How to Make Aluminum Stronger Than Steel

Via Tom's Guide:

This week, HTC is showing us that microarc oxidation process in action. The metal starts off as aircraft 6000 series aluminum, which is then hit with "10,000 volts of energy ... almost like lightning striking the phone." This causes a chemical reaction that creates the ceramic surface on the phone. HTC says the process makes the phone's housing three times stronger than stainless steel and even suggests users won't even need a case. See for yourself:

Utter coolness. If it has a good battery, it will be very hard to even consider looking at other mobile phones, but that's more a function of Koomey's Law....

Business Ideas : Small crocheted items

Business Description: Crocheted items are handmade products using crochet hook and different types and colors of thread. Such business can be easily made at home by investing a very small sum of money. It is also important that the objects made be small, because in order for large items to reach profitable selling prices there are relative big costs of materials (threads).

                  Small crocheted products that can be achieved include: small toys, pins, rings, bracelets, crocheted figurines, key rings, phone covers for, covers for cups or cans, various personal items, etc.
                  In the activity there can be made and crocheted items for celebration themes, for example Christmas (mini Santa Claus, mini trees crocheted, etc.), Easter (rabbits, eggs crocheted, etc.), Valentines and March (heart, amulets, crochet flowers, crocheted gifts, etc.)
                  The manufacturing process could be done at home, and marketing can be done online through a blog/ website/ online shop or offline at stands or stores that are part of this niche.

                  For experts in the art of crocheting can be made very small original figurines:

Here are some examples:

Pros: - very small investment
                - Work can be performed at home
                -It can be a various craft activity that will bring substantial additional income
                - If you opt for online trading, orders can be fulfilled easily through courier companies or the Post Office.
                - You can make a variety of products for different age categories (from toys to mobile phone covers and earrings)
Cons: - requires knowledge in the field or willingness to learn the craft
What You Need: - knowledge and skills in crocheting
                             - Purchase costs of materials and necessary tools
                             - Patience
                            - Making site / blog / free online store for selling products
                           - Promoting the products (online website promotion - offline, by providing price and  a product catalog)

Conclusions: Once you have gained a certain dexterity, this hobby can become a business that will bring significant revenues, with little effort in your spare time and an almost zero financial investment.

Business Ideas : Dried Fruit

Business Description: Dried fruits are fresh fruit that are dried in order to be stored more easily. In history, many civilizations used the method of drying fruit in order to benefit from the quality of fruit in winter. This method is more effective than freezing fruit, for frozen fruits lose their vitamins. Drying fruit was made only in the sun for periods of 1-2 weeks, but today drying/ dried fruits can be done much faster using professional fruit dryers.

Because these devices, can now be found in stores, many kinds of fruits can be dried, among which we mention: bananas, apples, kiwi, apricots, blackberries, peaches, cranberries, blueberries, grapes, plums, and more others. Dried fruits are very healthy, some of them even indicated to treat certain diseases, such as heart disease, anemia, lack of energy, circulation, cholesterol.
                 Drying/ dried fruits can be done with machines through dehydration. These devices must be professional, as small appliances only get a very low productivity. A professional appliance for drying fruit costs between 1800-2000 Euros/ 1200 - 1500 dollars. We know that prices in stores are very high for dried fruits; such investment in the acquisition of professional drying device can achieve a great revenue.
                 Dried fruit can be sold in 100 g packs or bulk, and customers can be greengrocers or supermarkets.
             
Pros: - dried fruits are sold at very high prices
                - the product can be preserved for a long time

                - the use of drying apparatus is simple
                - Dried fruits are very healthy products
                - Initially invest small amounts
                - Return on investment is fast
                
Cons: - If there is quality in the investment, this business has no disadvantages
What You Need: - cost of investment in machine drying / dehydration of fruits
                             - Costs of buying fruit to be dried
                             - Deals with grocery, intermediaries.
                             - Promoting the price offers for shops
Conclusion: This business can start off with little money and can make significant profits, in addition to offering customers a healthy product.

Business Ideas : Greenhouse

Description: Greenhouses are built on 3 to 15 square meters patches of land. These small buildings contribute to improving the appearance of a garden and in addition they are very decorative, so they can be used for intensive vegetable or decorative plant growing. The activity consists in building a greenhouse on a concrete slab foundation; the types of materials used are aluminum (for staff resistance) and glass or polycarbonate for the glass parts.

There are many discussions on the advantages and disadvantages of using glass or polycarbonate, both having distinct features. For example, glass provides a higher degree of transparency, polycarbonate instead provides better insulation because  of the air cushions. Sunny periods force a strong glass to be coated for shading, while polycarbonate offers exactly the light and shade needed. Both for glass and polycarbonate assemblies the aluminum frames are coated using silicon. It is important that these greenhouses be fitted on the door with windows to allow optimum ventilation. The size of the hobby greenhouses is approximately 2 m in height and the roof slope is 30 degrees. Besides greenhouses, you can sell various accessories, such as media for plant growth spiral, heaters of various capacities, thermometers, automatic irrigation systems, different types of shelves, racks, etc.

        An example of construction and several models:

Pros: - The garden is particularly effective
          - Easy to install, if it works well after a sketch is made
                -
Cons: - work / editing / cutting / joining materials for construction can be done only outdoors, you will need a workstation.
         - Lack of knowledge / experience in the technical product is almost impossible without hiring / working with a specialist.
What You Need: - studying existing greenhouses
                             - Making drawings / plans and calculating the materials required
                             - Cost of acquiring the necessary materials
                             - Study the most effective, both as resistance and economical efficiency, the best combination of teaching methods
                             - Site of presentation, promotion and taking orders
                             - Promote the product online: business cards, flyers, placement of the price offers, trips and discussions in specialized stores.

Conclusion: These greenhouses can offer your customers a more stylish green space around the house, but also a way of growing vegetables and farming for amateurs.

Excellence Requires Persistence of Purpose.

This is timely encouragement for somebody. Don't be discouraged if you aren't "there" yet! It's a process. You have to get with it an STAY WITH IT in the most important areas of your vision. You can't get there overnight. You just can't. Don't let people, the enemy or your frustrations lie to you. It's a process, but you have to stick with it. Excellence takes time to be developed in you.

I've written before about the 10,000 Hour Rule. I believe it more than ever after seeing the results in my own life and in the lives of others around me.

Excellence WILL BE DEVELOPED in you, if you stick with your vision. It takes time. Don't get off track! Please hear me. Don't get off track!! Your enemy wants you to stop before you make it. Some of you, he can discourage early. Some of you it takes longer. He doesn't care so long as he succeeds in getting you off the path. Doesn't matter if it happens early or later, if you quit early, he wins and YOU LOSE!!! And so do the rest of us who are waiting patiently for you to come into your place of excellence.

Keep going!!!

Please leave me your comments so I know how to serve you better!! If this was helpful, forward it to a friend. Talk to you soon! Please subscribe and visit me on my Live BIG! Die Empty. Facebook page!!

Spring 2012 Edition: Who Really Owns the U.S. National Debt?

The U.S. Treasury has revised its data indicating which nation's institutions through the end of the U.S. government's 2011 Fiscal Year, which ended on 30 September 2011. With that revision, we've updated our chart revealing who the biggest holders of all the U.S. government's public debt outstanding were as of 30 September 2011:

Compared to the preliminary version of this chart, we see a large decrease in debt appearing to be held by the United Kingdom, but large increases in debt actually held by other foreign entities. This is due to the role of financial institutions in the U.K. acting as international intermediaries for the interests of other foreign entities. The Treasury Department's annual revision of this data accounts for the actual foreign ownership of U.S. government-issued debt.

We note that some $1,773 billion of the U.S. government-issued debt we've recorded as being held by U.S. individuals and institutions as of 30 September 2011 was held by the U.S. Federal Reserve.

The U.S. Federal Reserve then accounts for 28% of all the debt held by U.S. individuals and institutions and works out to be nearly 12% of all the nation's public debt outstanding, as the Federal Reserve increased its U.S. debt holdings by $807 billion during the U.S. governments 2011 fiscal year.

Combined, the U.S. government-issued debt holdings of foreign individuals and institutions account for just shy of one-third of all the U.S. government's public debt outstanding.

Previously on Political Calculations

Who Owns the U.S. National Debt To Whom Does the U.S. Government Really Owe Money? Summer Update: To Whom Does the U.S. Really Owe Money Winter 2011 Edition: Who Owns the U.S. National Debt? Spring 2012 Edition: Who Really Owns the U.S. National Debt?

Data Sources:

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Monthly Report on Credit and Liquidity Programs and the Balance Sheet, October 2011. Table 1. Assets, liabilities, and capital of the Federal Reserve System.

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Monthly Report on Credit and Liquidity Programs and the Balance Sheet, October 2010. Table 1. Assets, liabilities, and capital of the Federal Reserve System.

U.S. Treasury Department. Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities. Accessed 24 March 2012.

U.S. Treasury Department. Monthly Statement of the Public Debt of the United States, September 30, 2011. Table III – Detail of Treasury Securities Outstanding, September 30, 2011.

The Next Scary Hockey Stick Chart

If Michael Mann's infamous hockey stick graph should be taken seriously as evidence that human activity is causing global climate change that must be stopped, or else it will trigger positive feedback effects that will result in a catastrophe that will ruin the lives of millions of people, what then are we to make of the following chart showing how the U.S. federal government is running up its own debt for the sake of loaning out money to college students?

Here, we find that the federal government has sharply increased the amount of money it borrows for the sake of loaning it right back out to college students since 2008. Beginning in 2009, the net increase in those borrowings account for 2.9% of the entire increase in the U.S. national debt observed since 2008. That amount is above and beyond the amount directly added to the nation's total public debt outstanding by the federal government's annual budget deficits.

In this case, the disaster that would directly affect the lives of millions of people means being forced at the direction of government bureaucrats into a dramatically lower standard of living for the sake of being able to make the payments on their student loans to the U.S. federal government, without any real hope of being able to discharge that debt through bankruptcy.

That, in turn, has the real potential to indirectly hurt millions of other people, because student loan payments are rising at the rapid pace supported by the government-subsidized cost of tuition, even though college graduates are entering into jobs that pay far below what is required to both live well and to support their super-sized student loan debt.

It is quite possible then that we have reached a point where higher education hurts the economic growth of the nation, rather than helps it:

Student loans could be the next asset class to school the United States about poor debt management. Graduates are now forking over more of their disposable income in repayments than 10 years ago, defaults are rising and with Uncle Sam now directly holding $450 billion of student debt, taxpayers are on the hook again. That could put U.S. higher education in the embarrassing position of hindering, rather than helping to fuel, economic growth.

Here's how: first, the size of the student loan market has mushroomed. Bachelor-degree debt at graduation has grown 250 percent over the past decade, according to finaid.org. At $867 billion, it exceeds both credit-card and auto debt in the United States, according to a study by the New York Federal Reserve. If this trend continues, by 2021 it'll be equivalent to 1.3 percent of GDP, triple its current level, assuming GDP cleaves to its 4.5 percent 15-year average nominal growth.

Next, average payments have risen by 83 percent over the past decade while median income for those aged 25 to 34 has increased by just a fifth, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That leaves less money for graduates to spend or save. Extrapolate ahead 10 years, and former students will be paying $125 billion extra a year. By then, that would equate to two-thirds of a percentage point of GDP.

We wonder how the higher education bubble and federal budget crisis deniers will react to this hockey stick chart....

Data Sources

U.S. Treasury. Monthly Statement of the Public Debt of the United States, September 30, 2011.

U.S. Treasury. Monthly Statement of the Public Debt of the United States, September 30, 2008.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2010 through September 30, 2011, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2010 through September 30, 2010, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2009 through September 30, 2009, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2008 through September 30, 2008, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2007 through September 30, 2007, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2006 through September 30, 2006, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2005 through September 30, 2005, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2004 through September 30, 2004, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2003 through September 30, 2003, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2002 through September 30, 2002, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2001 through September 30, 2001, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2000 through September 30, 2000, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 1999 through September 30, 1999, and Other Periods.

U.S. Treasury. Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 1998 through September 30, 1998, and Other Periods.

The Internet: Somebody Here Is Wrong....

Carpe Diem's Mark Perry has been highlighting positive signs of economic recovery and expansion in the U.S. economy, including some indications that some the regions where the U.S. housing market has fallen the most may finally be bottoming out. Here, he points to a Wall Street Journal article that looks at the housing market of Phoenix, Arizona:

As home prices continue to drop in most cities, a nascent real-estate rebound here holds lessons for the rest of the country. This sprawling desert metropolis was one of the hardest hit housing markets during the bust. Phoenix home prices declined 55% from 2006 through the end of 2011, and Arizona's foreclosure rate jumped to No. 3 in the nation in 2009. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners are underwater, meaning they owe more than their homes are worth.

Now real-estate economists across the country are studying an early but surprisingly broad Phoenix turnaround. The sharp drop in home prices has brought new buyers into the market. Unlike other markets where housing recoveries have been snuffed out by big overhangs of homes for sale and foreclosed properties, inventories are lean here.

Phoenix has hit a bottom," says Thomas Lawler, an independent housing economist who was one of the first to warn six years ago that prices in overbuilt metros were poised to fall.

BloodhoundBlog's Greg Swann is a real-life real estate professional in the Phoenix metropolitan area market. Surprisingly, he has a very different perspective on the state of that housing market:

Don't you love reading all that good news about the the Phoenix real estate market's recovery? Guess what? You're being lied to — as always.

This is what's really happening: FannieMae and FreddieMac are holding foreclosed houses off the market, in anticipation of "selling" them to campaign donors.

Meanwhile, the town is being picked clean, with prices being bid up by buyers convinced that houses are going out of style — a story we've heard before, yes?

As an example, my BargainBot search, which is shared with hundreds of investors all over the world, is at less than 5% of it's peak. A search I use to select premium rental homes produces one listing this morning, where it stood at 45 homes in April of 2011.

If Fannie and Freddie "sell" the homes they own to politically-connected "investors," the rental market in Phoenix will be slaughtered.

And if they release the homes they have been hoarding into the MLS, Phoenix will hit a third bottom before the market can finally recover.

You can call the news media idiots or you can call them liars. But any news from any official source about Phoenix real estate is dangerously misleading.

While we know that Greg's typing "it's peak" will specifically annoy Mark on grammatical grounds, if we go past the post into the comments, he provides more observations that would seem to support his claim:

> I know of REO real estate agent/teams who are starving for transactions now, another proof of shadow inventory.

I started to see the demand-side shortage in April of last year, which is why I noted the numbers from then. We can track that Fannie/Freddie withholding starting in July of 2011, a huge drop-off in the number of homes released into the MLS. If you look at what they’ve dribbled out since then, it’s clear they’re cherry-picking.

He also provided the following data to back his observation that both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are restricting the supply of housing in the Phoenix market:

This chart

shows month-by-month releases of lender-owned homes into the MLS from January 2010 to January 2012. This is our Market-Basket search, a subset of the market at large, but that search looks at precisely those bread-and-butter homes that matter most to us: Single-story stucco-and-tile 3-bedroom homes built since 1998. We can’t isolate reliably by owner in an MLS search, but the missing sellers are FannieMae and FreddieMac. They’re hoarding houses, and the artificial shortage they have created is what accounts for the current alleged “recovery.”

But then, another Phoenix area real estate professional, Elizabeth Evans, did her own back-of-the-envelope calculations and found that the apparently restricted supply of lender-owned housing may not be that big of a factor in the Phoenix market:

Fannie and Freddie have around 200,000 properties in their collective inventory. I can’t immediately find how many are in Arizona, so I will make a generous guesstimate. According to a March 1 article on Housing Wire, at the end of 2011 more than 23 percent of the Fannie Mae inventory was in California and the state with the second highest Fannie Mae inventory was Florida at 11.5 percent. There is no way the Arizona inventory could approach that of these two states, but let’s assume a worst case scenario of 8 percent of the GSE inventory situated in Arizona, or 16,000 properties. Some of these properties are located in other parts of Arizona, but let’s assume 75 percent of them, or 12,000 are located in the Greater Phoenix market.

Some of these properties are not fit for occupancy, have residual title issues, or are otherwise unsaleable. Knock off 10 percent as unsaleable, and you are left with 10,800 properties. Not even the most efficient private sector company could do the paperwork amd fix up necessary to get 10,800 properties on the market at once, so let’s give the GSE’s a year to process and list all 10,800 properties in their existing inventory. That’s, ummmm, 900 properties a month.

As of this morning, there are around 9,300 single family homes in Maricopa County and 11,400 in the entire MLS system listed as active. Even if 75 percent of the 900 monthly new listings by the GSE’s, or 675, are single family residences, they aren’t exactly going to dilute the inventory or significantly impact the imbalance of supply and demand.

Last year, Fannie took back around 200,000 homes. I can’t quickly find how many Freddie acquired, but let’s assume these highly efficient agencies could process and sell another 200,000 properties in the same year. That means another 675 single family houses for a total of 1,350 a month that will go on the market. Dilutive? A little, but in an improving economy, I’m pretty sure these properties would be absorbed without a huge impact on price.

If this guesstimate is anywhere near accurate, it proves how unnecessary the bulk sale program is in Arizona. The existing and pipeline inventory could be absorbed with minimum impact on or disruption of the market. This process is called an orderly liquidation. Orderly liquidation realizes the highest price for assets of an entity that must liquidate, exactly what the GSE’s need to accomplish.

The bottom line is that one of these people here on the Internet is wrong. We just don't know which one. The only certainty we have is that Mark Perry will be also be very specifically annoyed by Elizabeth Evans typing of "exactly what the GSE's need to accomplish"....

Image Credit: xkcd

What President Obama Believes Will Happen With Iran

On Friday, 23 March 2012, President Obama stated that tension with Iran was adding $20-$30 to oil prices:

"The key thing that is driving higher gas prices is actually the world's oil markets and uncertainty about what's going on in Iran and the Middle East, and that's adding a $20 or $30 premium to oil prices," Obama said in an interview with the American Automobile Association (AAA) published Friday.

So just how much tension is the world pricing in to each barrel of oil?

One way to find out is to estimate how much the world's oil supplies might be disrupted if tensions escalate. To do that, we've re-engineered the math from one of our recent tools so that we can find out how much oil would need to be either added or removed from world production in order to change the price of a barrel of oil by the amount that President Obama, or you, might enter.

Most of the other oil-related default data in the tool applies to the most recent figures we have from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which at this writing, applies to 2010, and which we'll assume is similar to today's production figures. If you have more current data, enter it (the same applies for the values of the supply and demand elasticities for oil....)

Since the tensions to which President Obama refers would primarily affect the supply of oil originating from Iran and the Middle East, the price of a barrel of oil should be that recorded for Dubai crude, which would be the benchmark for the region.

Got all that? Great! Let's do some math!...

Oil Production and Economic Data
Input Data	Values
Daily Oil Production Data
"Premium" in Today's Oil Price (per Barrel)
Current Oil Price (per Barrel)
Demand Elasticity
Supply Elasticity

Estimated Price Change
Calculated Results	Values
Estimated Change in the Supply of Oil [barrels]

For tensions with Iran or within the Middle East to add $20 to the price of a barrel of oil, that would suggest that the world's oil markets are expecting that the world's supply may be reduced by 5,574,855 barrels per day as a result of those tensions. If $30 has been added to the price of a barrel of oil, that would mean that the world expects the world's supply of oil to be reduced by 9,332,835 barrels per day.

Using that latter figure, since Iran itself would account for 4,252,000 barrels of daily production, or 45.6% of the potential reduction in world oil supplies, that lower quantity suggests that President Obama believes that the tensions to which he refers are so great that they will negatively affect the supply of oil from additional nations in the region.

Looking around the Persian Gulf, which would the the likely focus of such tensions, we find that the nations of the United Arab Emirates (2,813,000 barrels), Kuwait (2,450,000 barrels), Qatar (1,437,000 barrels) and Oman (867,900 barrels) would be the most affected, as these nations transport their oil by sea to world markets through the Strait of Hormuz. Combined with Iran, that would put the supply of 11,819,900 barrels of oil per day to the world's markets at potential risk of being cut off.

The 9,332,835 barrels per day figure suggested by our back-of-the-envelope calculations is 79% of that value. One way to interpret this value is that the world's markets believe that the 11,819,900 barrels of oil output per day may indeed be affected, but they are currently factoring in a 79% chance that will actually happen.

It could also mean that the world's markets are factoring in 100% odds that these oil supplies will be disrupted, but that a portion of the oil produced in these nations may reach world markets through other supply outlets other than through the Strait of Hormuz, such as through land-based pipelines.

Regardless, it appears that a likely conflict involving Iran that cuts off that much oil through the chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz would seem to account for the President's belief that as much as 30 U.S. dollars is currently being added as a "premium" to world oil prices. He's certainly factoring in quite a lot of supply disruption to arrive at that figure.

Dogme in the BE Classroom. Really?

Returning from Glasgow I realized that the conversations I had in the corridors and over dinner were truly eye-opening and the real take away from the conference.  Definitely, the presentations were good and insightful, but the chance to speak with the most experienced and talented trainers in the industry has caused more reflection.

Of course, one of the issues on my mind was the Dogme trend in ELT.  It has appeared so often in blogs and online discussions, it is difficult to miss.  As a Business English Trainer, I am fascinated by the approach and how it could be implemented in the classroom.  My goal in this post to share my persecptions on Dogme and offer some solutions for how we can incorporate the best parts into our training.

I have had several problems with what I have read, even pinning down what exactly it is.  In my reading I have boiled it down to several what it is and what it isn't (but I could be wrong):

IS...

• Extremly learner-centered.  Trainers should remove many (if not all) external materials and resources from the classroom which impose ideas, emotions, roles, and pre-formed learning paths.  As drivers of the content, the participants create the class and lessons through collaboration with the trainer and each other.
• Focused on binding language to pre-existing concepts within the learner.  Through the self-expression created in the Dogme classroom, the students are more receptive to language input which helps to refine, clarify, and give meaning to their ideas.  Thus, the theory is that students will learn faster because we are not asking them to communicate through a pre-determined language structure, rather giving language to the communication goal.
• Flexible.  Because learner self-expression is unpredictable, trainers must remain flexible to harness, highlight, and build upon emerging language.  Formal materials limit this flexibility.
• Focused on emerging language.  Emerging language could be expressed language forms which should be spread across the class or could be when the expressed meaning is clear, but a language gap impairs clear transmission.  One example of the second case is when students are faced with trying to express regret without knowing past modal verb forms.  Even a quite fluent learner will hesitate, realize they don't know how to express it, try to translate it from L1, and find the best possible work-around.  It is the trainer's job to afford these opportunities, recognize them, and fill these gaps with a lasting learning point.

IS NOT...

• Superfulous conversation.  Goals do exists and it is the trainer's duty to guide topics and discussions which will lead to these objectives.  A focus on progress is built into every lesson, and learning points should be recycled to reinforce learning and demonstrate improved performance.  To this point, a lesson log is crucial for the trainer to record and prepare for the next lesson.  Otherwise, training points could easily be lost and forgotten.
• All touchy feely.  While yes it is based on self-expression and interaction within the student group, it is not a group of people coming together and talking about their feelings and emotions.  That can happen, but it isn't Oprah's book club.  Learners are expected to learn and teachers are expected to teach (or rather facilitate learning).
• Materials and technology free.  From my reading it seems that these two items are both welcome in the classroom, but we should be very selective about why they are included.  Do they afford and reinforce the process of self-reflection and communication?  Do they enable the learners to express what they want and need to express?  Or are we simply bringing in a listening because it is the next step in our off-the-shelf learning plan?

Now, I have several problems with this approach in the BE classroom.  And honestly, if done correctly, I feel task-based activities may be better suited to the needs of our learners.  But I think many of the elements of Dogme are already present in some BE classrooms.  First, our clients expect a personalized training plan.  They also expect us to help them refine what they are already using in their job.  In fact, I think it is difficult as a BE Trainer in the one-to-one or small group setting to ignore the Dogme approach.

But here are the challenges I see for Dogme...

1. The Messi Analogy  There are many outstanding footballers, but there is only one Messi.  He seems to be able to do things on the field which defy explanation.  He can see moves before they are made, he is unbeliably quick, always calm, and gives every motion a flurish of creativity.  I tend to think that in order to pull off Dogme and make it effective, a trainer would have to be as talented as Messi.  The trainer would have to have the experience to see the dialog before it happens, guide this discourse through the students themselves, recoginze the emerging language and then have the supreme flexibility and creativity to set an activity to utilize the training point.  Wow.
2. Too many levels of listening  As a trainer, I am quite adept at listening to my students at various levels.  What are they saying (content)?  How are they saying it (accuracy)?  What are they not saying (language gap)?  What emergent language are they using?  I know I can do all four levels of listening sometimes, but I have to be 100% in the moment.  Of course, I cannot be 'on' in every minute of every lesson .  The risk of Dogme is that if I drop one of these levels of listening because I am distracted, tired, or unmotivated, the progress aspect of the lesson deteriorates.
3. It can't be taught  I am not sure how new trainers could learn such flexibility and language awareness.  I have digested massive amounts of activities ideas, approaches, tasks, and language features in my first three years of training.  I dove into the field with passion and enthusiasm.  I am still far from having the flexibility needed to make it work.  I am not sure how this could be taught in a course less than 6 months.
4. How to create affordances which replicate BE situations?  I am struggling with the idea of creating a environment in which we can really practice the skills needed in the learners' jobs.  One of the benefits of TBL is that we can model what right looks like and work from there.  In Dogme, we are working together to develop a suitable task situation.  In some BE classrooms the desire to improve their job performance is less motivating than other factors.  I could see conflict here between the Dogme approach and what companies expect from the training.

So, these are the challenges I see.  I think they can be overcome.  For example, I think we can train the different levels of listening by using authentic learner discussions in the trainer development setting.  I think the internet provides a great opportunity for us to develop the flexibility to respond to emergent language.

Also, I think the approach is perfectly suited to BE, specifically in-company courses in which we are faced with the challenge of adapting training to meet a variety of specific needs.  And I would like to think that many of us in BE are using this approach well, particularly in coaching.  Therefore, we should add it to our training toolbox, but understand that until it is more-fully developed it has a certain place and certain time.


Dogme Resources:

Scott Thornbury http://www.thornburyscott.com/  check out his articles under "Works"
His blog http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/

Blog from Emi Slater, Phil Wade, and Dale Coulter http://languagemoments.wordpress.com/

Outstanding paper from Martin Sketchley "Incorporating Dogme ELT in the Classroom"  http://www.scribd.com/doc/85100701/Incorporating-Dogme-ELT-in-the-Classroom-Handout-Version

Teaching Unpluggled co-author Luke Meddings http://lukemeddings.posterous.com/

Chia Suan Chong, a highly skilled and innovative Dogmetician http://chiasuanchong.wordpress.com/

Will Your Favorite Celebrity Couple Stay Together?

Five years ago, Garth Sundem and John Tierney worked together to come up with a mathematical formula to predict which celebrity couples were doomed to split apart.

Five years later, that original equation did an okay, but not great job in predicting which celebrity couples would survive the next five years.

So Sundem and Tierney returned to the drawing board to take advantage of the new data the world had accumulated about the success of celebrity relationships over the previous five years, and have now come up with a new and improved mathematical formula that seems to work better, at least if the backtested results are any indication.

Here's what changed in their own words:

While the 2006 equation did a good job over all of identifying which couples were most likely to divorce, some of the specific predictions proved too pessimistic. Because Demi was so famous — and much more famous than Ashton — we gave their marriage little chance of surviving a year, but they didn't split until 2011. We were similarly bearish on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes (because of his fame, his two failed marriages and their age gap), but they're still together.

What went right with them — and wrong with our equation? Garth, a self-professed über-geek, has crunched the numbers and discovered a better way to gauge the toxic effects of celebrity. Whereas the old equation measured fame by counting the millions of Google hits, the new equation uses a ratio of two other measures: the number of mentions in The Times divided by mentions in The National Enquirer.

"This is a major improvement in the equation," Garth says.

"It turns out that overall fame doesn't matter as much as the flavor of the fame. It's tabloid fame that dooms you. Sure, Katie Holmes had about 160 Enquirer hits, but she had more than twice as many NYT hits. A high NYT/ENQ ratio also explains why Chelsea Clinton and Kate Middleton have better chances than the Kardashian sisters."

More on the Kardashians later. For now, here's our newest tool, which is based on Sundem and Tierney's new and improved formula for predicting which celebrities are riding on the relationship Titanic.

Celebrity Relationship Factors
Input Data	Values
"Good" Fame: Number of search results since 1990 in New York Times archives
"Bad" Fame: Number of search results since 1990 in National Enquirer archives
Husband's Age
Wife's Age
Overexposure: Number of scantily-clad photos among the top five photos returned in a Google image search for the wife's name
Dating: Number of months the celebrity couple dated before getting married
Time: Years after getting married for which to calculate the percentage odds that the couple will still be married.

Odds of Celebrity Marriage Survival
Calculated Results	Values
"Good" to "Bad" Fame Ratio
Percentage Chance of Still Being Married After Entered Number of Years

Tierney describes how these factors can influence the outcome of the new formula:

Garth's new analysis shows that it's the wife's fame that really matters. While the husband's NYT/ENQ ratio is mildly predictive, the effect is so much weaker than the wife's that it's not included in the new equation. Nor are some variables from the old equation, like the number of previous marriages and the age gap between husband and wife.

In the fine tradition of Occam's razor, the new equation has fewer variables than the old one. Besides the wife's tabloid fame, the crucial ones are the spouses' combined age (younger couples divorce sooner), the length of the courtship (quicker to wed, quicker to split), and the sex-symbol factor (defined formally as the number of Google hits showing the wife "in clothing designed to elicit libidinous intent").

Now, back to the Kardashians. The default data in the tool above apply to the celebrity coupling of Khloe Kardashian and Lamar Odom, with the results using this default data indicating the probability that the couple will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

And from here, we'll let Garth Sundem describe the results:

"I've calculated the chance of Khloe Kardashian and Lamar Odom celebrating their golden anniversary," he says, "Even when I extend it to 15 decimal places, the probability is still zero."

To be fair, if any of the Kardashians could celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary, it probably would be Khloe. She'll just have to beat some very steep odds to do it though....

The Failure of Pigou's Taxes

Once upon a time, economist Arthur C. Pigou proposed that by imposing taxes upon things that might create excess social costs, those costs could be reduced.

Called a "Pigovian Tax", a classic example of this kind of tax in action would be the special excise taxes that many states impose upon tobacco products, where the excess social costs might be the increased spending for health care to deal with smoking-related ailments.

Here, if Pigou's taxes really work, we should see the consumption of tobacco products fall as the taxes imposed on them are raised substantially enough to affect the purchasing decisions of those who might consume them.

Let's use the state of Hawaii as a case study here, because Hawaii has been greatly increasing their taxes on tobacco products over the last several years. Here, the typical excise tax imposed by the upon a pack of cigarettes has increased from $1.00 in 2000 to $3.20 per pack in 2011, with 60% of that increase having taken place since 2008. During that same time, the federal excise tax on tobacco has increased from $0.34 per pack to $1.01 per pack, and the typical retail price of a pack of cigarettes in Hawaii has risen from $4.05 in 2000 to $9.27 in 2011.

But unlike every other state in the U.S., Hawaiians can't just jump in their cars and make a quick run for the border for the sake of buying bootleg tobacco products to avoid their state's very high tobacco taxes, which has risen to now rank fourth in the nation, behind only New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

That means that if Pigovian taxes can really work to significantly reduce the consumption of tobacco products anywhere, they're going to work in the islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that make up the state of Hawaii.

We've tapped the state's most recently issued report on its tax revenue collections from its excise tax on tobacco products for each of its fiscal years from 2000 through 2011. We then used that data, along with the state's tax on each 20-count pack of cigarettes, to calculate the equivalent quantity of packs of cigarettes consumed in the state for each of those years.

Our chart below reveals what we found:

Here, we see that the consumption of tobacco products actually rose in every year from 2000 through 2005, before beginning to fall in the years from 2005 through 2009.

But we see that 2009 really marked a bottom in consumption - the consumption of tobacco products has bounced back in 2010 from that low point and has held steady 2011, despite the state continuing to increase its taxes on tobacco products in each of those years.

What this data indicates is that whatever benefits that Pigovian taxes might be able to provide have diminishing returns. Past a certain point, they will fail to achieve their objectives of meaningfully reducing the excess social costs for the ails they are meant to fix. Instead, these kinds of taxes would appear to simply become a vehicle by which politicians may raise tax revenue by imposing a discriminatory tax policy aimed at an "undesirable" minority.

This outcome is quite different from what we anticipated might happen when we last looked at Hawaii's taxes on tobacco. We're definitely surprised.

References

State of Hawaii. Department of the Attorney General. Report on the Tobacco Enforcement Special Fund. Fiscal Year 2010-2011. [PDF document]. 9 January 2012.

The Effect of Apple's Dividend Announcement on the Future

One day later, and we're still blown away by the effect of Apple's dividend announcement upon stock prices.

Here's why. This is the only time we've ever observed stock prices leading a change in expected future dividend payments since we began regularly tracking dividend futures in December 2008!

Most often, we either see changes in the expected future for dividends lead changes in stock prices, or alternatively, stock prices reacting to the effect of noise events that are of limited duration - with the most significant one being the reaction of stock prices to the Federal Reserve's first quantitative easing program.

But this marks the first time in the years we've been watching dividend futures that the metaphorical cart actually led the horse!

To mark the occasion, we've animated the "before" and "after" view of the future for both stock prices and dividends per share for the S&P 500 as it relates to Apple's 19 March 2012 dividend announcement. (Click the links above for larger, clearer versions of the image frames.)

Here, we can see why investors would seem to have been focused on the expected dividend futures connected to the third quarter of 2012 in setting stock prices - with Apple's first dividend since 1995 to be paid out in July 2012, that event falls in the period covered by the dividend futures contracts for 2012-Q3.

In the absence of noise, the change in the expected growth rate of stock prices will closely pace the signal given by the change in the expected growth rate of dividends per share. In the "before" frame of the animated chart, we see that the average of stock prices recorded throughout March 2012 to date would seem to be inflated above that value.

But in the "after" frame of the animated chart, we can see that it is really closing in on where the S&P 500's expected change in the growth rate of dividends per share for the third quarter of 2012 would put them.

To put that another way, investors are setting stock prices "rationally"!

The Dark Cloud on the Horizon?

Here's another view of the change in expected future dividends per share:

Do note the comment on the right half side of the chart. We've just witnessed Item #1 with Apple's announcement. With this change now behind us, Item #2 now becomes the likely driver of major changes in stock prices.

The only questions left are "which future will investors select?" and "when will they select it?" Our animated chart shows two possibilities for "which future", but doesn't have anything to say about the answer to the second question....

Yes, we already know which future, and also have a pretty good idea of when, but we no longer publicly offer such predictions....

IATEFL Glasgow Conference Notebook - Day 1 (Part 1)

The day started out extremely well.  I aslept in, had breakfast in the hotel, then went back to sleep for a bit while watching BBC 4.  I am quite sure that the BBC channel I chose to watch says something about my character, but I don't know what.  I am also sure that my falling back to sleep also says something.

In any case, I missed Adrian Underhill's plenary session.  However, judging by the reaction on Twitter and the audience size, summaries of his talk are probably fairly easy to track down.

So after relaxing I hit the conference in full force, attending each session.  I will not be able to deal with all of the talks I attended today, but I hope to get to them all soon.

1.  Global Business Etiquette 101 by Nikolina Korecic

Ms. Korecic, a business English trainer in Croatia, advocated cultural training as part of the BE classroom and suggested several methods to do so.  Perhaps her most effective method was a discussion activity in which the participants give their culture a color and then explain why.  It was clear during the practical activity that this would certainly generate cultural self-reflection and aid communication.  Other metaphors for culture included fruit, football teams, and the standard iceberg, tree, and onion.  She also references the importance of cultural awareness in the context of ELF, continuing the discussion from Monday's BESIG PCE.

I think she is correct that BE involves cross-cultural communication at some level.  The questions remain open, however:

• How much does culture affect our clients ability to communicate?  When have we reached the right balance of cultural awareness?
• How can we train our participants to recognize when culture is interfering with communication or goal achievement?   Then how can they acknowledge it, repair it, and continue?
• If ELF is emerging as a common communication medium, is there a standard global business etiquette that is also emerging?  I would argue that there is.  Yes, it may be an adapation of Anglo-Saxon or Western communication methods and behaviors, but it is being standardized.  Participants are putting on this international culture just as they put on different clothes.  For example, I have trained leaners on working with the Middle East, and they come back and say it was wasted because everything was just like Europe.
• How do we handle cultural issues where they are really causing hovac, in virtual teams?  The classic business etiquette training such as hand guestures, eye contact, behavior, etc. doesn't apply here.  But communication styles and cultural expectations are destroying web meetings, emails, presentations and the like.

I would love to see more from Ms. Korecic on these issues.

2.  Training Virtual Communication Skills by Jackie Black and Jon Dyson (York Associates)

Ms. Black and Mr. Dyson gave a great introduction to web meetings, the technology businesses are using, and exercises to practice these skills in companies.  However, judging by the audience response, this area of BE is still quite new.  This is something we need to get on board with quickly.  In fact, in many cases we can take those old business travel sections out of our syllabi and replace them with web meetings, online collaboration, and messaging.  Companies are cutting travel budgets and using web meetings to replace them.  As communication experts we need to understand how our clients are talking to each other and master that format.

The presenters from York Associates are clearly ahead of the game (as I would expect from their company) and are basically using standard teaching activities such as role-plays, decision-making execizes, etc. and adapting them to the web meeting context.  For me, as a trainer who uses web meetings quite often, I found their idea of assigning roles to keep the participants engaged to be quite useful.  These roles include note-taker, time-keeper, challenger, etc.  Another great idea was the one slide business card of the participant, which they can prepare as they like at home and then present in the web meeting.

They also identified a series of language focus areas for learners to perform well in this context, such as numbers, checking and clarifying, and turntaking.  I would say the only thing they missed was words to talk about technology and software such as margin, spreadsheet, column, font, header, etc.  But overall a great presentation and BE trainers should sit up and assess their online collaboration competence.

So, those were the first two from today, and I hope to get to the rest in due course.