Friday, March 31, 2006

Posting to the Sequim Magazine BLOG

DRUG companies have outsourced about half of all clinical drug trials
to Indian, China and Brazil, where it is easier and cheaper to find
poor suckers willing to taken unproven drugs for a fee.

About 46 THOUSAND vets of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have already
gone to VA centers seeking treatment for mental health problems.

News that hurts.

Thursday, March 30, 2006

News - audio and video streams

News - audio and video streams: http://www.freepint.com/gary/audio.htm

Chilean salmon for $4.84 a pound

Global fishiness
How can Wal-Mart sell Chilean salmon for $4.84 a pound? An excerpt
from "The Wal-Mart Effect."

Editor's note: In 2006, the name Wal-Mart may have more polarizing power than any other corporate brand. The world's most powerful company is an economic juggernaut, political flashpoint and social
phenomenon. In "The Wal-Mart Effect," a thoughtful, comprehensive examination of how those famous "everyday low prices" are changing the world, Fast Company writer Charles Fishman offers up a compelling look at the company that, more than any other firm, is driving the global economy.

http://www.salon.com/tech/books/2006/01/23/walmart_effect/index_np.htm
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Monday, March 27, 2006

Inside Firefox - The Inside Track on Firefox Development

Inside Firefox - The Inside Track on Firefox Development: "March 26, 2006
Writing for Busy People

Back when I was in University, many of the lecturers stressed time and time again the importance of succinct, well organized writing. They said over and over that this was the best way to have your thoughts read and understood by decision makers. In fact, they scared us by saying that 70% of us would become managers sooner or later!

Well, I can tell you that's sage advice. It's great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it's even better when they're written for busy people. Here are some examples:

* Making important points up front
* Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
* Writing clearly and succinctly
* No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
* Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
* Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear

These days, I find I don't have a lot of time to read everything carefully, so the better structured a document is, the more I get out of it. I frequently find I miss entire subsections or points of documents, even when there's relatively little text, because of incomplete organization. My eyes definitely glaze over when i see a large block of unbroken text with few headings. "