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Week 14, 2006
THE BEST SELLERS (recent popular articles):
1) Business Week: Manuals for dummies [Une alternative aux modes d'emploi illisibles.]
2) New York Times: Male drivers waste six million hours a year [Les conducteurs masculins british qui refusent de demander leur chemin perdent six millions d'heures par an.]
3) The Rocky Mountain News: Heed the 'Fat Bald Guy' rule [Une bonne règle : à CV égal, un gros chauve est plus compétent qu'un beau sportif chevelu... en tant que gros chauve, je me sens visé...]
4) The Economist: Economic nationalism [Qui bénéficie réellement du "patriotisme économique" ?]

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THE REGULARS: Summary
5) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic: Protests in France [Manifs en France.]
6) Puzzle: Pickpocket warning [Un casse-tête.]
7) AUDIO/On the Media: Calling on Helen [Emission radio avec transcription, cette fois-ci sur la dernière conférence de presse de Bush, et son choix de faire appel à Helen Thomas, doyenne des journalistes, femme qu'il a soigneusement évitée jusqu'ici.]

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1) Business Week: Manuals for dummies [Une alternative aux modes d'emploi illisibles.]
http://www.businessweek.com

Manuals for Dummies
Frustrated with the cryptic or flabby instruction books that accompany products, consumers are choosing reader-friendly alternatives

From hardware to software to that new robot that mops the floor and scares the cat — nobody ever wants to read the manual that comes with a new widget.

And why should you? Most product manuals are either flimsy pamphlet things with terse, tiny-type instructions in eight different languages or thick, impenetrable softcover doorstops that have all the visual excitement of a real-estate contract. Hardcore techies who read and write these things came up with a snarky, online abbreviation to smack down people who skipped the instruction book, but showed up in user forums asking obvious questions. You may have heard of it: RTFM, which stands for Read The [Really Bad Word] Manual.

Easier said than done. I write about computers and technology for a large part of my income, and I can barely get through some of the mind-numbing documentation out there. Much of it is unreadable and also boring to look at. If I want to look at walls of gray, I'll go meditate on the Munsell in a photo-retouching lab.

But whether it's deciphering Adobe Photoshop Elements or trying to set up a wireless home network, many people have ditched the official documentation and turned to a friendlier alternative: the sassy, savvy, consumer-oriented technical book that explains a program, process or product in regular ol' English — aided by slick graphic design that keeps the harried reader comforted and entertained as he or she scales the learning curve.

Hitting the shelves in 1991, DOS For Dummies was the granddaddy of the User-Friendly User Manual. With conversational chunks of text peppered with cartoons, friendly icons and jaunty typefaces, this ur-Dummies title proved that non-nerds could cuddle up with a technical tome. The series, from Wiley Publishing, now boasts 125 million books (on a gajillion topics) in print, so it's safe to say somebody out there finds the Dummies pretty darn smart.

This combination of elements gently eases the reader into the technical information. It's sort of like how people, intimidated by the columns and columns of type in The New Yorker, feel secure knowing there's a cynically whimsical Roz Chast cartoon to rest upon during the long eyeball march through an intense 10-page burst of short fiction.

In addition to the predictable interior design that anchors every book in the series, each volume in the Dummies brand screams for attention on the store shelf with its loud, proud, yellow-and-black cover. (Wiley must get some sort of yellow ink bulk discount since they also publish the Cliffs Notes literary guides, the main reason most high-school sophomores can pass a test on Silas Marner.) There's comfort in consistency.

Needless to say, the concept of the saucy, snappily designed guidebooks took off. Witness the proliferation over the years: the Complete Idiots Guides from the Penguin Group, the Visual QuickStart books from Peachpit Press and the Missing Manuals from Pogue Press/O'Reilly Media.

I was heavily biased towards the Missing Manual series even before I was asked to write one about the iPod, as it's the brainchild book line of David Pogue, who wrote Macs for Dummies before incorporating Pogue Press and joining forces with computer-book giant O'Reilly Media in 2000. If you're into graphics arts, digital video or publishing, odds are you've got at least one edition of his Mac OS X: The Missing Manual next to your computer by that can of Coke.

Thanks to designer Phil Simpson, the Missing Manual series has its own distinct look, with sidebar boxes, blurb-like tips and attention-getting graphics on just about every page. A lot of thought went into that design, particularly because most of the books in the series are printed in economical monochrome. Without the pedagogically proficient use of color within the text to call out specific points or display illustrations, the books have to make due with varying amounts of black ink on the page.

"The original idea behind Phil's design," recalled David when I called him to ask about the look of the Missing Manuals, "was how can we make it look like color just with shades of gray. If you look through the books, you'll see six or seven different, distinct shades of gray used as basically color elements to make it a little more vivid and lively." (See for yourself.)

While imparting technological wisdom in short humorous sections, the text itself also becomes something of a visual element within a Missing Manual. The discussion in any given chapter intertwines around short sidebars focused on one aspect of the topic at hand. Boxed graphics displaying captioned screenshots and brief "tips 'n' tricks" info-nuggets centered between horizontal rules also serve to enhance the main text.

"On the Missing Manual series, our idea was to let you open the book in the bookstore and stick your finger in at random and you will find three or four different entry points to the page," said David, citing the various elements mentioned above. "We never wanted to have just two pages of plain text." In a Missing Manual, the reader has plenty of graphical rest stops on the road to enlightenment.

"From my personal-training history of teaching people computers," David continued, "I know that it's wearying to be fed a nonstop river of new information in something that it's not immediately apparent to you how you need it yet. We're basically bending over backwards to keep the interest level high and the entertainment level high."

So fear not, gentle nontechnical reader. There are computer books out there that will not put you in a state of visual vegetation. With the Missing Manuals, Dummies books, Complete Idiots Guides and all the rest here to help, maybe that old techie snark will morph into a new meaning: "Read That Fantastic Manual!"

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2) New York Times: Male drivers waste six million hours a year [Les conducteurs masculins british qui refusent de demander leur chemin perdent six millions d'heures par an.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/19food.html

Male drivers waste six million hours a year
Tue Mar 14, 6:42 AM ET

LONDON (AFP) - British male drivers waste nearly six million hours a year lost on the road because they are reluctant to ask for directions. Men who are lost wait an average of 20 minutes before giving up and asking for directions, while women only wait 10 minutes before seeking help, according to a survey from Royal Automobile Club Direct Insurance.

Men even endure a "nagging period" of around 10 minutes from their partner before throwing in the towel and stopping to ask the way, the poll showed.

Based on responses from 2,000 adults, the survey also revealed:
-- Some 64 percent of couples admitted to having arguments over getting lost on the road.
-- Only 27 percent of couples plan their journeys before setting off.
-- Just 36 percent of couples rely on landmarks and road signs to find their destination
-- One in four couples still scribble down basic directions on a bit of scrap paper.

RAC Direct Insurance product manager Craig Martin said awareness of the problem could improve driving standards. "The anxiety, increased stress levels and road rage that can be caused by getting lost are unnecessary distractions on today's busy roads when motorists need to be alert and able to concentrate," Martin said. "These problems can easily be avoided just by motorists taking a bit more time to plan their journeys," he added. Martin said new technology installed in cars, including satellite navigation systems, were now being used by about one in five drivers.

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3) The Rocky Mountain News: Heed the 'Fat Bald Guy' rule [Une bonne règle : à CV égal, un gros chauve est plus compétent qu'un beau sportif chevelu... en tant que gros chauve, je me sens visé...]
http://www.rockymountainnews.com

Heed the Fat Bald Guy Rule
Paul Campos

March 7, 2006
Last week, a friend and I were discussing a college basketball coach who has managed to retain his job despite an unimpressive record. We concluded that an important factor in his otherwise surprising survival is that the coach in question is a rather handsome man (he is also African-American and "well-spoken," which is how white people describe black people who speak standard English).

This discussion brought to mind a certain college football coach, whom I will call "John Smith." Coach Smith, who looked like a surfer out of a Beach Boys song, was hired to a very high profile coaching position at a very young age, despite possessing a markedly thin résumé for such a job. He proceeded to get his team into difficulties with the NCAA, whereupon he skipped town for another high-profile program, which ended up firing him for violating NCAA rules.

The careers of these two coaches illustrate what I call the Fat Bald Guy Rule. The FBGR posits that, when considering otherwise roughly equivalent candidates for any job whose formal requirements don't include being good-looking, hire the fat bald guy. The reason is simple: Society gives all sorts of unearned preferences to good-looking people, so when a fat bald guy manages to assemble a résumé that at first glance resembles that possessed by his good-looking competition, the FBGR assumes that the former record is actually far more impressive than the latter, all things considered.

Examples of the FBGR can be found all over our image-conscious and media-driven culture. For instance, the essential difference between a ranting lunatic like Ann Coulter - who at a national GOP event last month gave a speech in which she referred to Arabs as "ragheads," and who has opined that "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity" - and the schizophrenic bag lady who wanders the downtown mall is that Coulter is equipped with a law degree and long glossy blonde hair.

Even in academia, which prides itself on supposedly avoiding superficial judgments, the advantages of conventional good looks can be considerable. An anthropologist once pointed out to me that many an ivied quadrangle is full of what she described as "well-dressed idiots," who have parlayed an attractive countenance and a glib manner into academic success.

Of course the politics of personal appearance can be quite complex. In societies such as ours that put an especially high premium on female beauty, women in particular must maneuver through a minefield of cultural contradictions. For instance, in professional settings women who are "too pretty" often find it difficult to be taken seriously. A strikingly attractive friend of mine even went so far as to replace the photograph on her university's Web page with a less flattering image, just before she was considered for tenure (I admit I haven't had the chutzpah to ask her if this was a strategic decision).

Given the enormous amount of discrimination that takes place as a direct consequence of personal appearance, it's noteworthy that a nation as legalistic as ours has passed almost no laws that attempt to regulate such matters. Outside of a handful of municipalities (San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Calif., Washington, D.C.) it is perfectly legal to discriminate against people because of their looks, even when their looks have nothing to do with their ability to do their jobs.

Perhaps this is an admission that appearance-based discrimination is so deeply rooted in our culture that no law could hope to do much about it. More disturbingly, perhaps it's a sign that at bottom we don't actually disapprove of giving all sorts of unearned social advantages to beautiful people simply because they're beautiful.

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4) The Economist: Economic nationalism [Qui bénéficie réellement du "patriotisme économique" ?]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VVSVNGN

Economic nationalism: From Karl Marx's copybook
Mar 2nd 2006

Efforts to block foreign takeovers rest on a deceit about ownership and interests

PATRIOTISM, said Samuel Johnson, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. That may be unfair to the proper sort of patriot, but it would be an entirely valid comment about politicians today who make a fuss about foreign takeovers in their countries, in the name of “national interests”. The truth is that they are not defending their nations' interests at all. They are defending their own interests and (often) those of their cronies.

Such selfish populism has become increasingly popular. Recent weeks have seen American politicians attacking the purchase of a port management firm by DP World from the United Arab Emirates (see article) and proposing new barriers for state-owned buyers to jump; the French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, hastily arranging a merger between a state-owned gas firm, Gaz de France, and another big utility, Suez, in order to see off an Italian bid for Suez (see article), and proposing other anti-takeover measures; the Spanish government trying to block a German firm's bid for Endesa, a Spanish utility; the Polish government hindering an Italian takeover of a German bank because it involves Polish subsidiaries; South Korean politicians yelling foul at an American-led attempt to buy KT&G, formerly the state-owned tobacco and ginseng monopoly (see article); and the French and Luxembourg governments both trying to discourage a takeover by the world's biggest steel firm, Mittal, for the Franco-Belgian-Luxembourgeois Arcelor.

From the point of view of those who favour open markets for goods, services and capital it is possible to see these political reactions as good news, not bad (see article). They imply, first of all, that there are a lot more cross-border mergers and acquisitions going on than before, notably in Europe, as otherwise there would be nothing to complain about. They may also imply that other refuges of political scoundrels aren't as useful as they once were: trade barriers are hard to erect, especially within the European Union but also more widely thanks to the World Trade Organisation, and the use of public spending to rescue or “create” jobs runs up against state-aid rules, budget-deficit limits and the awkward practical fact that such subsidies don't work for very long. The forces of globalisation, moreover, look much stronger than the measures currently being deployed against them.

Commanding heights

To be entirely sanguine about this spate of economic nationalism could well, however, prove a mistake: it needs to be seen in the wider context of China-bashing in America's Congress, anti-enlargement feeling and even growing racism in some European Union countries, and the continued frailty of the Doha round of trade-liberalisation negotiations. Globalisation is a human construct, after all, not some force of nature; it can be reversed, as has happened in previous bouts of beggar-my-neighbour politics. But even if these anti-takeover movements do prove futile, and don't trigger a broader move to protectionism, that still doesn't make them benign. They introduce distortions and impose costs on the countries that deploy them. And they are, at bottom, corrupt.

The idea that it is somehow in the French national interest that a utility should not become owned by an Italian firm, or in the American interest that ports be kept out of Arab hands, is one to gladden the heart of Karl Marx. His view was that ownership, and hence the power to exploit, was all; hence socialist governments' fateful desire to nationalise the “commanding heights” of their economies. Does Britain suffer because French firms (eg, EDF and Suez) already own large British electricity and water utilities? No: they are subject to exactly the same regulations and labour laws as any other utilities. Would the management of six American ports give DP World control over security there? No: as with any port or airport, it is controlled by the government. The laws of the land and the reach of state or federal agencies are unaffected.

What is affected, however, is the ability of governments and of individual politicians to use patronage at favoured firms to help their friends, to get favours in return, to support special interests such as trade unions, and, in broad political terms, to paint themselves as patriots. Consumers aren't helped, living standards don't rise, the nation as a whole is not better off. But the political and corporate elite may well be.

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5) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic: Protests in France [Manifs en France.]
http://www.scholastic.com

Protests in France
By Alexandra Cale

Hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets in France on Tuesday, disrupting transportation services across the country. The demonstrators sent a loud and clear message to the French government that they are against a proposed labor law that would allow employers to fire young employees more easily.

According to Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, the new law would be an improvement, designed to create job opportunities for young people. The existing law makes it difficult and expensive to fire workers, so employers are hesitant to hire. In France, the current unemployment rate is 9.6 percent.

The new law—contrat premiére embauche (also known as the CPE)—would allow employers to fire workers under 26 years old for any reason during their first two years of employment.

Young workers are not the only citizens dissatisfied with the law. Postal workers, teachers, and media employees also took to the streets in protest. Labor unions are concerned that the law will create a generation of "throwaway workers" who will be unable to find stable jobs.

The demonstrators filled the streets of several French cities, including Paris, Lille, and Marseille. They focused on stalling the French public transportation system, causing delays on trains and subways, and in airports. In Paris, police were called to clear thousands of protesters from a large public square—Place de La Republique. Officers resorted to tear gas and water cannons to control the crowd. Authorities say there were no serious injuries; more than 700 arrests were made across the country.

The Next Step

Not all government officials agree with de Villepin's position. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy suggested waiting before replacing the current law so that negotiations can take place. Meanwhile, the country awaits the response of President Jacques Chirac, who has canceled a trip he had planned for later in the week to remain in the country. President Chirac has expressed support for the Prime Minister and the CPE, but recent labor unrest reportedly has caused him to reconsider his position.

De Villepin has invited union members and students to join him for talks Wednesday, but it is not certain they will accept. While the Prime Minister has told members of his UMP party that he would be willing to modify the law, he shows no signs of backing down. Union leaders say having a meeting with de Villepin is pointless if he is unwilling to withdraw the CPE.

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7) AUDIO/On the Media: Calling on Helen [Emission radio avec transcription, cette fois-ci sur la dernière conférence de presse de Bush, et son choix de faire appel à Helen Thomas, doyenne des journalistes, femme qu'il a soigneusement évitée jusqu'ici.]
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_032406_helen.html

CALLING ON HELEN
March 24, 2006

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. With his approval ratings in free fall, the President launched a public relations offensive this week, appearing at various forums to take questions from citizens, military families and the press. But wait--the press? The media filter he's been working around for almost six years? What an odd way to burnish his image, opening himself up to questions or screeds, like this one.

HELEN THOMAS: I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, you--your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is why did you really want to go to war?

BOB GARFIELD: That was Helen Thomas talking to President Bush. New York Newsday's conservative columnist James Pinkerton put forth a theory about that exchange in his Thursday column, and he joins me now to discuss it. Jim, welcome to OTM.

JAMES PINKERTON: Thank you. The theory, of course, is that the President knew exactly what he was going to get when he called upon Helen Thomas to ask him a question. She is well-known as noisy and extremely hostile to President Bush and the Republicans. So why then would he want a question from her? And the answer, I think, is that he was using her as a foil.

BOB GARFIELD: In other words, to tell his base and other Americans that, “see, see what I've been telling you all along--this is what I'm up against; there is no way you're going to get the straight dope about Iraq or anything else.”

JAMES PINKERTON: Exactly. Bush kept his sense of humor, didn't lose his cool, was nice about it, but let the press show off that they can be kind of scruffy and obnoxious. Now, of course, the press isn't running for anything. It's not their job to be smooth and rounded in their conversations and tones and so on. So Helen Thomas or David Gregory of NBC News can be obnoxious. But if they let themselves become the issue, such they get on the national stage, then I think it's the President's further hope that people will equate a somewhat obnoxious feisty press with the Democratic Party. And if that happens, then the Democrats are in deep trouble because if people have to choose between left and right in this country, they usually choose right.

BOB GARFIELD: So what you're suggesting is this isn't an isolated incident, that the strategy is to goad the President's opponents, whether they be in the press or in the Democratic Party, to further attack him and just to seem extreme and unreasonable and out of the mainstream.

JAMES PINKERTON: Right. In the short run, if President Bush is attacked by nothing but David Gregory and Helen Thomas, and anybody else who wants to ask bean ball questions in these press availabilities on TV, that only helps the President look moderate and heroic to his own base. I think the real test will come down the road if, for lack of a better term, Thomasism, sort of the descendant of McGovernism - if the Democrats get so energized and angry about the war and if they think that President Bush is to them what Richard Nixon was to Democrats three and a half decades ago, then the paradox they might face is that the Democrats nominate a candidate in response who can't get elected. He's just--he or she is so far to the left that he or she is not electable. That's what happened to the Democrats in 1972, and I'm convinced that Richard Nixon was a smart enough guy to realize that if he and Spiro Agnew stirred the pot back and forth with protestors and demonstrators and liberals and Democrats and so on back then, that the Democrats would take the bait and nominate somebody who couldn't get elected. In the final analysis, if it's a battle of the bases, Republicans benefit.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Jim. Well, thank you very much.

JAMES PINKERTON: You bet, thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Jim Pinkerton is a columnist for New York's Newsday.

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9) The Economist: The doughnut wars [Un roman qui satirise la vie dans l'entreprise.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5601307

New fiction: The doughnut wars

Mar 9th 2006

WHO has not dreamed of becoming rich by penning a tale—nay, a film-script—about freakish officemates? This reviewer has been tempted many times, having once shared an office (at The Economist) with someone who called himself “Dude” and pretended to be from Alabama. Max Barry, an Australian novelist, is a welcome addition to the oddly under-populated field of corporate satire. “Company”, his latest effort, would do Evelyn Waugh proud.

Zephyr Holdings, the firm at the heart of the novel, has its idiosyncrasies. None of the employees has any idea of what it does, despite the bustle of departments such as Business Card Design, Gymnasium Management, Infrastructure Control, Training Sales and, of course, Senior Management. Nor has anyone ever laid eyes on the chief executive, a legendary figure named Daniel Klausman. Everyone is too busy chattering about which departments will be outsourced or consolidated. Besides, there are other pressing matters to attend to, such as who took Roger's doughnut (a sacking offence, as it turns out), and whether Freddy's habit of anonymously sending Eve, a sexy receptionist, $40 worth of flowers each week will pay off.

Into the corporate circus marches Jones, an earnest and fresh-faced graduate. As Roger's assistant, his first assignment is making inquiries about the doughnut incident. But Jones is destined for higher things. After an adventure on the company rooftop, he discovers Project Alpha, a secret undertaking that shows the true purpose of Zephyr Holdings. To divulge this plot twist might give away too much; but rest assured, management types will double over laughing.

Project Alpha drives the novel, leaving the ending a bit flat. But no matter: Mr Barry's real strength is artful prose and dialogue. He is a master of short sentences and the passive tense, both of which do much to convey his characters' self-importance. When Senior Management is displeased, “glances were exchanged” and the offender terminated. After an epic turf war, “departments were lost, claimed, and lost again.” After one of the Training Sales employees, Elizabeth, gets pregnant (courtesy of the ubiquitous Roger), she is summoned to Human Resources, which turns out to be a small, empty room occupied only by a plastic chair and a mirror. A loud voice booms down: “Irregularities have been detected in your work patterns. Your bathroom breaks have sharply increased in frequency and duration.” Somehow, the company knows all.

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10) Slate/Moneybox: Lost Highway [Pourquoi le leasing d'équipements publics n'est pas un bon plan pour les collectivités.]
http://www.slate.com/id/2138950/

moneybox
Lost Highway
The foolish plan to sell American toll roads to foreign companies.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, March 29, 2006, at 4:56 PM ET

If a governor told you there were a way to spread pork, raise funds for infrastructure investment, promote jobs, avoid raising taxes, and put a dent in the trade deficit—all in one fell swoop—you might think he had a bridge to sell you. And you'd be right. Only in this case, it's a toll road. And instead of a sale, how about a long-term lease?

Earlier this month, in a triumph for Gov. Mitch Daniels, Indiana's House narrowly approved his proposal to lease the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road, which spans the northern part of the state, for $3.85 billion to a joint venture of Cintra, a Spanish company, and Australia's Macquarie Bank. The two companies have been active in the U.S. road business. In 2004, the two inked a 99-year lease for the 7.8-mile elevated Chicago Skyway. Last year, Macquarie completed its acquisition of the Dulles Greenway outside Washington, D.C. And Cintra, which manages toll roads in Europe and the Americas, is a strategic partner to the Texas state government in the planned Trans-Texas Corridor. There are likely more such deals to come.

For Daniels—who failed to live up to his nickname ("The Blade") when he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the first Bush administration—the 75-year lease is an elegant solution. The state needs billions of dollars to invest in new roads. Getting the cash upfront will allow Daniels to speed up construction on needed infrastructure projects, create new jobs, and fund his Clintonian Major Moves initiative. (Here's a list of projects to be funded and a fact sheet on the deal.) And by raising the cash from foreigners, he's doing his part to rein in the pernicious current-account deficit. "Too often in Indiana, we see Hoosier dollars and jobs leaving the state. Major Moves is an exciting opportunity to recapture U.S. dollars by attracting foreign investment, and use them to create jobs for Hoosiers," he said.

What's in it for the foreign companies? Huge potential profits. Gigantic, steady profits. Toll roads are an incredible asset class. They're often monopolies. They can support debt, since they provide a recurring guaranteed revenue stream that is likely to rise over time, as more people take to the roads and tolls increase. According to Cintra, the Indiana Toll Road generated $96 million in revenues in 2005, and Cintra expects a 12.5 percent internal rate of return on its investment. The heavy lifting has already been done: The state or federal governments have acquired the land and rights of way, built the roads and maintained them for years, and enacted toll increases. All the private companies have to do is deliver cash upfront, maintain the roads, and collect the windfall. The buyers can also increase their profits by making toll roads run more efficiently with technology. After assuming control of the Chicago Skyway, the Cintra-Macquarie consortium installed electronic toll equipment on some lanes. And by refinancing nimbly, companies can cash out. Last year—just seven months into its 99-year lease—Cintra announced that it had recovered 44 percent of its initial investment in the Chicago road through refinancing.

(So, why aren't American companies buying up our toll roads? Here's a theory: Why aren't American companies buying the roads and making the profits that are going to Cintra and Macquairie? Oddly, it may be because the toll roads are good investments—but not great ones. The long-term economics of these sweetheart deals don't appeal enough to today's quick-buck American investors. Big private-equity firms are sitting on piles of cash, and money is cheap. And yet they're not bidding seriously on these lease deals. Ironically, the very factors that make the United States an appealing market for foreign investors—its size and stability, the security afforded by the rule of law—make it comparatively unappealing for some local investors. Macquairie and Cintra might be perfectly happy with 12 percent internal rates of return. But many big U.S. investors are seeking returns at twice that rate, which they believe can be found more easily in riskier markets like India and China.)

This easy money for foreigners makes the locals uneasy. In mid-March, the Indiana House approved the deal by a surprisingly slim margin. The Indiana scheme continues to engender local opposition. Last week, while participating in a panel discussion in South Bend, Ind., I got the sense that the toll lease made Hoosiers uneasy for reasons they couldn't quite articulate. It's not like the buyers could uproot the concrete and move it to Queensland, Australia, or Seville, Spain. The 400-page contract spells out in detail obligations of the consortium to invest in maintenance and safety and to keep a lid on toll rates. And unlike the Dubai ports case, it's hard to see how management of the toll road by a foreign entity could raise security threats.

I think the uneasiness has more to do with what it says about the peculiar fiscal climate in the United States. How is it that in the richest nation on the earth, localities simply don't have the cash to do necessary maintenance on basic infrastructure, the political will to raise such funds, or the competence to run such easily profitable operations? Why are they being forced to sell off long-term cash cows for short-term cash?

Leasing or selling a public asset is a classic one-shot—a short-term measure that bolsters the balance sheet today but that can't be repeated. While politicians like Daniels focus on getting through the next few fiscal years with minimum pain, foreign companies are thinking about how to get rich off of tolls for the next three-quarters of a century. From Gov. Daniels to his former boss, President Bush, there's a troubling unwillingness to align governmental resources with the express goals and responsibilities of government. At the federal level, we rely on China's central bank to buy our bonds and fund basic operations. As a result, our tax revenues wind up in Beijing—as interest payments. At the state level, Indiana is relying on foreign companies to lease public infrastructure like toll roads. And under these arrangements, tolls—taxes people pay for driving—are being paid to foreign shareholders of foreign companies.

Of course, by selling public infrastructure at high prices, state governments could be taking foreigners for a ride. The Japanese famously overpaid for Rockefeller Center, after all. It's possible that Indiana just ripped off the Spaniards and Aussies. But I doubt it.

Why aren't American companies buying the roads and making the profits that are going to Cintra and Macquairie? Oddly, it may be because the toll roads are good investments—but not great ones. The long-term economics of these sweetheart deals don't appeal enough to today's quick-buck American investors. Big private-equity firms are sitting on piles of cash, and money is cheap. And yet they're not bidding seriously on these lease deals. Ironically, the very factors that make the United States an appealing market for foreign investors—its size and stability, the security afforded by the rule of law—make it comparatively unappealing for some local investors. Macquairie and Cintra might be perfectly happy with 12 percent internal rates of return. But many big U.S. investors are seeking returns at twice that rate, which they believe can be found more easily in riskier markets like India and China.

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11) The Economist: Attack of the Eurogoogle [Le rival européen de Google a l'air vachement intéressant.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5571496

Attack of the Eurogoogle
Mar 9th 2006

Search technology: Can an ambitious new European search engine, backed by the governments of France and Germany, challenge Google?

“WE MUST take the offensive and muster a massive effort,” said Jacques Chirac, the president of France, who went on to warn of the dangers of losing the battle for “the power of tomorrow” in a speech made last April. Standing beside him was Gerhard Schröder, then chancellor of Germany. In response to the formidable challenges posed by America, Japan and the emerging powers of China, India and Brazil, the two men announced that they had decided to step up their co-operation in a technological programme of vital strategic importance. A new fighter jet, perhaps, or a satellite surveillance system? No, the two heads of state were endorsing a plan to build a Franco-German internet-search engine, to be called Quaero (Latin for “I seek”).

The project would, said Mr Chirac, be undertaken with the help of government funds “in the image of the magnificent success of Airbus”. In a series of further speeches over the past few months, he has warmed to his theme: “We must take up the global challenge of the American giants Yahoo! and Google”; “Culture is not merchandise and cannot be left to blind market forces”; “We must staunchly defend the world's cultural diversity against the looming threat of uniformity”; “Our power is at stake.”

In July Mr Chirac noted that while French research has traditionally been good, it “now needs encouraging”. The following month the French government, the main financier and developer of Quaero, duly created the Agency for Industrial Innovation (AII), based in Paris, largely to oversee the project. The AII received an initial endowment of €1.7 billion ($2 billion). Michel Lemonier, a senior administrator at the AII, refuses to discuss how much of the budget is being allocated to Quaero because, he jokes, the leaders of other AII-funded programmes would be “very jealous”. Quaero is expected to be finished before any of the other planned AII projects, and may be online before the year is out.

The magic of Quaero, say its supporters, will be in the ambitious capabilities of its tentacles. Today, internet searches are performed using keywords. Of course, search engines can retrieve image, audio and video files, in addition to text documents. But this is done by matching the user's keywords to a text description of the image, audio or video content. Quaero users will be able to search the internet with keywords in the usual way; but in addition, researchers at Quaero's public-private consortium, led by Thomson and France Telecom in France and Siemens and Deutsche Telekom in Germany, are developing technology that will allow users to perform searches using pictures and sounds as query terms. “It's beyond Google,” says Marie-Vincente Pasdeloup of Thomson.

Quaero will allow users to search using a “query image”, not just a group of keywords. In a process known as “image mining”, software that recognises shapes and colours will then retrieve still images and video clips that contain images similar to the query image. (The software is being supplied by LTU Technologies, a firm based in Paris, which already supplies the technology to law-enforcement agencies for use in sifting through surveillance footage.) When Quaero finds an image without a description that matches a properly labelled image, it will append the description from the labelled image to the unlabelled one. This technique, called “keyword propagation”, will enrich the web linguistically: image descriptions in French, for example, will spread as they are tacked on to similar images, so that those images can also be retrieved by users who type in French keywords.

Meanwhile, in Germany, researchers at the University of Karlsruhe are developing Quaero's voice-recognition and translation technology, with funding from the European Commission. The idea is that this software will find audio files—such as political speeches or radio broadcasts—and then automatically transcribe and translate them into a number of European languages. The original audio files can then be found using keyword searches. In addition, speaker-identification software will allow users (via computer microphones) to search the internet for audio clips recorded in their own voices, or those of other speakers.

These are stunningly ambitious goals, and some of the audio features may not be ready by the time Quaero is launched. Yet they show that Quaero is intended to be far more than just another would-be Google, but a leap forward in search-engine technology. “Google is so hegemonic that no one even wonders about other interfaces,” says François Bourdoncle, the chief executive of Exalead, a French search engine that has taken on the task of integrating these various technologies under the Quaero umbrella.

Even so, the most striking difference between Quaero and Google is not technological, but ideological. Quaero is a classic example of European state-funded industrial policy, while Google is the very embodiment of American free-market techno-capitalism. The use of government funds to back Quaero has raised eyebrows, even among its supporters, who worry that it might fall foul of rules that prevent governments from using state aid to give favoured firms an unfair competitive advantage.

But so far no formal complaints against Quaero have materialised. The project is a public-private partnership, and the private firms involved are also committing considerable sums to it. The government funds, meanwhile, are being carefully distributed via a complex system of favourable loans, interest-free cash advances, forgivable loans and grants for pre-competitive research, all of which are allowed under international trade rules. The project is further protected by the fact that big public-research organisations, including France's National Centre for Scientific Research and Germany's RWTH-Aachen University, are also involved.

When Angela Merkel took over as German chancellor in November, there were rumblings that she might not match Mr Schröder's commitment to the project. In fact, her dedication to Quaero is even greater, says Jean-Philippe Touffut, the secretary-general of the Cournot Centre for Economic Studies in Paris, who co-ordinates collaboration between the project's French and German participants.

How will Google respond? Brad Fallon of SEO Research, a search-engine consultancy based in Atlanta, says Google has put the development of multimedia search technology into its “as-soon-as-possible” category, since it now offers only text-based searches. At the moment, however, “Quaero appears to have the edge,” he says. But when Google and the other big American search engines unveil their multimedia search features, they are likely to provide interfaces in foreign languages, just as they do today with text-based searches. So simply by existing, Quaero will make the cut-throat search-engine business even more competitive.

Google, of course, makes its money from advertising, and Quaero's backers hope that it too will produce substantial advertising revenues. But Quaero's chief aims are cultural and political, rather than commercial. Alexander Waibel, a research leader at the University of Karlsruhe who sits on Quaero's steering committee, offers an emotional justification too. “Europe wants to secure access that does not have to be channelled through American technology,” he says. And an official close to Mr Chirac adds that “the goal surpasses by far the industrial stakes.”

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12) Reuters:Games hosts try to polish Chinese manners [La Chine veut inculquer les bonnes manières au peuple avant les JO.]
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/29032006/80-132/games-hosts-try-polish-chinese-manners.html

Games hosts try to polish Chinese manners
Reuters Wednesday March 29, 03:01 AM

By Joel Kirkhart

BEIJING (Reuters) - Some 30 years ago, no home in China was complete without the collection of sayings of Chairman Mao Zedong known universally as the Little Red Book. By the end of this year, Beijing authorities hope etiquette guides, aimed at improving the manners of the city's inhabitants before the 2008 Olympics, will have found a similar place in the capital's 4.3 million households.

Bad manners were a significant threat to the success of the Olympics, He Zhenliang, advisor to the Beijing Games organisers, warned last week. The series of books go far beyond encouraging citizens to cheer for foreign athletes and not take flash photographs at sporting events. The "Basic Reader in Civility and Etiquette" is packed with suggestions on posture, crossing the street, ordering steaks and at least one tip that seems to have been plucked from a guide for swinging singles. "Intimate gazing zones include the eyes, lips and the chest. Gazing at these areas can stimulate emotions and express love," it reads.

There is extensive advice on fashion and formalities, some harking back to a past era. "Women's underwear should not be exposed and especially should not be worn on the outside... Pyjamas should not be worn in public areas," the book says.

"The proper way to greet a person from a Socialist or Marxist-Leninist country is with the term 'comrade'."

Sister volume "Rules and Propriety for Olympic Programmes" walks readers through all the Olympic sports -- each illustrated by cartoons with athletes represented as a chicken and a plump panda -- and explains when and how to cheer at different events.

Cartoons and strange fashion advice aside, the etiquette drive is no joking matter to Beijing. "Beijing's audiences will represent the spirit and style of the city and the entire country," mayor Wang Qishan writes in the introduction to "Rules and Propriety". "Along with the athletes and others, they will be like 'actors' appearing on billions of television screens around the world. It goes without saying this is a big problem!"

Beijing sports crowds have been known to get rowdy, to the embarrassment of the authorities. In August 2004, angry soccer fans went on the rampage after hosts China lost to Japan in the final of the Asian Cup. A July 2005 basketball game between China and Puerto Rico in Beijing deteriorated into a brawl, with fans hurling insults and missiles at the visiting team.

City officials admit that book learning will not be enough to get people to change their ways, so the Chinese capital is taking its etiquette campaign to the streets. The city is mobilising an army of volunteer "civility supervisors" charged with persuading people to queue for buses and stop spitting in public. The volunteer patrols will be backed up by thousands of new trash cans bearing reminders to "spit civilly" and warnings that expectorating in public can fetch fines as high as 50 yuan (4 pounds).

Past attempts to free the city of unsanitary habits such as spitting, including a big push when Beijing was in the grip of the SARS epidemic in 2003, have failed to have much impact."They spend lots of money on printing all those books but it seems like a waste to me," taxi driver Zhang Jie, a 45-year-old Beijing native, told Reuters. "There are just too many people in this country. How are you supposed to be able to control the actions of that many people?"

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THE right to a good, free state school is part of France's republican folklore, the guarantor of its secular meritocracy. So new figures this week, based on the 2005 school-leaving exam (the baccalauréat or bac), may come as a surprise. Of the top 29 schools, all but one—the Lycée Henri IV on Paris's left bank—are private.

The ranking, carried out by Le Figaro, took all lycées (secondary schools) with a 100% pass rate in the three main academic streams. This list was then compared with expected results, based on the socio-economic background of pupils: the results revealed the startlingly superior performance of private schools. Interestingly, central Paris does not monopolise the top places. At the pinnacle is the Lycée Epin, in the capital's suburbs. Others include the Lycée de Marcq, in Lille, and the Lycée Ozar Hatorah in Toulouse.

Despite the popular myth of a decent state education for all, many middle-class parents choose private schools. Some 14% of primary pupils attend a private school, and the figure for lycées is over 20%. Admittedly, French private schools bear little resemblance to, say, British ones, not least because they do not compel parents to remortgage their houses to pay the fees. As the state pays teachers' salaries at schools “under contract” with the education ministry, fees are usually well under €3,000 ($3,600) a year. Moreover, some parents choose private schools for a religious instruction that is forbidden in the secular state system. Many, like the Lycée de Marcq, are Catholic; some, like the Lycée Ozar Hatorah, are Jewish.

Nonetheless, the popularity of private schools points to a growing dissatisfaction with the state's offering, which is under assault from other quarters too. Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, recently caused controversy by floating the idea of putting police officers inside rough schools, in response to rising violence. A schoolteacher near Paris was knifed several times by one of her pupils in December.

Mr Sarkozy has also blasted the system for not promoting social mobility, another cornerstone of French republicanism. The proportion of pupils passing the bac has risen from 25% in 1980 to 62% in 2004, but this has not opened up the top universities. The share of working-class children going to France's grandes écoles (elite higher-education colleges) is lower than in the 1950s, says Mr Sarkozy. “For a century, free secular republican schooling has proudly ensured equal opportunity, permitting thousands of children from modest families to obtain secondary and higher education,” he said last month. “But today it has become inegalitarian.”

Above all, as the bac has spread, those without it have become marginalised. As Patrick Fauconnier points out in a recent book on French education's failings, these days you need the bac to be a supermarket cashier. Yet every year 160,000 pupils leave school without it. Most have no qualifications, and many are functionally illiterate. The penalty in France is severe, says Eric Charbonnier, of the OECD: the difference in the unemployment rate of those with and without the diploma is far above the OECD average.

What can be done? Mr Fauconnier suggests less abstract teaching, less rote-learning, and a system less built around failure. Richard Descoings, head of Sciences-Po, a grande école, wants to create a lycée d'excellence in one of Paris's grim banlieues. Mr Sarkozy wants to give schools more freedom to experiment and specialise, to pay good teachers more, and to introduce more sport. All fine stuff; but the difficulty is France's formidable, centrally employed, 1m-strong teaching body. It equates decentralisation and diversity with an assault on republican uniformity—even though that means more in theory than in reality.

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14) Slate: Workus Interruptus [Les pseudo-statistiques sur la perte de productivité des travailleurs sont du pipeau.]
http://www.slate.com/id/2138123/

hey, wait a minute: Workus Interruptus
Sure, take a break—and help cost the U.S. economy $588 billion.
By Jeff Merron
Posted Thursday, March 16, 2006, at 12:06 PM ET

While writing the second draft of this article, my telephone rang. I didn't answer it, but I took a few seconds to check caller ID and think about it. Then it took me a few minutes to get back on track. This interaction—three minutes out of my workday—supposedly cost the U.S. economy about a buck.

"Workplace interruptions" like that phone call slice $588 billion a year from the national economy, according to a widely quoted figure that comes from the New York consulting firm Basex. If American workers could work without interruption, the country would apparently be able to pay off this year's record $400 billion federal budget deficit and still have enough cash left over to mail every U.S. citizen a check for $635.71.

Except, of course, that Basex's estimate—like just about every other estimate you see that's followed by the phrase "costs the U.S. economy"—is largely bogus.

Time magazine explained how these costs are calculated when it published the $588 billion figure in January. Using Bureau of Labor statistics data from 2005, Basex estimated that "knowledge workers" earn an average of $21 an hour. Then, based on online surveys and about 200 follow-up phone interviews, Basex concluded that these knowledge workers spend an average 2.1 hours each day fielding interruptions from e-mail messages, phone calls, instant messages, chatty co-workers, and so on. Included is the time workers spend "recovering"—getting back to what they were doing in the first place.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 56 million knowledge workers in the United States, says Jonathan Spira, CEO and chief analyst for Basex. Rounding down a bit, Basex estimated that each worker is "losing" to interruptions 10 hours a week, or 500 hours a year. The cost per year for the average knowledge worker: $10,500. Multiply by 56 million, and you get to $588 billion.

So, if we eliminated workplace interruptions, I asked Spira, would the companies we work for boost profits? Would we all get big raises? Not so much, Spira admitted. "The U.S. economy wouldn't grow by $588 billion if we got rid of these interruptions," he said. "We put it this way to illustrate that managers don't really know how to manage."

It's true that fewer interruptions might give employees more time to debug software, seek new business from important clients, or write more articles. But that time hole is no gold-spinning Sutter's Mill.

The point is that the oft-used phrase "costs the U.S. economy" is disturbingly vague and rarely accurate. Spira told me that his figure often gets cited without question. What other workplace-related issues are supposedly draining our national bank account? Here's a list based on a quick Nexis search.

Cost to the U.S. economy of annoying co-worker behavior: $300 billion.
Cost of negativity: $300 billion.
Cost of disengaged employees: $256 to $363 billion.
Cost of spam: $22 billion.
Cost of product counterfeiting and copyright piracy: $600 billion.
Cost of movie pirating: $3 billion.
Cost of delays at U.S.-Canada border: $4.1 billion.
Cost of power disruptions: $100 billion.

These figures aren't destined for any reputable economics textbook. To begin with, it's hard to believe that workplace interruptions really do nearly eight times the damage of rising oil prices, which are said to cost the economy $75 billion. Then consider the double-dipping. No doubt some work "negativity" involves all those annoying co-workers. And when the power goes out, disengaged employees don't even notice. Consider in addition that each of these costs has a corresponding economic payoff. Anti-spam efforts keep well-paid software engineers employed. Annoying co-workers have spawned a healthy market in noise-canceling headphones. There's no standard method for smoothing out all the overlap and contradiction.

Often, though not invariably, "costs to the U.S. economy" are self-serving sums concocted by lobbyists, companies, and advocacy and trade groups in order to grab attention. Basex, for example, is a consulting company that—you guessed it—would love to help you cut down on all those pesky interruptions, for a fee.

That's not to say there's nothing at all to the hype, though. If I'd closed my office door and muted my phone, I'd have finished writing this 25 minutes ago. Which would have given me time to send a copy of the Natalie Portman rap to my buddy Andrew. Ah, I can annoy him with that tomorrow.
Jeff Merron is a staff writer and columnist at ESPN.com.

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15) The Economist: Life after Rover [Qu'est devenu le foyer de Rover suite à la faillite du constructeur ?]

Life after Rover: Soft landing at Longbridge
Mar 10th 2006

Rover's demise may have been a blessing in disguise

MG ROVER'S factory at Longbridge, near Birmingham, was always more than a sprawling collection of assembly lines churning out vehicles. It reigned in the national psyche as the biggest and, finally, last British-owned mass-market carmaker. So its closure in April 2005, after half a century of bungled government interventions and bail-outs, was seen as the death of British manufacturing.

Almost a year on, however, a different picture is emerging. A report this week by a government-appointed task-force suggests that the aftermath is less bleak than was feared. Only 6,271 workers lost their jobs, including those at Rover's suppliers, compared with the 24,000 reckoned to be at risk when Rover was in desperate straits five years ago. And more than three-fifths have found new jobs elsewhere.

“The landing was relatively soft but only because the glide path was so long," says Nick Oliver, a professor at Cambridge University's Judge Business School. Car production at Rover had been falling for more than three decades (see chart), slumping recently from almost 175,000 cars in 2000 to 107,000 in 2004.

Suppliers, too, had time to adjust. They were shocked five years ago, when BMW, a German carmaker which had bought Rover from British Aerospace in 1994, broke up the company, sold off bits and gave the Longbridge plant to the Phoenix Consortium, which in turn presided over Rover's eventual demise. They set about finding new customers. When the end came, MG Rover accounted for less than 15% of its suppliers' sales, down from as much as 30% in 2000, according to David Malpass of Accelerate, an arm of Birmingham's Chamber of Commerce.

Buying time for the region to diversify greatly reduced the number of jobs lost, points out Richard Burden, the Labour MP for the area. The government is also spending some £250m ($436m) between 2000 and 2008 to support suppliers and workers, the National Audit Office reported this week. And the rest of the British motor industry is healthy, if under foreign management. Last year it exported a record 1.2m cars, and producers other than MG Rover raised output by 1.7%.

Graham Mulholland, managing director of EPM Technology, which makes carbon fibre parts for Formula 1 racing cars, is among those who are hiring. His payroll has grown from 13 to 140 in four years, including some people who worked for MG Rover. It may double again soon, he says.

About a quarter of the workers who found new jobs are earning more than they did at Rover, according to the task-force. Not all have been so lucky. Half of those now employed elsewhere are earning less, and more than a third of the original workforce—mainly the older and less-skilled—are still out of work. But many are getting training and help. The task-force reckons 80% of MG Rover's former employees will be back in work by summer.

In time, the collapse of MG Rover may even prove to be a boon to the region. Some think that loss-making Rover held back the local economy. It also tied up skilled workers who might have been more valuable elsewhere. And land at Longbridge will be used for a new technology park, where about 10,000 people may be employed where the car factory once stood, says Tim Haywood of St Modwen Properties, the firm developing the site.

It won't be the first big change that Longbridge has seen. In 1905, when Herbert Austin started making cars at what became Rover's main factory, it was on the site of an abandoned printing company. Few mourned its passing for long.

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