If you love watching two tech titans have a catfight, this is your month so far.Facebook and Google just got into the ring to duke it out.

Round One: Knowing Facebook was having a big announcement this week, Google chose to steal the limelight in advance by annoucing its long-awaited answer to Facebook, Google+. 

Round Two: Oh by the way, Google+ will feature video chat.

Round Three: Facebook had its launch, anyway, and was quick to mention that it has 750 million users worldwide (that would be 749,999,000 more million users than the 1,000 Google+ users who have signed up since last week.)

Round Four: Facebook is also launching online video chat by integrating Skype calling with its online chat client.

Round Five: Google+’s “Google Hangouts” will enable online video chatters to host multiple callers at the same time. Skype calls on Facebook are, for now, limited to two people at a time.

Round Six: Google Hangouts allows video chatters to watch YouTube videos together. Facebook-Skype can’t do that yet. P.S. The Los Angeles Times is reporting rumors that Google is in talks to buy Hulu.

Round Seven: Google says “hold off” to businesses who want to create a company profile on Google+. It says it is working on a solution for that to come out by the end of the year. If you try to cobble by using a personal profile as a business profile in the meantime, Google will likely kill it out of the system anyway. So wait.

Round Eight: At this week’s press event for the Facebook-Skype launch, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pretended to not be rattled by all of the Google buzz.  Press questions were brushed aside quickly with Zuckerberg rambling “I view a lot of this as validation as to how the next five years are going to play out.” Huh?

Round Nine: In further efforts to rename every single proper noun in the galaxy to something that starts with Google, Google scrapped the names “Picassa” and “Blogger”.  They will now be called “Google Photos” and “Google Blogs,” respectively. Curiously, Google is calling “Google+” a “project” instead of a “product.” Interpretations of that are welcome in the comments below.

Source: Inc.com/Tech_Blog

Citing “large macroeconomic imbalances,” the World Economic Forum, a global  policy group based in Geneva, ranked the United States in sixth place on this year’s Global Competitiveness Index, the group announced on Sept. 26.

Despite a surge of entrepreneurial activity, years of running budget deficits  have knocked the United Statesfrom its top spot on a closely-watched ranking of the world’s most competitive nations.

The annual index is based on economic data, as well as surveys with more than 11,000 business leaders in 215 countries.

Switzerland ranked No. 1, up from No. 4 last year, as a result of its “sound institutional environment, excellent infrastructure, efficient markets and high levels of technological innovation,” the report said.

Also ranking above the U.S. were Finland, Sweden,Denmark, and Singapore. The three least competitive countries on this year’s list were Angola, Burundi, andChad.

The top rankings of Switzerland and the Nordic countries ”show that good institutions and competent macroeconomic management, coupled with world-class educational attainment and a focus on technology and innovation, are a successful strategy for boosting competitiveness,” Augusto Lopez-Claros, the group’s chief economist, said in a statement.

Lopez-Claros said that business activity in these countries clearly benefited from “rule of law, an efficient judicial system, and high levels of transparency and accountability within public institutions.”

While the U.S. also fosters an excellent business environment and remains a global center for technology development, rising levels of public debt and repeated fiscal deficits is threatening its long-term competitiveness, the report said.

“What worries business communities, and others, is that the current account deficit in the U.S. is the largest it’s ever been,” Lopez-Claros said. Many are beginning to ask if this is sustainable, he added.

The U.S. current account deficit — the broadest measure of foreign trade — rose to $218.4 billion over the second quarter of the year — the second highest on record, theCommerce Department reported in September. That’s putting the country on track for a fifth straight annual deficit this year.

At least part of the trade gap, U.S. manufacturers say, is the result of policies by China that give its producers an unfair advantage in the global marketplace, including undervaluing its currency, and turning a blind eye to piracy and intellectual property theft.

A day after the WEF rankings were released, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the world’s largest business association, with small businesses making up over 95% of its members — issued a report calling on China to lower its trade barriers, float its currency, and enforce copyright protections.

Source: Inc.com

Scott Harrison was 28 years old, sitting on a beach inUruguay with a model girlfriend, a Rolex watch and aBMW waiting nearby—a life the nightclub promoter inNew York City had been chasing after for nearly 10 years—when he realized (in his own words)  “what a selfish scumbag” he was. His entire adult life had been geared towards serving himself and the club patrons, and when he had done nothing to help others, it made him step back.

Seven years removed from that day on the beach, Harrison is still in New York, heading up charity: water, a non-profit organization that has delivered clean drinking water to over 1 million underserved people in 17 different countries, and aspires to help more than 100 million in the next ten years. How serious of a problem is he tackling? In short, nearly a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water (that’s one in eight people). One of the most successful social entrepreneurs of our time, Harrison’s visionary non-profit grew over 100% in the first quarter of 2011 (as compared to the same period in 2010), the economy be damned.

Success stories like Harrison’s are few and far between for social entrepreneurs, defined as “someone who targets an unfortunate but stable equilibrium that causes the neglect, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity; who brings to bear on this situation his or her inspiration, direct action, creativity, courage, and fortitude; and who aims for and ultimately affects the establishment of a new stable equilibrium that secures permanent benefit for the targeted group and society at large,” by Roger L. Martin and Sally Osberg in a 2007Stanford University report titled “Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition.”

But how do you make it as a social entrepreneur, and why now? As Rupert Scofield, the president and CEO ofFINCA International, writes in the recently releasedSocial Entrepreneur’s Handbook, “whether your mission is as ambitious as pulling millions of people out of poverty or as modest as feeding people in your neighborhood, now is the perfect time to get started. Social entrepreneurship has never been more needed, more valued and more achievable than it is today.”

Complete Article, here

Title: How to Become a Social Entrepreneur.

Source: Inc.com

 By Françoise Nielly

An ad hominem (Latin: “to the man”), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to link the truth of a claim to a negative characteristic or belief of the person advocating it.^[1]The ad hominem is normally described as a logical fallacy,^[2][3][4] but it is not always fallacious; in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue.^[5]

The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that ad hominem reasoning is essential to understanding certain moral issues, and contrasts this sort of reasoning with the apodictic reasoning of philosophical naturalism.^[6]

Types

Abusive

Abusive ad hominem (also called personal abuse or personal attacks) usually involves insulting or belittling one’s opponent in order to attack his claim or invalidate his argument, but can also involve pointing out factual but apparent character flaws or actions that are irrelevant to the opponent’s argument. This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and negative facts about the opponent’s personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent’s arguments or assertions.

Examples:

• “You can’t believe Jack when he says the proposed policy would help the economy. He doesn’t even have a job.”
• “Candidate Jane’s proposal about zoning is ridiculous. She was caught cheating on her taxes in 2003.”
• “Jeff’s argument on LeBron James’ failures in the NBA finals aren’t worth reading, everyone knows he is a “LeBron” hater.”

An abusive ad hominem can apply to a judgment of cultural works or academic efforts based on the behavior or unconventional political beliefs of an artist, author, or musician, or the taste of an infamous person who loved a certain work.

Examples:

• Jimi Hendrix died of a drug overdose, so his music was worthless.
• Leni Riefenstahl was a Nazi, so her film The Triumph of the Will is devoid of merit.
• Sylvia Plath was a depressive who eventually committed suicide, so her works are unreadable.
• That Boris Godunov was the favorite opera of Joseph Stalin indicates the worthlessness of the opera.
• What Ted Kaczynski wrote about boundary conditions in mathematics is shown false due to his crimes.

Circumstantial

Ad hominem circumstantial points out that someone is in circumstances such that he is disposed to take a particular position. Ad hominem circumstantial constitutes an attack on the bias of a source. This is fallacious because a disposition to make a certain argument does not make the argument false; this overlaps with the genetic fallacy (an argument that a claim is incorrect due to its source).^[7]

The circumstantial fallacy applies only where the source taking a position is only making a logical argument from premises that are generally accepted. Where the source seeks to convince an audience of the truth of a premise by a claim of authority or by personal observation, observation of their circumstances may reduce the evidentiary weight of the claims, sometimes to zero.^[8]

Examples:

Mandy Rice-Davies’s famous testimony during the Profumo Affair, “Well, he would [say that], wouldn’t he?”, is an example of a valid circumstantial argument. Her point was that since a man in a prominent position, accused of an affair with a callgirl, would deny the claim whether it was true or false. His denial, in itself, carries little evidential weight against the claim of an affair. Note, however, that this argument is valid only insofar as it devalues the denial; it does not bolster the original claim. To construe evidentiary invalidation of the denial as evidentiary validation of the original claim is fallacious (on several different bases, including that of argumentum ad hominem); however likely the man in question would be to deny an affair that did in fact happen, he could only be more likely to deny an affair that never did.

Conflict of Interest: Where a source seeks to convince by a claim of authority or by personal observation, identification of conflicts of interest are not ad hominem – it is generally well accepted that an “authority” needs to be objective and impartial, and that an audience can only evaluate information from a source if they know about conflicts of interest that may affect the objectivity of the source. Identification of a conflict of interest is appropriate, and concealment of a conflict of interest is a problem.

Tu quoque

Ad hominem tu quoque (literally: “You also”) refers to a claim that the source making the argument has spoken or acted in a way inconsistent with the argument. In particular, if Source A criticizes the actions of Source B, a tu quoque response is that Source A has acted in the same way. This argument is fallacious because it does not disprove the argument; if the premise is true then Source A may be a hypocrite, but this does not make the statement less credible from a logical perspective. Indeed, Source A may be in a position to provide personal testimony to support the argument.

For example, a father may tell his son not to start smoking as he will regret it when he is older, and the son may point out that his father is or was a smoker. This does not alter the fact that his son may regret smoking when he is older.

Guilt by association

Guilt by association can sometimes also be a type of ad hominem fallacy if the argument attacks a source because of the similarity between the views of someone making an argument and other proponents of the argument.^[7]

This form of the argument is as follows:

Source S makes claim C.

Group G, which is currently viewed negatively by the recipient, also makes claim C.

Therefore, source S is viewed by the recipient of the claim as associated to the group G and inherits how negatively viewed it is.

Common misconceptions

Gratuitous verbal abuse or “name-calling” itself is not an ad hominem or a logical fallacy.^{[8][9][10][11][12]}

In order to become a fallacy, the insult would need to be given as a reason for believing some conclusion. An example would be, “X is idiotically ignorant [of politics], so why should we listen to him now?”

—-

*From Wikipedia.

tarnoff:

Mark Twain’s almost-history as a drug lord. 

In 1856, a twenty-one-year-old Mark Twain was stranded in Keokuk, Iowa, working for his brother’s printing office, bored to death by the small town’s soporific pace. Restless, he needed a change. He started reading about the Amazon River, and soon cooked up a scheme to sail to Brazil. In August, he wrote to his younger brother Henry about his plans. Fifty-four years later, he reminisced about the episode in an essay published just two months before his death in April 1910:

Among the books that interested me in those days was one about the Amazon… [H]e told an astonishing tale about coca, a vegetable product of miraculous powers, asserting that it was so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill and down all day on a pinch of powdered coca and require no other sustenance. I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon. Also with a longing to open up a trade in coca with all the world. During months I dreamed that dream, and tried to contrive ways to get to Para and spring that splendid enterprise upon an unsuspecting planet.

In short: Mark Twain, at twenty-one, almost became a drug dealer. He wanted to go to Brazil and start importing cocaine into the United States. He got as far as New Orleans before he decided to become a steamboat pilot instead.

Mark Shuttleworth, Leader of Cannonical, Open Source Initiative

curioos-arts:

Charlie Terrell (USA) - Portfolio