Aug 04-Dec 04
Finland. Estonia. Latvia. Lithuania. Poland. Czech Republic. Slovakia. Hungary. Slovenia. Croatia. Yugoslavia. Romania. Bulgaria...
Jan 05
Turkey.
Feb 05-May 05
Georgia. Azerbaijan. Caspian Sea. Turkmenistan. Uzbekistan... Tajikistan... Afghanistan... Pakistan...
Jun 05
India Himalayas
Jul 05-Aug 05
Nepal... India...
Sep 05 ... 2006
Myanmar... Thailand... Laos... Vietnam... Cambodia... Malaysia... Singapore
"A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts"
Burton Malkiel, author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street
The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German dramatist, novelist, poet, & scientist (1749 - 1832)
Visitors to Blogger's Blogspot.com network have complained that they were exposed to infected sites when they used the "Next Blog" link. [...]I've always hated personal sites that come with music. Not only does it inflate the page load time, you are also subjected to the person's brand of music which could get highly annoying (esp when it is on repeat mode) Hopefully this will actually put people off having music on their sites and thus do the world a whole lot of good.
Visitors to Blogger sites at Blogspot.com say they have been targeted with pop-up ads seeking to deliver malicious code to their computers. One ad erroneously warns people that their computers are vulnerable to spyware and prompts them to click the ad to protect themselves. Clicking the ad launches a download that infects a machine with spyware.
At least one Blogger visitor has charged that his computer was hit by an automatic download that did not require him to click on anything to become infected.
[...] [O]ne major culprit of malicious code was a service called iWebtunes.com, which lets people add music to the Web sites in the form of a couple lines of JavaScript code. Bloggers using Blogspot might embed the iWebtunes code into their template and then pass on the spyware unwittingly to visitors to their site.
iWebtunes will likely get a fee each time it spreads the spyware or it might benefit from the sale of advertising. The bloggers, on the other hand, will get nothing.
I first heard about this (Mr Brown's website: No More Free Straits Times Online). I thought that maybe it's a silly rumor started by somebody and actually emailed ST to find out, only to find to my dismay that it is true.SINGAPORE'S most-read English language news website, The Straits Times Interactive (STI), will no longer be a free-access one.[...] The managing editor of Singapore Press Holdings' English and Malay Newspapers Division Patrick Daniel explains the reason for the change: 'We believe that we have a good and valuable product that users will be prepared to pay for. It's also not a tenable business model to charge for the print edition, and not for the online edition.'
New York Times Digital (which includes Boston.com as well as NYTimes.com) netted an enviable $17.3 million on revenues of $53.1 million during the first half of 2004, the last period for which its financials have been disclosed. All indications are that the digital unit is continuing to grow at 30% to 40% a year, making it NYT Co.'s fastest-revving growth engine.As more people become more comfortable with reading text online and more people shift to reading their papers strictly online, it seems inevitable that newspapers would eventually have to charge to cover the costs of quality journalism.
Advertising accounts for almost all of the digital operation's revenues, but disagreement rages within the company over whether NYTimes.com should emulate The Wall Street Journal and begin charging a subscription fee. Undoubtedly, many of the site's 18 million unique monthly visitors would flee if hit with a $39.95 or even a $9.95 monthly charge. One camp within the NYT Co. argues that such a massive loss of Web traffic would cost the Times dearly in the long run, both by shrinking the audience for its journalism and by depriving it of untold millions in ad revenue. The counterargument is that the Times would more than make up for lost ad dollars by boosting circulation revenue -- both from online fees and new print subscriptions paid for by people who now read for free on the Web. [...]
"It gets to the issue of how comfortable are we training a generation of readers to get quality information for free," he says. "That is troubling."
nautidog (Google)
Nike Rabid Panda (Google)
pic-a-blond (Yahoo)
singapore malay girls social escort (Yahoo)
SUNTAN BEACH PPS (Google)
vanderbilt ymca hostel problem (Yahoo)
Bovinely (Google)
link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.oldwivestales.net%2Farticle1030.html (Yahoo)
link:DdaGRwtJ4foJ:gamehouse.com/ (Google)
Miss Cheongsam Malaysia 2004 (Yahoo)
moochie cooker (Yahoo)
Visitors to the Brawny site will find a section for the tongue-in-cheek "Innocent Escapes" videos in which a strong but sensitive Brawny Man offers compliments like, "By the way, you look beautiful today - something about your eyes."
While I agree with him that high esteem does not get you high achievements, in my case it really does seem that low self-esteem prevented me from achieving what you are really capable of. So perhaps there is a threshold level of esteem one needs to reach your maximum potential though an overdose of esteem creates unrealistic self-expectations and is likely to backfire. Looks like the ancient Chinese got it right when they said moderation is the way to go.Jan 30, 2005
Forget self-esteem, focus on self-control
by Roy F. Baumeister
When I ran my first research study on self-esteem in 1973, [...] [p]sychologists everywhere were convinced that if only we could help people to accept and love themselves more, their problems would gradually vanish and their lives would flourish. They would even treat each other better.[...]
A generation - and many millions of dollars - later, it turns out we may have been mistaken. [After wading through] the enormous amount of published research on the subject, [...] [h]ere are some of our disappointing findings.
High self-esteem in schoolchildren does not produce better grades. (Actually, children with high self-esteem do have slightly better grades in most studies, but that's because getting good grades leads to higher self-esteem, not the other way around.)
[C]ollege students with mediocre grades who received regular self-esteem strokes from their professors ended up doing worse on final exams than students who were told to suck it up and try harder.
Self-esteem doesn't make adults perform better at their jobs either. Sure, people with high self-esteem rate their own performance better - even declaring themselves smarter and more attractive than their low-self-esteem peers - but neither objective tests nor impartial raters can detect any difference in the quality of work.
Likewise, people with high self-esteem think they make better impressions, have stronger friendships and have better romantic lives than other people, but the data doesn't support their self-flattering views.
Self-esteem doesn't predict who will make a good leader, and some work (including that of psychologist Robert Hogan writing in the Harvard Business Review) found humility, rather than self-esteem, to be a key trait of successful leaders.
It was widely believed that low self-esteem could be a cause of violence, but, in reality, violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves.
They turn violent towards others who fail to give them the inflated respect they think they deserve. Nor does high self-esteem deter people from becoming bullies, according to most of the studies that have been done; it is simply untrue that beneath the surface of every obnoxious bully is an unhappy, self-hating child in need of sympathy and praise.
High self-esteem doesn't prevent youngsters from cheating or stealing or experimenting with drugs and sex. (If anything, children with high self-esteem may be more willing to try these things at a young age.)
There were a few areas where higher self-esteem seemed to bring some benefits.
For instance, people with high self-esteem are generally happier and less depressed, though we can't quite prove that high self-esteem prevents depression or causes happiness. Young women with high self-esteem also seem less susceptible to eating disorders.
In some studies (though not all), people with high self-esteem bounce back from misfortune and trauma faster than others. High self-esteem also promotes initiative. People who have it are more likely to speak up in a group, persist in the face of failure, resist other people's advice or pressure and strike up conversations with strangers. [...]
In short, despite the enthusiastic embrace of self-esteem, we found that it conferred only two benefits. It feels good and it supports initiative.
The workplace now has a new sport on V-Day. And size matters in this race to be the object of greatest envy. [...]In the end, it all seems like a silly game. It's practically a competition to see who's bf is a bigger sucker to buy me the most expensive bouquet -- yes the one that will wilt in about a week. Some women were in fact so stressed out by it that they forked out money to purchase bouquets for themselves. I can't deny that it is always nice to receive gifts but when it has evolved to something that women expect their men to do so that they can preserve face, the act, and in fact the day itself , has lost its meaning. Love is not a competition. To view it as such is to cheapen the feelings that you do have.
According to The Times of London women in Britain too love this game of one-upmanship: Whose bouquet is bigger? Whose present is more extravagant? Who is being taken to a more fashionable restaurant?
Like them, many women here view these displays of affection as a barometer of love. Marketing director Ling Tan, 31, is typical. She recalls her disappointment last year waiting and waiting for that bouquet from her boyfriend of nine months.
'My heart would skip a beat every time a dispatch rider walked through the door. I was hoping that since it was our first Valentine's Day, he would do something special, like send flowers to my office.
'But nothing came till I left at 6pm,' she said.
What made it worse, she added, was watching two colleagues become the centre of attention and the memory of previous boyfriends dutifully [can you see my eyes rolling in disgust here?]dispatching bouquets of red roses or white lilies to her office.
Ms Tan, like many, is keeping her fingers crossed that tomorrow, big blooms will arrive at her office. 'Sure, it's shallow but which woman doesn't want to feel like a princess, especially when most around her are getting special treatment.'Yet they persist in their expectation that the men act like gallant knights that they've always dreamt about when they were a wee girl. Perhaps it's about time that these women grow up and instead of of imposing their silly ideals on them, accept their men for who they really are.