to work at all.
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4) CNN/Global Office: Row over Europe's working week [Débat européen
(franco-britannique) sur les horaires de travail. VOIR AUSSI L'ARTICLE
3.]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/06/07/europe.work.week/index.html
Row over Europe's working week
Tuesday, June 7, 2005 Posted: 1128 GMT (1928 HKT)
LONDON, England (CNN) -- One topic that highlights Europe's institutional and political deadlock is the ongoing debate over how many hours people should spend in the office.
The issue came to a head in Luxembourg last week with France, Greece and Belgium trying to force a maximum 48-hour working week on the entire European Union. But after a day of negotiations labor ministers from Britain and eight other member states blocked the proposal. Britain said it must be allowed to let its employees work more.
Currently, British workers can work more than 48 hours a week because the UK is exempt from the so-called "working time directive." Britain wants to retain the ability for workers and employers to set their own working hours.
Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania and Malta also claim it is a bureaucratic intrusion into people's lives and that some sectors of the economy would suffer. They highlight Britain's unemployment rate, which is half that of France. Britain, also has the second longest working hours after Latvia in the EU.
In 2003 the average working week in Latvia and Britain was just above 43 hours while the average for the EU was 40.2 hours. "The UK's economy is doing much better than that of its continental partners. Therefore, having this flexible working pattern in place improves the UK's economy," Sean McGuire of the Confederation of Business and Industry told CNN.
But the EU parliament, backed by France, wants only a handful of Europeans to work more than 48 hours a week when averaged over a year -- mainly in the health sector. If France is able to impose this limit on free market economies, then Britain would have to prove that its economy will be harmed if it cannot work for longer.
Those in Britain and France who want a 48-hour week ceiling argue that it improves workplace safety because tired people cause accidents. A limit to the number of hours also protects workers from being exploited. "Many employers in Britain are working their employees harder, not smarter," says David Coates from the Working Foundation. "If they improve productivity, get output up during core hours, we can achieve a much better balance between work and family life."
What counts as work is also a sticking point in the
debate. For instance, should the time a healthcare worker spends on-call
-- but asleep -- be considered part of someone's working week? The European
Commission says no, while the European parliament and the top EU court
say yes.
France's rejection of the European Constitution was in part influenced
be fears over work hours, with some concerned that it would lead to labor
liberalization, a longer working week and "Anglo-American pro-market
sentiment."
CNN's Jim Boulden contributed to this report.
5) The Economist: It's Chirac, stupid [Le véritable responsable de l'échec du référendum, c'est Chirac.]
France after the referendum: It's Chirac, stupid
Jun 2nd 2005
France's president has wasted ten years, devoted mainly to a search for scapegoats
UNDER France's fifth republic, prime ministers have come to serve a useful purpose for presidents: when the going gets tough, they get both the blame and the boot. Georges Pompidou got rid of Jacques Chaban-Delmas; François Mitterrand kicked out Pierre Mauroy, Michel Rocard and Edith Cresson. Sure enough, after the crushing French rejection of the European Union constitution in a referendum on May 29th, President Jacques Chirac turfed out Jean-Pierre Raffarin and appointed Dominique de Villepin, one-time foreign minister and unelected former diplomat, promising a “new impetus” from his government (see article). Having heard France's message, he said in a television broadcast, “I intend to respond.” The trouble is that the selection of an elite technocrat is not a meaningful response to that message. For the ultimate responsibility for the political upset this week belongs not to the hapless Mr Raffarin, but to Mr Chirac himself.
The French had many reasons to reject the constitution, but underlying their defiance was a simple point: times are hard, jobs are scarce, nothing changes, promises go unkept, we are fed up, and you—the political class—refuse to listen. After ten years as president, Mr Chirac has received this message more than once. He received it in 1997, when he called an early parliamentary election and lost, landing himself with a Socialist government. He received it in 2002, when the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the presidential run-off. He received it in 2004, when the left swept the board at regional and European elections. Now, he has received it once again.
Leaders can respond to such discontent in two ways. One is to pretend that the French social model is still valid, that no trade-off exists between social protection and economic growth, that France can close the shutters and shelter from global capitalism, that all the blame belongs with outside forces—whether globalisation, America or Brussels. The other is to admit that France cannot isolate itself from the world economy, to explain that new markets are an opportunity for French companies, that job losses in manufacturing can be balanced by job creation in services and that inflexible social protection deters the creation of new jobs.
At almost every turn, Mr Chirac has chosen the first response. His one bold attempt at economic reform, under Alain Juppé in 1995, ended in failure when he backed down after the country was paralysed by strikes. Since then, rather than confronting the populist arguments of the anti-globalisation lobby, Mr Chirac has drifted to the left with public opinion. During the referendum campaign, he was at it again, promising that the constitution would entrench the French social model and protect it from “Anglo-Saxon liberalism”. His choice of Mr de Villepin, the aristocratic product of elite technocratic training and the embodiment of everything the French have just rejected, runs true to form. Mr Chirac was first elected president in 1995, pledging that “jobs will be my preoccupation at all times”. Since then, unemployment has barely moved: from 11.3% then to 10.2% today.
At this time of morosité, it is easy to forget that France has so much going for it. Government policy may stop its top companies from creating many jobs, but they know how to make and sell the world such products as lipstick, rubber tyres, cars, handbags and insurance. There is no reason why the country should not halve its unemployment rate by deregulating the labour market—if the political will existed to take on the unions. Yet Mr de Villepin, who has never held an economic portfolio and recently called for a more socially minded programme, is unlikely to be any bolder than his predecessors.
You have delighted us long enough
The source of France's troubles is not Europe, nor
global capitalism, nor rebellious socialists, nor the far-right, nor the
far-left. It is Mr Chirac. His failure to be straight with the French
about the need for reform has come back to haunt him. That is why a better
response would have been for Mr Chirac to follow the example set by Charles
de Gaulle after he lost a referendum in 1969: to accept his responsibility
and resign.
^RETURN TO TOP^
6) The Economist: Financing German companies [Proposition de créer une 'usine à crédit' en Allemagne pour faciliter les prêts aux PME.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3868740
Financing German companies: The loan factory
Apr 14th 2005 | FRANKFURT
How financial mass-production could help Germany's artisans
HANS REICH, head of Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW),Germany's national development bank, has a recurring dream: an inexhaustible well from which the country's small and medium-size enterprises, collectively known as the Mittelstand, can draw loans at reasonable rates of interest. The savings banks used to be that magic source, but new capital rules and the loss of their state guarantee from July 15th this year have made them pickier about credit risk.
German banks have plenty to lend, but processing costs and wariness of smaller credits mean that they are all chasing bigger borrowers, with sales of €50m ($65m) or more. For a loan of around €300,000, a bank's processing cost is far more than the risk premium it can earn, says Mr Reich.
His solution is a Kreditfabrik (loan factory), for processing standardised loans cheaply on behalf of many banks. The banks would deal with customers, as now; the factory would do the back-office work.
The idea is not new. The Länder, or states, and co-operative banks would claim to have the basis for their own loan factories already; the savings banks also have a project, Modell K, that they say has already cut processing costs. However, the division of German banking into private-sector, public and co-operative banks hinders industry-wide collaboration. Meanwhile, rising numbers of small firms complain that they “hardly have access any more to credit and reasonable development capital”, said Mr Reich this week.
A survey of Mittelstand companies, by Creditreform, a commercial-debt advisory group, shows that a slight upward trend in expectations last year has been thoroughly squashed: forecasts of turnover, employment and profits have fallen. Even so, these companies still intend to invest, if they can only get credit.
Mr Reich hopes that a change in KfW's refinancing programme will help. Since April 1st banks that refinance Mittelstand loans through the development bank have been allowed to charge borrowers a risk-based rather than a flat interest rate. That may encourage more lending.
However, progress on the Kreditfabrik is slow. Even if it does come to fruition, it will not solve another acute problem facing the Mittelstand: lack of equity capital. In the 1960s, shareholders' equity accounted for 30% of German companies' balance sheets; now the ratio is only 17%. And 37% of the Mittelstand companies surveyed by Creditreform this year had less than 10% capital; last year's figure was 31.4%.
Venture capital and mezzanine finance—essentially, debt with equity-like features—are still rare in Germany. That is changing slowly. Last month Deutsche Bank, the country's biggest bank, and IKB Deutsche Industriebank, a specialist industrial lender, touted “equiNotes”, a mezzanine instrument for Mittelstand companies. These would be standardised enough to trade as securities. In July the Munich stock exchange will open a new segment, called M:access, for Mittelstand companies.
Neither innovation, though, will be much use to run-of-the-mill companies. M:access demands minimum capital of €2m, a website and an annual analysts' meeting. EquiNotes are aimed at companies with sales of at least €50m and an investment-grade rating. Most of the Mittelstand will have wait to for Mr Reich's loan factory to open for business.
^RETURN TO TOP^THE REGULARS
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7) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic: The fastest roller
coaster [Le grand huit le plus rapide du monde.]
http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/news/archive.asp?archive=052405
The Fastest Roller Coaster
By Steven Ehrenberg
Tuesday, May 24—Roller coasters are speeding up. The latest record-breaking coaster opened in New Jersey on Thursday, rocketing passengers along at 130 miles an hour.
Just for perspective—that's as fast as winds in a major hurricane. Kingda Ka, the new roller coaster at Six Flags Theme Park, that opened on Thursday, near Trenton, New Jersey, goes up at that speed.
"The launch alone is phenomenal," said Jeremy Delong, who bid $1,692 on e-Bay to sit in the front seat during the coaster's first spin. "There's this incredible force, this pressure on your chest, and then your eyes start streaming from the wind."
His fellow speed fanatics were similarly impressed. "This puts every other roller coaster to shame," said 18-year-old Jesse Pomeroy. "People from all over the world are going to come here for this. It's going to put New Jersey on the map."
The horseshoe-shaped Kingda Ka reaches its peak speed of 130 miles per hour in less than four seconds before turning and coasting horizontally at 458 feet from the ground. At that height, riders can admire Manhattan's skyline, if they dare to open their eyes. Then, the coaster plummets into a spiral and whizzes over a second hump before sliding back to the station.
"It was worth it," said early rider Hank Freeman. "It was a rush. You get up to the top. You catch your breath. You've got about a half second, and then it's just straight down."
Kingda Ka lifted the speed crown from Top Thrill Dragster, a ride in Cedar Point, Ohio, that held the record for two years at 120 miles per hour.
"Looking at it, you get the jitters. I've never seen anything that looks that menacing," said Adam Padilla before getting in. "That's half the fun—the anticipation. And once you're strapped in, it's too late."
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8) Car Talk/The Puzzler: Two decks [Un
casse-tête. Probabilités et jeux de cartes.]
http://www.cartalk.com
Let's say you have two decks of playing cards, 52 cards each, regular cards. You put both decks together and shuffle [mélanger] them up. You've got 104 cards all shuffled together. Then you split them back into two equal piles. Well, you haven't looked at them now, in the traditional manner. You just counted them out so you have a pile of 52 on one side--we'll call that pile A--and a pile of 52 cards on the other side, pile B, and they're all mixed up.
Here's the question: What are the chances that the number of red cards in pile A equals the number of black cards in pile B? And question 2: How many cards do you have to look at to be sure of your answer?
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9) The Washington Post/Miss Manners: Address
book etiquette [Conseils sur les bonnes
manières. Cette semaine, une lettre demandant à quel moment
on peut enlever de son carnet d'adresses les coordonnées d'un ami
défunt.] http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Q:
Dear Miss Manners:
A friend of mine died last week. Going through my address book today looking for someone else, I came across my deceased friend's name. When is it appropriate to remove it, or is it a matter of dealing with grief?
A:
How could it be rude to remove a telephone number that is no longer useful
to you, when the person concerned will never know?
That is the practical answer. Yet Miss Manners is well aware of how it feels. Piety toward the dead may not be reasonably defensible, but it is an important part of the human condition. So the answer is to leave it there until the pang it gives you to remove it is manageable, which could be sooner, later or never.
********************************
10) CNN/Global Office: Enduring the killer question
[Un nouveau type de question d'entretien d'embauche fait surface.]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/04/25/killer.questions/index.html
Enduring the killer question
Tuesday, April 26, 2005 Posted: 0412 GMT (1212 HKT)
LONDON, England (CNN) -- As the employment market becomes increasingly competitive, interviewers are resorting to more extreme methods of selection. Gone are the days of being asked: "what is your worst attribute?" Now prospective bosses are using a new breed of killer questions on prospective employees.
These questions are designed to disorientate applicants, leave them speechless, stumped or tongue-tied. A new survey shows that 90 percent of British firms try to use them in interviews. Questions cover a variety of topics from deciding which famous person you would prefer to invite to a dinner party, to telling your prospective boss something about yourself that you have never told anyone.
"Random questions are not very useful, but they are being increasingly used by UK corporations," Paul Jacobs, managing director of recruitment firm Office Angels told CNN. "I think they test the ability of potential employees to cope under pressure and cope with the unexpected." Jacobs believes these questions are aimed at achieving truthful answers from interviewees. They are also designed to test a candidate's general knowledge and lateral thinking, as well as go one step further than the average interview question.
Killer questions are aimed at delving beyond the professional persona and finding out how people react when faced with unforeseen conundrums. It is also a tool used to take candidates out of the comfort zone. "There are no right or wrong answers, you should try and answer honestly and a degree of preparation is essential," says Jacobs. He suggests that interviewees take time to develop their answers and explain their thoughts to the interviewer.
In the survey of 1,500 people in the UK by the recruitment firm, the following killer questions were the most popular:
# If you were Prime Minister, what would your top
priority be?
# If Hollywood made a movie about your life, who would play the lead role
as you?
# Who do you most admire and why?
# In your last job what was the company turnover and revenue?
# Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
Interviewees are not the only ones being put to the test. The survey found that nearly one in ten (nine percent) of interviewers surveyed did not have a well thought out answer when candidates turned the question back on them. And nearly half of interviewers (47 percent) admit that they have struggled to accurately answer questions about their company objectives and key plans for their businesses' future growth.
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THIS WEEK'S TEXTS
11) The Guardian: The lost boys [Une secte polygame américaine illégale jette ses garçons pour supprimer la compétition.]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1505995,00.html
The lost boys, thrown out of US sect so that older men can marry more wives
Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday June 14, 2005
The Guardian
Up to 1,000 teenage boys have been separated from their parents and thrown out of their communities by a polygamous sect to make more young women available for older men, Utah officials claim.
Many of these "Lost Boys", some as young as 13, have simply been dumped on the side of the road in Arizona and Utah, by the leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), and told they will never see their families again or go to heaven.
The 10,000-strong FLDS, which broke away from the Mormon church in 1890 when the mainstream faith disavowed polygamy, believes a man must marry at least three women to go to heaven. The sect appeared to be in turmoil yesterday, after its assets were frozen last week and a warrant was issued in Arizona on Friday for the arrest of its autocratic leader, Warren Jeffs, for arranging a wedding between an underage girl and a 28-year-old man who was already married.
Mr Jeffs is also being sued by lawyers for six of the Lost Boys for conspiracy to purge surplus males from the community, and by his nephew, Brent Jeffs, who accuses him of sexual abuse.
Warren Jeffs' whereabouts yesterday were uncertain, but Utah officials said they believed he may be hiding in an FLDS compound near Eldorado, Texas, and they have contacted the Texan authorities.
Some have voiced concern that an attempt to corner the sect leader could provoke a tragedy like the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas.
Jim Hill, an investigator in Utah's attorney general's office, told The Guardian yesterday: "From everything I've been able to discern about Warren Jeffs, he is someone who is capable of some very different things. Whether that includes a mass suicide, I don't know. But I worry about it all the time."
FLDS officials and the sect's lawyer, Rodney Parker, did not return calls seeking comment, but have previously argued that the Lost Boys were exiled from their communities because they were teenage delinquents who refused to keep the sect's rules.
Mr Hill said although the boys may have been rebellious, their expulsion had more to do with the ruthless sexual arithmetic of a polygamous sect.
"Obviously if you're going to have three to one or four to one female to male marriages, you're going to run out of females. The way of taking care of it is selectively casting out those you don't want to be in the religion," the investigator said.
Dave Bills, who runs Smiles for Diversity, a foundation in Salt Lake City set up by an ex-FLDS member to look after the Lost Boys, said it was difficult to estimate their numbers because they had been scattered. But Mr Bills said the figures could be "as low as 400 and as high as 1,000".
"They live every day like it's their last day and they don't care about anything," Mr Bills said. "They're told they won't have three wives, and they're doomed. But they all want to go back to their mums."
One of the boys, Gideon Barlow, said he was expelled from a FLDS community in Colorado City, Arizona, for wearing short-sleeved shirts, listening to CDs and having a girlfriend. He said his mother rejected him on orders from the sect's leaders.
"I couldn't see how my mum would let them do what they did to me," he told the Los Angeles Times. After his expulsion, he attempted to give her a Mother's Day present but she told him to stay away. "I am dead to her now," he said.
Joanne Suder, a lawyer representing some of the Lost Boys in a case against the sect, said there had been "a conspiracy to excommunicate young boys to change the arithmetic so there are more young girls available for polygamy."
She said some of the boys were simply driven out of town and dumped on the side of the road, leaving them traumatised. "I think anyone who finds themselves ousted from the only environment they ever knew and left in the middle of nowhere, and then is not allowed to be with their family and loved ones, and is led to believe that they can no longer go to heaven, is going to be troubled," Ms Suder told The Guardian.
Polygamy is illegal in the US, but the authorities have been wary of confronting the FLDS for fear of provoking a siege or inviting political attacks for religious persecution.
State investigators have also found it hard to persuade FLDS members to give evidence against Mr Jeffs. However, authorities in Utah and Arizona have recently increased the pressure on the sect's leader, Last week, a Utah judge froze FLDS assets, and the attorney's office in Mohave County, Arizona, charged Mr Jeffs for arranging a marriage between a 28-year-old married and a 16-year-old girl. If convicted he could serve up to two years in prison.
Mr Jeffs inherited the leadership of the FLDS three years ago after the death of his father, Rulon. Since then, he has ruled its enclaves on the Arizona-Utah border, in Texas and Canada with fearsome discipline. At the age of 49 he has reportedly fathered at least 56 children by 40 wives.
There have been no confirmed sightings of Mr Jeffs for over a year, but a photograph of a man resembling the sect leader was taken in January at the FLDS 1,700-acre Texas ranch near Eldorado.
Randy Mankin, the editor of the local newspaper, the Eldorado Success, said: "People on the ranch don't have contact with the outside world. Two men only do whatever is necessary to do their business."
>>What is the FLDS?
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints split off from the Mormon church in 1890, when the mainstream faith disavowed polygamy.
The sect has communes in Utah, Arizona, Texas and Canada. It is the biggest polygamous group in the US.
>>What does the FLDS believe?
Polygamy allows a higher birth rate, increasing the "righteous" population. No man can go to heaven if he has less than three wives. The sect believes black people are inferior, the offspring of Cain. It teaches that America was first colonised by a lost tribe of Israelites and was visited by Jesus after his resurrection.
>>Who runs the sect?
Warren Jeffs, 49, inherited the leadership in 2002 after his father, Rulon, died. He has pursued a hard line against sect members deemed to fall short of "perfection", and has purged hundreds from the ranks, mostly men and boys. He is estimated to have 40 wives and 56 children. His whereabouts are uncertain but he is widely thought to be holed up in the FLDS compound outside El Dorado, Texas.
>>Who are the "lost boys"?
Among those purged from the sect are between 400 and 1,000 teenage boys
and young men. The FLDS describes them as delinquents. Utah authorities
say they were thrown out to make more girls available as wives for older
men in the sect.
********************************
12) Things Asian: Dubai's Islands [Un promoteur
de Dubaï crée un archipel d'îles artificielles qui représente
le monde entier, chaque île représentant un pays. Qui va
acheter la France ?]
http://www.thingsasian.com/goto_article/article.2966.html
Dubai's Islands
By AFP/Fiona MacDonald
There are only so many islands in the world but the dream of owning one, for the super rich anyway, is becoming very much a reality -- in Dubai. A cluster of 300 islands, shaped like a world map, is gradually surfacing on Gulf waters, making the dream of procuring a private water retreat within an ultra-luxurious setting very real indeed.
In this affluent emirate, construction is being taken to such extremes that there are no boundaries set by any lack of suitable real estate.
So, you can buy the island paradise of Iran, France, Texas, Lebanon, Sudan, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, New Delhi, New York or even Iraq, provided you're one of the world's wealthiest and accredited to own them.
Israel and Palestine won't exist. But neither will various other countries for merely design and practicality purposes, according to Wahid Attalla, Executive Director for Commercial and Operations at Nakheel, the property developer that has embarked on this most immoderate project.
About 10 percent of "The World" has been sold, Attalla told AFP, while around 12 islands are already above water, marking the beginnings of yet another extravagant Dubai landmark.
All of Australia, comprising 14 separate islands, has been snapped up by a Kuwaiti consortium planning a multi-purpose development. All that can be revealed of the other buyers is that they involve "some impressive names", among them celebrities.
"I think it's the most exclusive development in the world," said Attalla. "You're talking about buying an island for millions. You will need to spend twice as much to develop it. "So it's a mega investment. That's part of the exclusivity, over and above, of course, that the project is unique. "With the level of investment, we have been requested by the investors to give them the opportunity that when they are ready with their designs and everything, they will make the announcement."
The World will be 5.5 kilometres (3.5 miles) in length and width and cover 60 million square feet (5.5 million square metres), including 10 million square feet (930,000 square metres) of beach.
Prices for the islands range from 23 million to 135 million dirhams (6.2 million to 36.7 million dollars). They will measure between 120,000 and 450,000 square feet (11,148 and 41,806 square metres), separated by nearly 100 metres of water.
The three-billion-dollar development, forecast for completion at the end of 2007, will be located four kilometres (2.5 miles) off Dubai's shores halfway between the landmark Burj Al-Arab hotel and Port Rashid. Access will be by sea or air.
The project is along the coast from the world's largest two man-made islands in the shape of palm trees, The Palm Jumeirah and The Palm Jebel Ali, rapidly taking shape and also developed by Nakheel.
The grandiose developments are only some of a raft of pioneering schemes launched by Dubai, one of seven city states that make up the UAE federation.
Though buyers of property on both palm islands have to meet certain criteria, they are not under the strict guidelines for owning part of The World. "We don't just sell to anyone who has the money, you have to pre-qualify," said Attalla. So unless purchasing an island for private use, prospective investors have to submit a company profile, bank references and a track record of hospitality or tourism developments undertaken.
Nakheel, which three and a half years ago didn't even exist, is targeting "the big investors, sea lovers and yacht owners," and heavily promoting its developments and Dubai in general at international shows attended by the like.
Given the extent of investment opportunity in Dubai and its booming real estate market, Attalla sees the islands being used more for commercial projects than private homes. And "with the exception of one or two cases where buyers have an attachment to a certain country, some of the rest are planning to change the (island) name once it's developed," he said.
Affluent Dubai, which has launched a bid to establish itself as the Gulf's business and leisure hub, has ambitious plans to attract 15 million visitors by 2010 and 40 million by 2015. The $3 billion cost will cover only the land reclamation work, said Saud Kanoo, chairman of partner developer Bahrain-based Dala Development.
A local marine environmentalist said such large-scale reclamation projects could cause massive disturbances to the undersea environment and harm marine life that thrives here, including grouper, mackerel, shrimp, pearl oysters and dolphins. "We have to be very careful because reclamation can easily destroy the coral reefs which support marine life," said Jassim al-Qaseer, director of Fisheries and Marine Resources.
In Dubai, where hot properties on man-made islands are luring buyers from around the world, dredging and dumping of fill have buried coral reefs, oyster beds and sea grasses that nurtured fish and sea turtles. The emerging islands also block and reroute natural currents, eroding Dubai's famed natural beaches. One of the Dubai archipelagoes lies in an area once protected as a marine-wildlife zone.
*******************************
13) The Economist: The alchemist of paper [Le
patron d'Adobe ambitionne de transformer la gestion des documents, et
même d'internet.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3860760
Face value: The alchemist of paper
Apr 14th 2005
Bruce Chizen, the boss of Adobe Systems, wants to end bureaucracy as we
know it
“IT'S exciting; we get to change society once again,” says Bruce Chizen, boss of Adobe Systems, the firm behind the popular PDF (or “portable-document-format”) files that are widely downloaded and e-mailed around nowadays. This is not, he adds, about making offices “paperless”, as some people—ludicrously, in retrospect—were predicting a decade ago. Instead, it is about bridging the separation between paper and electronic files in order to make all documents, in whatever form, “intelligent”, thereby blasting apart the way that paper-pushers in government and corporate bureaucracies work today.
If his vision becomes reality, it would be a remarkable vindication for Mr Chizen, who was not at Adobe when it last “changed society”—by launching the desktop-publishing revolution of the 1980s and early 1990s. John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Adobe's bearded and boffinish founders, had invented PostScript, software that allows printers to reproduce text and graphics exactly as they appear on computer screens. It was followed by Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, three applications used by creative types everywhere.
But Messrs Warnock and Geschke were lovable technophiles who proudly intoned that they were not in it for the money. As a result, Adobe never grew anything like as rich or powerful from its revolution as other software companies, notably Microsoft, did from their own. The founders realised during the 1990s that Adobe had to outgrow its “garage” culture. So they gradually handed over the firm to Mr Chizen, who had joined Adobe in 1994 as a marketing—and decidedly not an engineering—talent. Tough, and with a large dose of Brooklyn chutzpah, Mr Chizen in 1998 turned Adobe's culture upside down, introducing hierarchies, performance reviews and the like. In 2000, he became chief executive, and the founders co-chairmen.
That allowed Mr Chizen to return to his main passion, salesmanship, and in particular to a software application called Acrobat, the one Adobe product that has always been targeted at the wider business (as opposed to the narrower graphics-and-design) market. Acrobat turns any file type into a PDF document that will look, on screen and in print, exactly as intended, regardless of the computer or operating system. To open an Acrobat file, viewers need a bit of viewing software, called Reader, which allows users to fill in on-screen forms.
In the 1990s, when the internet was young and broadband connections rare, Acrobat was going nowhere. Adobe initially charged for Reader, and with few Readers there were few reasons to buy Acrobat. But gradually things changed. Adobe started to give Reader away, and broadband connections became common. Today, Reader is becoming ubiquitous, creating a huge audience for PDF files, and thus a market for Acrobat.
This has given Mr Chizen the opportunity to develop the market for Adobe products in a new direction. Last week, he was in Brussels to demonstrate how. Belgium will be the first country in the European Union to give its citizens electronic ID cards. And by plugging these cards into the USB ports of computers that have Reader, Belgians will soon be able to “sign”—ie, digitally authenticate and seal—PDF documents such as tax forms, mortgage applications, patent approvals and anything else that today requires a signature in ink.
The news is not that these forms can then be submitted electronically for instantaneous processing. Rather, it is what happens to those forms that are submitted on paper (because the owner is offline, say). Today, such loose-leaf is the atavism that disrupts all those bureaucratic workflows that are allegedly already electronic. For instance, billions of PDF forms have been downloaded from the website of the IRS, America's tax agency, in the run-up to this week's filing deadline. But most of these were then printed out and sent by mail, for poor drudges in some back office to type again into a computer. What a bore.
Adobe's trick—in effect, a sort of alchemy that turns paper into computer code—is a clever bar code at the bottom of its latest PDF documents. As a PDF form gets filled in on a computer, this bar code constantly changes so that all the information is captured. This includes not only the obvious (name and address, say) but also higher forms of “intelligence”, such as audit trails (who has read this form?), access privileges (who may view or e-mail it?), and business logic (who needs to see this form next?). When the form is then printed and sent as paper, it only needs to be scanned at the other end for all the data to enter their destination computers as if the form had stayed electronic all along.
What if Microsoft notices?
Insofar as this promises, one day, to end bureaucracy as we know it, everyone should be happy. But Mr Chizen's brief is to win Adobe's shareholders, this time, a disproportionate share of the joy. That is why, he says, he spends most of his time thinking about three things: Microsoft, software platforms and workflow.
Microsoft, Mr Chizen says, is scary because “PDF caught them by surprise”. As the business enters a new phase, Microsoft may see an opportune moment to trample into it. Mr Chizen, who in 1987 made the financially costly choice to leave a senior position at Microsoft to join a subsidiary of Apple, just as Microsoft began to clobber Apple (and others), knows what that usually leads to. Software platforms, he says, are crucial because of their network effects. Microsoft succeeded by making Windows a platform; Adobe can succeed by turning Reader into a platform, and building Acrobat and other applications on top. And workflows matter because that is where bureaucracies today get stuck, and where intelligent documents will make a difference. “This can easily become a $5 billion-a-year company,” says Mr Chizen. (Adobe is now barely a $2 billion-a-year company.) Failing that, it can at least, once again, change society.
^RETURN TO TOP^*******************************
14) Mid-Day: Ludicrous hype [Marre du tapage
de Londres sur sa candidature aux JO.]
http://web.mid-day.com/sports/international/2005/june/111091.htm
Ludicrous hype
By: Khalid A-H Ansari
June 8, 2005
London: The notoriously ludicrous capacity of the English media to whip
up unrealistic xenophobic expectations, bordering on hysteria, among sports
fans has been in evidence here again over the past few days.
Former Somerset cricket captain Peter Roebuck last week described the English media as “socially destructive, infantile and lacking in intellectual rigour”. He accused it of “craven nationalism”.
In the lead-up to the release of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) evaluation committee’s report last Monday, on the plans put forward by the five cities – Paris, London, Madrid, New York and Moscow — bidding for the 2012 Games, the London media worked itself up to a frenzy, misleading its audience into believing that the choice of London was a virtually foregone conclusion.
As it happens, the race for the 2012 Olympics has become the third bone of contention between the neighbours across the English Channel whose none-too-cozy relationship is the stuff of legend.
As the Times puts it in a front-page banner headline in its compact (the word tabloid is abhorrent) edition: British and French Rivalry spills over on three fronts — * Blair Confronts Chirac on EU reform; * Britain ignores French treaty plea: and * Paris and London contest Olympic race.
As so often in the past in matters of sport, the bubble of expectation has burst, and harsh reality dawned, with the evaluation committee making no secret of the fact that Paris is the clear front-runner, with London a fairly distant second, as the five contenders come round the final bend.
The award of the prize for the honour to play host to the Olympics will be made in Singapore on July 6. Meanwhile, the litany of favouritism and conspiratorial theories has already started in real earnest in the English media.
The respected The Guardian has attempted to mollify its disillusioned readers with the not-so-thinly veiled accusation that the report is “part of a coronation process for Paris rather than a contribution to the election process.”
Duncan Mackay, labelled the “Sports journalist of the year” by the paper, is quick — a la George W. Bush in the despicable “weapons of mass destruction” saga — to convict the authors of the IOC report.
Rushing in — foolishly where angels fear to tread — in the words of the song, Mackay writes, “Conspiracy theorists might detect the hand of Gilbert Felli, the Francophile director of the evaluation commission, in writing the report”.
Completely ignoring the merits of the other contenders in the race, Mackay, apparently wearing blinkers, goes on to thunder, “Founded by a Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the Olympics have always had a sentimental attachment to that part of the world.
“Paris is praised,” he writes, in the report for ‘its rich cultural heritage with regard to Olympism’ but there is no mention that London has twice stepped in to host the Games at the last minute.”
Be that as it may — and the Olympic movement should be grateful to London for it — there is no reason to cast aspersion on the integrity of the honourable gentlemen on the committee that will decide the venue of the 2012 Games.
The evaluation report, released from the IOC’s headquarters in Lausanne (whose Olympics museum KHALIDOSCOPE had the good fortune of visiting last week), has justified Paris’s position as odds-on favourite.
Apart from the 17% gap in public support between Paris and London, the Commission has found very little wrong with the Paris submission.
London has been praised for addressing concerns raised by the IOC last March, particularly regarding transport, which had been described as “obsolete”. However, concerns were expressed at its ability to deliver the main construction projects in time.
But Mackay is not impressed.
“If London’s report was good,” he bitches, “then Paris’s was positively glowing. If it had been a school report, it was the kind you would have run all the way home to show to your mum and dad as you would have been so proud”.
On and on, ad nauseam. The English sports fans are in for a large dollop of this sour-grapes calumny up until July 6. One feels very sorry for them, indeed.
^RETURN TO TOP^15) The Washington Post: Cash, charge or fingerprint? [On remplace les caisses enregistreuses et les cartes de crédit par un lecteur d'empreinte digitale.]
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Cash, Charge or Fingerprint?
Retailers Experiment With Biometric Payment To Speed Up Service And Prevent
Fraud, A Move That Worries Some Privacy Advocates
By Ellen McCarthy, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, June 9, 2005;
D01
Three or four days a week, Darren Hiers gets lunch at a Sterling convenience store near the car dealership where he works. He grabs a chicken sandwich and a soda and heads to the checkout counter, where a little gadget scans his index finger and instantly deducts the money from his checking account.
Hiers doesn't have to pull out his wallet to buy lunch -- and if it were up to him, he'd never have to write a check or swipe a credit card again.
The finger scan used at the shop in Sterling, known as a biometric payment system and made by a Herndon firm, is just starting to be installed at convenience stores and supermarket chains around the country, another step in a revolution that is turning the human body into the ultimate identification card.
Already faces and fingerprints are used to track visitors coming into the country. Computer passwords are being replaced by thumbprints at some companies and iris scans are giving consumers in England and Germany access to their bank accounts at ATMs.
The owner of BioPay LLC, which makes the technology used at the store, predicts the finger scan soon will be ubiquitous, offering speed and convenience for consumers. But civil libertarians have raised privacy concerns, citing some recent problems. In February, ChoicePoint Inc., a background-screening company that collects personal information -- including biometric data -- said it accidentally sold more than 100,000 individual profiles to identity thieves.
For many people, a fingerprint means one thing: a police record. That association could be enough to make many people wary. The car rental business already has had some experience with this. Toward the end of 2001, Dollar Rent a Car began fingerprinting its customers in an effort to combat theft. The experiment lasted just four months, until consumer complaints forced the firm to reverse its policy.
Biometric payment systems work by connecting images of an individual's fingerprint to his bank account. At the Sterling convenience store, a BP gas station owned by Rich Gladu, users enroll by handing the cashier a personal check (verified with a driver's license) that is scanned into the computer. Then they place each index finger on a tennis-ball-sized reader that captures the unique characteristics of their fingerprints.
The enrollment process takes about two minutes and from that point on, consumers can make purchases just by punching a 10-digit code (like a phone number) into the countertop terminal and placing a finger on the reader. The funds are subtracted directly from the customer's checking account, as a debit transaction would be.
"It keeps me from having to carry cash or a checkbook" said Hiers, who sometimes stops by the Sterling convenience store twice a day to get lunch, fill up his gas tank and pick up rations for his hour-long commute home to Charles Town, W.Va. "It makes my life a little easier, especially if I just want to get in and get out."
That's exactly what BioPay President Tim Robinson likes to hear. His company makes the biometric technology used at the Sterling store and says it has a database of 1.8 million customers. Most of those consumers are using BioPay's technology as an identification verification for merchants cashing paychecks -- an application intended to cut down on fraudulent checks. Customers have to enroll to cash paychecks, so if someone tries to cash a fake paycheck, the system will flag it. But by this summer 150 retailers will have installed the payment system.
Lowe's Food Stores Inc. will test BioPay's system at four of its 110 supermarkets. Next spring, it plans to install the technology at the rest of its stores, most of which are in North Carolina. More than 80 Piggly Wiggly Carolina Co. grocery stores in South Carolina and Georgia already have biometric payment systems made by Pay by Touch, a San Francisco company.
"Kids growing up now can't imagine that you needed a cord to use your telephone. Soon they're going to say, 'You mean you have to carry around a piece of plastic or a piece of paper to go buy something?' " Robinson said.
Biometric technology makers say the biggest advantage their systems can offer is speed at the checkout counter. Executives of Pay by Touch say a transaction on their system can be completed in about 14 seconds, compared with 64 seconds to process a check and 48 seconds for a credit card.
"We're all always convinced we've gotten in the long line. . . . Any way we can improve that experience, make it quicker, make it more secure, we're interested in doing that," said Michael Sansolo, senior vice president of the Food Marketing Institute, an industry trade group.
Robinson, of BioPay, said the real motivation for retailers will be financial. Credit card companies often charge retailers a fee equal to almost 2 percent of the total purchase price for each credit transaction. So for every $30 tank of gas bought with a credit card at the Sterling BP, the store pays a fee of 60 cents or more. But BioPay charges the store a flat 15-cent fee for each transaction, regardless of the size of the purchase.
"What they're offering is a bit of relief from the transaction fees," said Gray Taylor, vice president of research at the National Association of Convenience Stores.
In 2004, the biometric payment market -- which includes paycheck verification fees -- totaled $33.8 million, according to the International Biometric Group. That's just a sliver of the overall biometric market, which is dominated by security technologies and totaled $1.2 billion in 2004, but the payment market is expected to grow, according to the group.
Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy rights group, is concerned about that trend. He worries that the technology could be compromised, exposing huge databanks of personal information. Systems can always break, he says, either because of malicious or accidental causes, but the information stored by biometric companies is in some ways far more valuable than that held by credit card firms.
"You can always get a new Social Security number, but you certainly can't get a new thumbprint. . . . If things mess up, I could be hurt much more badly by a mistake," Lee said. And week after week, headlines scream of data breaches putting thousands of individuals at greater risk of identity theft, a crime that can ruin personal credit and take months or years to clear up.
Robinson, of BioPay, argues that a personal check written at a grocery store passes through eight people before it is cashed, a process he considers much less secure than a biometric payment, in which the fingerprint image is connected immediately to the user's bank account.
"What can I do to hurt you if I have a picture of the tip of your finger? Not much," Robinson said, contending that associating fingerprints with legal troubles is unwarranted. BioPay does not share its biometric data with government agencies, and in fact, the full fingerprints are not stored in the system. Instead, a complex mathematical algorithm is created to represent identifying characteristics of the fingerprint, which are matched to the real thing when a user shows up at a checkout counter.
The technology has taken off slowly at the Sterling convenience store. Since it was installed in late 2003, about 300 people have enrolled at that store and two others in Leesburg owned by Gladu. Except for a couple of small BioPay stickers on the doors of the shop and an occasional ad interrupting the easy-listening music pumped into the store, Gladu isn't really pushing the technology. He's convinced biometrics will take off eventually, but for now it's mostly a novelty, Gladu says, something to set him apart from the other gas stations in town.
"It's like when you watch TV and they put their hand on the screen to open the sliding door. This is kind of the same thing -- it's science fiction come to reality," Gladu said.
^RETURN TO TOP^16) USA Today: More sell homes to lock in big gains [Les Américains commencent à vendre leurs maisons avant le krach de l'immobilier.]
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-06-16-housing-1a-usat_x.htm
More sell homes to lock in big gains
By Adam Shell, USA TODAY
Looking to cash in on a red-hot housing market that has lifted prices an estimated $5 trillion in the past decade, some homeowners are selling and pocketing the profit.
Home values have more than doubled in the past five years in some states, and the median price of existing homes nationwide topped $200,000 for the first time.
Real estate agents in hot markets say more of their clients have sold their homes to lock in gains or are considering the move.
Although it's impossible to quantify such activity, and the National
Association of Realtors estimates the numbers are small, anecdotal evidence
suggests house-rich folks are cashing out. Unlike a typical situation
where sellers take profits and plow them into bigger homes, some people
worried about an upcoming price drop are getting out of real estate altogether:
•Penny Dorneman, 47, and her husband, sold their three-bedroom ranch in Milford, Conn., banked the $128,000 profit and now rent a two-bedroom, $2,885-a-month apartment in Boston. "We have a lovely nest egg," she says. "Like us, people are saying, 'Let's sell now and buy again after the bubble bursts.' "
•Art Munson, 64, of Toluca Lake, Calif., recalls not being able to sell a home during a tough patch for real estate in the early '90s. He sold a home recently for nine times what he paid for it in 1979. He now rents a two-bedroom apartment for $2,500 a month. "I felt like it was time to go."
•Roberta Murphy, a sales associate at Windermere Exclusive Properties in La Costa, Calif., says a client sold his house after a job transfer and will "stay cool for a while" before deciding whether to reinvest the $255,000 profit in another house.
•A client of Coldwell Bank agent Terrence Cook, worried that prices are nearing a top, recently put his Sarasota, Fla., condo up for sale.
For Ken Koegl, 63, a retiree from South Lake Tahoe, Calif., the idea of cashing out "just started going through my mind." A broker told him his main residence, bought in 1993, is worth $400,000 more today. Koegl, who owns three homes, isn't shying away from real estate, but thinking of selling and going back to Texas, where housing prices have posted modest gains. "I'll sell high and buy low," he says.
The huge potential profits to be made might have many others contemplating similar moves. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, estimates $5.2 trillion in "bubble wealth" has been created since the real estate boom began in 1996.
Still, the decision to sell one's home — and uproot the family and give up the mortgage tax deduction — should not be taken lightly, especially if the decision is driven by the market.
"How do you know where the top or bottom is?" Murphy says. One of her clients, figuring prices had peaked, sold a home 18 months ago in the high $500,000s. "The same homes are now in the high $700,000s," she says.
There are circumstances where selling in a hot market makes financial sense, Murphy and others say. People with second homes or rental properties might consider reducing their exposure to real estate and reinvest the proceeds elsewhere. Older people with big houses who want to scale down also have an incentive to sell, as do those in or nearing retirement looking to hatch an instant nest egg.
In such cases as those, the prudent move can be to take the money and run. "We have been in a long housing bull market, and taking some chips off the table is perfectly fine," says Kurt Brouwer of financial advisory firm Brouwer & Janachowski.