Candeland

No words...

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:40:59 GMT

The statistics in this NYTimes article are - horrifying...

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October 7, 2007

Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War

BUKAVU, Congo — Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore.

Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”

The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over. Last year, this country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end Congo’s various wars and rebellions and its tradition of epically bad government.

But the elections have not unified the country or significantly strengthened the Congolese government’s hand to deal with renegade forces, many of them from outside the country. The justice system and the military still barely function, and United Nations officials say Congolese government troops are among the worst offenders when it comes to rape. Large swaths of the country, especially in the east, remain authority-free zones where civilians are at the mercy of heavily armed groups who have made warfare a livelihood and survive by raiding villages and abducting women for ransom.

According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.

United Nations officials said the so-called Rastas were once part of the Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994, but now it seems they have split off on their own and specialize in freelance cruelty.

Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman with high cheekbones and downcast eyes, said she was kidnapped from a village that the Rastas raided in April and kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks ringing her delicate neck. The men would untie her for a few hours each day to gang-rape her, she said.

“I’m weak, I’m angry, and I don’t know how to restart my life,” she said from Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where she was taken after her captors freed her.

She is also pregnant.

While rape has always been a weapon of war, researchers say they fear that Congo’s problem has metastasized into a wider social phenomenon.

“It’s gone beyond the conflict,” said Alexandra Bilak, who has studied various armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu. She said that the number of women abused and even killed by their husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality toward women had become “almost normal.”

Malteser International, a European aid organization that runs health clinics in eastern Congo, estimates that it will treat 8,000 sexual violence cases this year, compared with 6,338 last year. The organization said that in one town, Shabunda, 70 percent of the women reported being sexually brutalized.

At Panzi Hospital, where Dr. Mukwege performs as many as six rape-related surgeries a day, bed after bed is filled with women lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling, with colostomy bags hanging next to them because of all the internal damage.

“I still have pain and feel chills,” said Kasindi Wabulasa, a patient who was raped in February by five men. The men held an AK-47 rifle to her husband’s chest and made him watch, telling him that if he closed his eyes, they would shoot him. When they were finished, Ms. Wabulasa said, they shot him anyway.

In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are described as young men with guns, and in the deceptively beautiful hills here, there is no shortage of them: poorly paid and often mutinous government soldiers; homegrown militias called the Mai-Mai who slick themselves with oil before marching into battle; members of paramilitary groups originally from Uganda and Rwanda who have destabilized this area over the past 10 years in a quest for gold and all the other riches that can be extracted from Congo’s exploited soil.

The attacks go on despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world, with more than 17,000 troops.

Few seem to be spared. Dr. Mukwege said his oldest patient was 75, his youngest 3.

“Some of these girls whose insides have been destroyed are so young that they don’t understand what happened to them,” Dr. Mukwege said. “They ask me if they will ever be able to have children, and it’s hard to look into their eyes.”

No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why this is happening.

“That is the question,” said André Bourque, a Canadian consultant who works with aid groups in eastern Congo. “Sexual violence in Congo reaches a level never reached anywhere else. It is even worse than in Rwanda during the genocide.”

Impunity may be a contributing factor, Mr. Bourque added, saying that very few of the culprits are punished.

Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was cultural and insisted that the widespread rapes were not the product of something ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society. “If that were the case, this would have showed up long ago,” said Wilhelmine Ntakebuka, who coordinates a sexual violence program in Bukavu.

Instead, she said, the epidemic of rapes seems to have started in the mid-1990s. That coincides with the waves of Hutu militiamen who escaped into Congo’s forests after exterminating 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during Rwanda’s genocide 13 years ago.

Mr. Holmes said that while government troops might have raped thousands of women, the most vicious attacks had been carried out by Hutu militias.

“These are people who were involved with the genocide and have been psychologically destroyed by it,” he said.

Mr. Bourque called this phenomenon “reversed values” and said it could develop in heavily traumatized areas that had been steeped in conflict for many years, like eastern Congo.

This place, one of the greenest, hilliest and most scenic slices of central Africa, continues to reverberate from the aftershocks of the genocide next door. Take the recent fighting near Bukavu between the Congolese Army and Laurent Nkunda, a dissident general who commands a formidable rebel force. Mr. Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi who has accused the Congolese Army of supporting Hutu militias, which the army denies. Mr. Nkunda says his rebel force is simply protecting Tutsi civilians from being victimized again.

But his men may be no better.

Willermine Mulihano said she was raped twice — first by Hutu militiamen two years ago and then by Nkunda soldiers in July. Two soldiers held her legs apart, while three others took turns violating her.

“When I think about what happened,” she said, “I feel anxious and brokenhearted.”

She is also lonely. Her husband divorced her after the first rape, saying she was diseased.

In some cases, the attacks are on civilians already caught in the cross-fire between warring groups. In one village near Bukavu where 27 women were raped and 18 civilians killed in May, the attackers left behind a note in broken Swahili telling the villagers that the violence would go on as long as government troops were in the area.

The United Nations peacekeepers here seem to be stepping up efforts to protect women.

Recently, they initiated what they call “night flashes,” in which three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night as a signal to both civilians and armed groups that the peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the ground around them.

But the problem seems bigger than the resources currently devoted to it.

Panzi Hospital has 350 beds, and though a new ward is being built specifically for rape victims, the hospital sends women back to their villages before they have fully recovered because it needs space for the never-ending stream of new arrivals.

Dr. Mukwege, 52, said he remembered the days when Bukavu was known for its stunning lake views and nearby national parks, like Kahuzi-Biega.

“There used to be a lot of gorillas in there,” he said. “But now they’ve been replaced by much more savage beasts.”

Found this in Shape magazine, so it must be true....

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:21:41 GMT

(Nov 2007 issue)
"When Getting Angry is Good for You: If you want to get to the bottom of a situation that has you seeing red (a neighbor's dog keeps getting loose in your yard, you receive a too-high cable bill), being a hothead may help. According to a recent article in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, irate individuals are better at thinking critically than their calmer counterparts. Why? "Anger motivates you to pinpoint the cause of an issue so you can resolve it quickly," says Wesley Moons, co-author of the article and psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. So channel those hostile feelings - they could ultimately help you find serenity.

Cancer in comics

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:26:14 GMT

One of my favorite comic characters, Lisa in Funky Winkerbean has made the decision not to fight her cancer .... and it has made for a really sad month's worth of comics.

I'm not sure how I feel about this move by author Tom Batiuk: on the one hand I think it is really amazing that see this transformation (maybe it is my voyeuristic side?) .... on the other hand I'm not usually reading these comics expecting to feel so much emotion for the characters....
That and it looks odd when I'm crying over my morning yogurt in the office...

I'll miss you Lisa.

How to talk to your spouse about your day

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 16:43:22 GMT

Very funny online comic (basicinstructions.net) worth checking out

Comics that make me question why any one (willingly) becomes a parent...

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 16:43:52 GMT

More on Subprime Mortgage Market

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:20:50 GMT

For all those interested in learning more of the how and why's there's a really good entry on Economist's Views.

What I've been working on lately....

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:13:46 GMT

Schumer's people put up a relatively accurate account of the recent mortgage market meltdown and how it has spun out into a broader financial market problem....

Trying to understand this whole mess and how it will play out is what I've been up to since the first quarter of this year...

First it was Oil, now its the mortgage market ... too bad we have ethics rules about what I can invest in...

The Reason I have a Job: Or Why American Consumers are Less-Risk Averse than Wall Street

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:27:28 GMT

Choice quotes: "Dan and Julie McGrath cannot say whether the program would have helped them. Three years ago they took a $150 payday loan to follow Mrs. McGrath’s daughter to an out-of-area basketball game. Before long they had loans at five payday stores, and some $2,000 a month, about two-thirds of Mr. McGrath’s income, was going to finance charges... On a recent evening, the couple huddled outside a weathered 22-foot trailer on property owned by Mrs. McGrath’s parents 90 minutes away near the Michigan border. Since the couple lost their house, this has been their home. It has no hot water or working toilet. In moving, they gave up custody of Mrs. McGrath’s teenage children."

WHAT?!!!

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Nonprofit Payday Loans? Yes, to Mixed Reviews

APPLETON, Wis. — This city of 70,000 has five McDonald’s franchises, three Pizza Huts, four Starbucks shops — and 19 payday loan stores, brightly lighted storefronts with names like EZ Money and Check Into Cash that offer two-week loans without credit checks.

Skip to next paragraph

Kevin J. Miyazaki for The New York Times

Peggy Truckey found help in one of the nonprofit loans, which have not been immune to critics.

Enlarge This Image

Kevin J. Miyazaki for The New York Times

Commercial payday loan stores abound in Appleton.

Peggy Truckey, 53, knows the allure. Last year she owed nearly $1,300 to four of those stores, and was paying about $600 a month in finance fees alone. “I thought I was going to have to take a second job just to pay off the interest,” Ms. Truckey said.

Then she heard about a new nonprofit program operated out of a Goodwill thrift store, one of several hundred lower-cost payday loan products that are now being tried by credit unions around the country. She got a payday loan, at half the finance charge, but also something more: help converting all her two-week payday debts, which charged the equivalent of more than 500 percent annual interest, to a one-year loan at 18.9 percent, bringing her monthly payments down to a manageable $129. A few dollars from each payment go into a savings account, the first she has had in years.

“I have almost $100 in savings,” said Ms. Truckey, who earns $9.50 an hour as a supermarket meat clerk. “I’m in a comfortable position for the first time in many years.”

The program, GoodMoney, a collaboration between Goodwill and Prospera Credit Union, is a response to an industry that has been criticized by lawmakers and consumer advocates as predatory but that has reached as many as one in 20 Americans.

“Our goal is to change behavior, to interrupt the cycle of debt,” said Ken Eiden, president of Prospera, who is also a director at Goodwill.

For Ms. Truckey, as for most payday borrowers, the loans began as a stopgap. After losing her job in 2002 she borrowed $500 from a payday store, which charged $22 per two weeks for every $100 borrowed, or the equivalent of 572 percent annual interest. When the loan came due in two weeks, she could repay only the $110 finance charge, so she rolled the loan over, adding another finance charge.

Soon she took a second loan, from another store, and eventually two more, which she rolled over every two weeks, multiplying the cost of the loans. Even after she found a full-time job, she said, “I wasn’t able to pay my electric bill on time or my other bills on time, because half my paycheck was going to finance charges.”

At GoodMoney, tellers encourage borrowers to consolidate their debt in lower-interest term loans, and to use other credit union services like automatic savings. If borrowers cannot repay a loan after rolling it over twice, they can get the loan interest-free by attending a free credit counseling session with a nonprofit service.

But alternative payday loans have also drawn criticism from some consumer advocates, who say the programs are too similar to for-profit payday loans, especially when they call for the principal to be repaid in two weeks. At GoodMoney, for example, borrowers pay $9.90 for every $100 they borrow, which translates to an annual rate of 252 percent.

That may be roughly half the rate offered by commercial payday lenders, but “it’s still the same debt trap,” said Uriah King, a policy associate at the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit advocacy group that is critical of payday lending. Even with the lower finance fees, Mr. King said, most borrowers have to roll the loans over.

According to Prospera, 62 percent of GoodMoney users took fewer than the industry average of seven loans for the 12-month period ended July. The median user at GoodMoney took four loans.

Payday loan stores, which barely existed 15 years ago, now outnumber most fast-food franchises. Typically a customer borrows a few hundred dollars in exchange for a check, postdated to the next payday, made out in the amount of the principal plus a fee of $15 to $22 per $100 borrowed.

Usury laws in 12 states, including New York, prohibit or severely regulate payday lending. But while critics, including some lawmakers, call the stores predatory lenders that trap borrowers in ever-deeper cycles of debt, consumers flock to their easy, short-term loans, offered with no credit checks.

Wisconsin, with a population of 5.6 million, has about 450 payday loan stores. In 2005, they made 1.7 million loans, state regulators say, for a total of more than $625 million. Borrowers paid $138 million in fees, making the annual interest rate 521 percent, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsible Lending.

GoodMoney arose out of cases like Ms. Truckey’s, said Bob Pedersen, president of Goodwill Industries of North Central Wisconsin, which provides services to low-income people. A few years ago, Mr. Pedersen said, the organization noticed that both its clients and its employees were struggling with payday loans.

“It wasn’t uncommon to find them a good job, then see them upside down on credit, with debt they wouldn’t be able to pay off in their lifetime,” he said.

Some of Goodwill’s directors, Mr. Pedersen said, initially opposed offering payday loans, even at lower interest. But Mr. Eiden, Prospera’s president, said that “a lot of consumers felt they were a savior.”

Of the $9.90 that GoodMoney charges per $100 borrowed, nearly half goes to writing off bad loans, Mr. Eiden said, and the rest to database service and administrative costs.

Since June 2005, the program has made more than 5,600 payday loans, a negligible dent in Wisconsin’s payday loan business.

Dan and Julie McGrath cannot say whether the program would have helped them. Three years ago they took a $150 payday loan to follow Mrs. McGrath’s daughter to an out-of-area basketball game. Before long they had loans at five payday stores, and some $2,000 a month, about two-thirds of Mr. McGrath’s income, was going to finance charges.

On a recent evening, the couple huddled outside a weathered 22-foot trailer on property owned by Mrs. McGrath’s parents 90 minutes away near the Michigan border. Since the couple lost their house, this has been their home. It has no hot water or working toilet. In moving, they gave up custody of Mrs. McGrath’s teenage children.

Recalling the way the loans had piled up, Mr. McGrath, a 41-year-old maintenance mechanic, said: “We thought, ‘O.K., we can get this one over here and pay off these others.’ But it never works out. I’d need a set of tires for the car: back you go.”

“We sold things out of our home just to eat,” he added.

The McGraths now have the assistance of a credit counselor, who has helped them consolidate their payday debt.

A payday alternative like GoodMoney might have helped, they say. Or it might have just been one more source of debt.

“People need to realize what it can do to you,” Mrs. McGrath said. “This is what it can do to you.”

Economist: Sex, shopping and thinking Pink

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:03:37 GMT

Opinions on this piece...? Comments?

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Evolutionary psychology

Sex, shopping and thinking pink

Aug 23rd 2007
From The Economist print edition

The brains of men and women are, indeed, different

WOMEN really are better than men at shopping. And they really do prefer pink. And, surprisingly, it is possible that these facts are connected. The first conclusion was drawn by Joshua New of Yale University and his colleagues. The second was drawn by Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling of Newcastle University in England. The connecting theme is that in the division of labour that forms the primordial bargain of human hunter-gatherer societies, it is the men who do the hunting and the women who do the gathering.

Blackberry-picking aside, urban humanity does little gathering from the wild these days, so Dr New decided to look at what seemed to him to be the nearest equivalent—shopping at a farmers' market. There is a fair amount of evidence that men are better than women at solving certain sorts of spatial problems, such as remembering the locations of topographical landmarks. Many researchers suggest such skills may have been important in the past for man-the-hunter, who needed to be able to find his way round the landscape. If that is the case, then woman-the-gatherer might have been expected to develop complementary skills not shown by males. And that, as he writes in this week's Proceedings of the Royal Society, is what Dr New found.

Dr New used the market to test two hypotheses. The first was that women remember the locations of food resources more accurately than men do. The second was that the more nutritionally valuable a resource is, the more accurately its location will be remembered.

To prove these conjectures he recruited 41 women and 45 men and led each of them individually on a merry dance around the chosen market. In the course of this peregrination, each participant visited six of the 90 food stalls in the market. At each of those stalls, participants were given a piece of food to eat. They were asked their preference for the taste of the food, how often they ate that food in normal life, how attractive they found the stall and how often they had made purchases from that stall in the past. After visiting all six stalls, they were taken to the centre of the market and asked to point toward those stalls, one at a time, using an arrow on a dial. In addition, they were asked to rate their own sense of direction.

In the pink

On average, women were 9° more accurate than men at pointing to each stall—a significant deviation if you have to walk some distance to get to a place. This was not because those women had more experience of visiting the market than the men had. Nor did the women rate themselves as having a better sense of direction—indeed the men rated their own navigating skills more highly.

Dr New suggests that these results show women are better than men at the particular task of relocating sources of food. That contrasts with the idea that men are better at navigation in general. In other words, women's minds are specialised for their ancestral task of gathering the sort of food that cannot run away.

That such food is in a different mental category from the one occupied by general landmarks was suggested by the answer to the second hypothesis. The higher the calorific value of the food sold by a stall, the more accurately Dr New's volunteers were able to point towards it. And that result applied to both sexes, though women still did better than men.

How much the participants liked the food did not have an effect on this accuracy. Indeed none of the secondary attributes of the food or stall in question (taste preference, the frequency of an item in a volunteer's normal diet, the appearance of the stall and how often a volunteer used that stall in daily life) were found to affect pointing accuracy. Only the calorific value of the item in question was relevant.

For their part Dr Hurlbert and Dr Ling, who report their study in Current Biology, used coloured patches flashing on a computer screen to find the preferences of their set of volunteers. These volunteers were men and women of British and Chinese origin who were in their early 20s.

Mostly, the two researchers found that people of different sexes and from different continents did not differ in their colour preferences. But there was one exception. Among both the British and the Chinese, women preferred reddish hues such as pink to greenish-blue ones. Among men it was the other way round.

Moreover, though anatomical sex is binary, mental “gender” is more pliable. To see how masculine or feminine the brains of their participants were, Dr Hurlbert and Dr Ling used what is known as the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which asks about personality traits more often associated with one sex than the other. This showed that the more feminine a brain was, regardless of the body it inhabited, the more it liked red and pink.

All this suggests a biological, rather than a cultural, explanation for colour preference. And Dr Hurlbert and Dr Ling have produced one. They suggest that their result may be connected with the fact that the colour of many fruits is at the red end of the spectrum. An evolved preference for red, pink and allied shades—particularly in contrast with green—could thus bring advantage to those who gather such things. And if they can also remember which tree (or stall) to go and visit next time, then so much the better.

More reasons why I dislike social networking sites....

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:12:44 GMT

Facebook's plan, if it works, could be potentially powerful for advertisers. While Google's keyword-targeted ads aim at "demand fulfillment" -- that is, they are triggered by Internet searches conducted by people who are actively looking for something that they want -- Facebook's new ad plan could help advertisers address an area called "demand generation." This involves using available information -- not just from a user but also the activities and interests of his "friends" on the site -- to figure out what people might want before they've specifically mentioned it...... However, he says Facebook needs to be careful in implementing any targeted ad system, lest loyal users "find it creepy."

Full WSJ article below
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Facebook Gets Personal
With Ad Targeting Plan

By VAUHINI VARA
August 23, 2007; Page B1

Social-networking Web site Facebook Inc. is quietly working on a new advertising system that would let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves.

Eventually, it hopes to refine the system to allow it to predict what products and services users might be interested in even before they have specifically mentioned an area.

As the industry watches the Palo Alto, Calif., start-up to see if it can translate its popularity into bigger profits, Facebook has made the new ad plan its top priority, say people familiar with the matter. The plan is at an early stage and could change, but the aim is to unveil a basic version of the service late this fall.

A news-feed ad from Facebook's current program

People familiar with the plan say Facebook wants to accomplish what Google Inc. did with AdWords, which lets anyone place ads next to search results by buying "keywords" online. It brought in the majority of the search engine's $10.6 billion in revenue last year. A Facebook spokeswoman acknowledged the company is working on an ad system, but declined to provide details.

Most users of Facebook treat it as a sort of online scrapbook for their lives -- posting everything from basic information about themselves to photos to calendars of events they plan to attend. They create a social network by linking their own Web pages with the pages of other users they consider online "friends." Facebook already uses some information from users' pages in a rudimentary system that allows advertisers to go online, and starting at $10, buy simple "flyers" that run as boxed ads on the left-hand border of Facebook pages. But for targeting, advertisers are limited to age, gender and location of the user.

The new service would let advertisers visit a Web site to choose a much wider array of characteristics for the users who should see their ads -- based not only on age, gender and location, but also on details such as favorite activities and preferred music, people familiar with the matter say. Facebook would use its technology to point the ads to the selected groups of people without exposing their personal information to the advertisers.

These ads would show up differently than the banner ads and boxed flyers that appear on the borders of Facebook pages, say people familiar with the plan. Instead, they would be interspersed with items on the "news feed," which is a running list of short updates on the activities of a user's Facebook friends. In addition, the ads would show up on Facebook pages that feature services provided by other companies, one person says.

Facebook has already had some success in getting users to notice similar ads created in a separate initiative. Under that program, launched last year, advertisers say they typically spend about $150,000 for a three-month campaign that gives them a special page on Facebook, as well as the news-feed ads. But customizing these campaigns can be a costly process for Facebook, which has to dedicate staffers to the efforts.

Facebook hopes allowing advertisers to buy customized ads online will be a less labor-intensive way to take advantage of the personal data people reveal on the site. A key part of this new plan is that Facebook would use an automated system to process transactions instead of requiring advertisers to work with a Facebook representative, people familiar with the plan say.

Next year, Facebook hopes to expand on the service, one person says, using algorithms to learn how receptive a person might be to an ad based on readily available information about activities and interests of not just a user but also his friends -- even if the user hasn't explicitly expressed interest in a given topic. Facebook could then target ads accordingly.

Getting this right is important for Facebook, which was founded in 2004 by then-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and which has become Silicon Valley's latest darling.

While the Web site had roughly 30.6 million visitors in July, the company says it needs to do a better job profiting from its huge user base.

That's because unlike other hot Web start-ups such as MySpace and YouTube, which were acquired by large Web and media concerns, Facebook wants to stay independent and potentially go public. Last year it stepped away from talks with Yahoo Inc. and Viacom Inc. to be acquired for close to $1 billion. The start-up's investors have publicly said they hope to take Facebook public at a valuation approaching $10 billion. That would require the company to generate far more revenues and profits than it currently produces.

Finding a way to use people's interests and personal connections to show them relevant ads has "always been the promise of social networking, but we're still waiting to see the big successes," says Debra Aho Williamson, an online-advertising analyst at New York-based eMarketer Inc.

Facebook is on track for $30 million in profit this year on $150 million in revenue, say people familiar with the matter. About half of that revenue is expected to come through an ad deal with Microsoft Corp. that lets Microsoft sell many of the major display ads on Facebook's U.S. site. The deal will likely bring in $200 million to $300 million for Facebook through 2011, and potentially much more if Facebook's traffic grows rapidly, say people familiar with the matter.

However, advertisers say the addictive quality of social networking means users are so busy reading about their friends that they hardly notice display ads and, even if they do, are loath to navigate away to an advertiser's site. Advertisers say the percentage of people that click on display ads is lower on Facebook, News Corp.'s MySpace and other similar sites than on other popular Web sites like Yahoo Finance and CNET Networks Inc.'s News.com site.

As a result, Facebook has needed to diversify its revenue sources away from just display ads. The new ad plan is being spearheaded by Matt Cohler, vice president of strategy and business operations, and Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of product marketing and operations, with input from CEO Mr. Zuckerberg, say people familiar with the matter.

"It's about saying, 'We are going to take this information because you've acknowledged that you have an interest in X, Y and Z,'" says David Blum, who oversees the interactive division of Sausalito, Calif., ad agency Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners.

But Facebook's new plan faces hurdles. It could upset Microsoft, which is itself trying to build technology to make it easier for advertisers to place targeted ads on Facebook. A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment on this issue.

While Facebook plans to protect its users' privacy and possibly give them an option to keep certain information completely private, some Facebook users might rebel against the use of their personal information for the company's gain.

And the perceptions that targeted ads create can be as much of a problem as the reality. "Most people don't realize how targeting works; it becomes so good that even though it's anonymous, you feel like they know you," says Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Publicis Groupe-owned consulting firm Denuo Group. However, he says Facebook needs to be careful in implementing any targeted ad system, lest loyal users "find it creepy."

-- Kevin J. Delaney contributed to this article

Eight Random Things

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:26:42 GMT

I've been tagged by Billtron to post 8 random things about myself - and then pass the tag on to my some of my other blogging friends....

Here's the skinny:

The rules:
* Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
* People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
* At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
* Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

8 Random Facts/Habits about myself:
1. I love milk and cookies - but my absolute favorite way to eat them is by submerging the cookie into the milk. I don't normally do it in public because people (ahem, dad) have always made fun of me for it .... but if you see me in public with cookies and milk - rest assured I'm dunking them in my head...
2. Laughing is probably my favorite thing to do ... but a close second/third are reading and writing - very anti-social, I know...
3. Probably the funniest book I've read (as an adult) was "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" - a book about grammar (If we are counting childhood books it was probably one of the Wayside books)
4. I wear a small silver cross around my neck because my maternal grandmother gave it to me as a child - and its all I have to remind me of her.
5. One of my biggest regrets in life is that I took honors chemistry in high school instead of taking regular chem. The honors class was nothing more than a glorified study period - marked by the teacher making fun of the students in what can only be described as a a pathetic attempt to relive his own failed childhood. I sometimes think that I would have gone into engineering if I hadn't had such a miserable time with science after that class.
6. Something I've always dreamed of doing but have never done (and probably never will do) is run away.
7. I try to learn as much as I can about the people I care about - I'll ask them all kinds of crazy questions and will try to really pick their brains about things their interested in and especially their work. Sometimes I think people think I'm too serious because I only ask about 'serious' things and will ask them challenging questions - but really I'm just very interested in them and am trying to learn about them/what they do.
8. Nobody's perfect - but I believe that everyone has someone in their life who makes them feel perfect (even if just for a little while)

Tags: (I've cheated a bit and included people who I'm not sure have blogs -- if you don't, feel free to post your 8 random things in the comments to this post)
1. Allen
2. Molli
3. Mithi
4. Mark
5. Nicole
6. Megan
7. Elise
8. Nina

My first print interview....

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:49:42 GMT

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2007-07-30-fed-camp_N.htm

What up dawg?!

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:03:24 GMT

Suggest captions....
(From the BBC's "Day in Pictures")

Something every woman (and man, I guess) should know...

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:35:34 GMT

On Your Feet: High Heels' Effects on the Body

Click to enlarge

My Simpsons Avatar: Xena

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 01:18:09 GMT

Here's the link to make one for yourself.... if you create a log in you can download the pic to a jpeg file.

Public service announcement from Gawker that you should all know about

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 19:42:21 GMT

A must read if you surf the web....

http://gawker.com/news/how-to-blog/things-to-never-google-image-273611.php

Because I like comics

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 15:02:20 GMT

Viral Videos

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:40:30 GMT

Gotta love that Baby Pearl

Whooo hooo! No more math class, for now....

A post-graduate-math-class world...

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:42:17 GMT

So I'm still seriously considering trying that computer sci class this fall... but I'm not sure I can wrap my head around the "average of 12-16 hours of programming and related course work per week"...

is that including or excluding class time....

yikes!

Math class....

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:40:35 GMT

worse than getting hit repeatedly in the head, but almost better than spending ~$4k on something stupid, like, retirement savings....

Didn't they make a kid's movie about this comic?

Thu, 03 May 2007 13:19:50 GMT

What message am I suppose to take a way from this?

Catan reference in a Star Trek macro

Wed, 02 May 2007 22:45:25 GMT

Don't know how I came across this today - (I am really bored right now)...

But for all those super geeks who love Catan (boardgame) (online version) I stumbled across this spoof of Star Trek 'macros' that included a reference to the beloved game....

Anyone else get it...
I'm geeking out over here!

Best beer ad I've seen in a long time ....

Wed, 02 May 2007 19:46:10 GMT

Guy goes through a series of reincarnations while attempting to get his hands on a Tiger Beer....

Enjoy

Public scandal about private matters leads BP cheif to resign

Tue, 01 May 2007 20:40:27 GMT

Read BBC article and Financial Times follow up...

While I agree in principal that the public has the right to know about the misuse of funds by executives of publicly traded companies - it seems to me as if the coverage of this story focused more on Lord Browne's sexuality than actual proof (instead of hearsay) of misconduct. Given the stakes and the focus of media coverage - it seems quite reasonable that he would have lied under oath about the circumstances of how he met his accuser ---- NOTE: they say nothing about him denying the relationship....

Quote from the FT:

Devising privacy laws that do not interfere with the freedom to pursue and publish journalistic investigations into potential wrongdoing is notoriously difficult. But since the British remain unwilling to give up their fascination with the personal lives of the rich and famous it is time to take another look.

Chinese territory protests influx of cheap labor: Anyone else see the irony?

Tue, 01 May 2007 20:34:11 GMT

Reported in the BBC this afternoon:

Rare Macau protest turns violent

A rare political protest in the Chinese territory of Macau turned violent after demonstrators clashed with police.

Hundreds of people had been taking part in a May Day protest over alleged corruption and illegal labour.

Police fired shots into the air and used dogs to try to disperse the marchers, as they veered off the route.

Protesters were complaining about the lack of local jobs due to an influx of cheap foreign labour caused by a recent boom in Macau's lucrative casino trade.

They accuse the government of turning a blind eye to the situation.

Arrests

Some protesters carried signs saying, "Severely punish employers of black market workers", while others called for Macau's political leaders to stand down.

"We are displeased with the labour crisis and the government's lack of action in dealing with it," said Ho Hen Kuok, president of the Macau Labour Union.

"We don't want to see illegal labour being given jobs."

"The government is rich, the casinos are rich, but nobody is looking out for the Macau people," one marcher told the AFP news agency.

The protest turned violent as demonstrators tried to break through the police cordons lining their route.

Protesters surrounded one police vehicle and threw water bottles and placards at officers, who had boosted their lines with water cannons, the AFP reports.

Police also fired shots into the air, but it was not immediately clear if they had used blank or live rounds to disperse the crowds.

There were no reports of injuries, but several protesters were seen being led away by police.

Unlike nearby Hong Kong - another former European colony which was returned to China in the 1990s - such protests in Macau are uncommon.

Macau's population of 500,000 has a history of co-operation with the Beijing government.

The tiny territory has seen a surge in investment in recent years, with foreign gambling firms - mainly from the US - moving in to build new casino resorts.

Macau workers say that a resulting labour shortage in the territory has led many employers to hire cheap illegal labourers from mainland China.