• BBC’s Natural History Unit is doing a series entitled Life. You owe it to yourself to watch the 6-minute preview of the series: fascinating video!
• This Google Crisis Response page gives details on how to make contributions to help out in Haiti. Note that the White House (and Consumer Reports) particularly recommend making contributions to the Red Cross. You can do so via your phone by SMS texting “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts
• Another charitable cause worthy of consideration is support of the author of Green Your Decor, whose daughter was recently diagnosed with leukemia. (My dad died from leukemia … it is a brutal disease that does not discriminate by age.)
• Thanks to Torsten for forwarding this interesting link to me: Psychology of technology: less input, more innerput. Makes excellent points about the value in consciously reducing the input noise in your life so can pay more attention to your “innerput.”
• I recently came across another price-comparison/product-comparison tool, and mention it here in case you want to experiment with it: Become.

Related posts:

1. Misdirected Charity
2. Prisoners of Our Thoughts
3. What If You Were Born into Different Circumstances?
4. Some of My Favorite Keener Living Articles

Your ability to succeed in this world depends in large part on how well you understand “how the world works” (what you can influence and what influences you). Because of this, some of my previous articles have encouraged you to read books like How We Decide, Predictably Irrational, Nudge, and so on. Today I would also like to suggest that you further your understanding of the rising influence of corporations on our lives.

Within the past few days, I have come across several interesting articles on corporate influence. The articles are not short, so you may wish to print them out for reading at a later time, but I do recommend that you read them.

The first article is one from Search Engine Land, entitled Google Just Says No To China: Ending Censorship, Due To Gmail Attack. This article gives the best description I have seen on Google’s notice to China that it will suspend censorship in China, and may suspend its operations in China, unless actions are taken to improve human rights.

It’s a bold move, and one could that could impact US-China relations.

On the surface, it seems like a very positive move, although there are some who question Google’s true motives. For example, from the article Doubting the sincerity of Google’s threat:

But to wrap their decision in the melodramatic rhetoric of cyberattacks on Chinese human rights activists? Give me a break. Their supposed naivete about whom they were dealing with just doesn’t sound very convincing. Are we really supposed to believe that, until they experienced cyberattacks on the email accounts of the Chinese human rights activists, they thought that their counterparts in the Chinese government were all good and well-meaning chaps who would never think of such a thing?

I lean toward suspecting that Google’s motives are pretty much as stated: advocating human rights. But, I can see that a lot of complex factors could enter into the process for Google making such a decision.

[By the way, it should be noted that Google is still a young corporation that has not yet had to spend a lot of its brain power and resources on human relations. It is now learning the hard way about how to do this, as illustrated in the NYT article about Google's lack of service on its Nexus One phone: Hey Google, Anybody Home?]

Another article worthy of your attention is this one from The Huffington Post on the Harvard Corporation: Will The Harvard Shadow Elite Bankrupt The University And The Country? A few quotes from the article should stir your interest:

Harvard lost $11 billion from its endowment last year, plus another $2 billion by gambling with operating cash and $1 billion in bad bets on interest rate fluctuations. Harvard had been borrowing vast sums to leverage its assets and to expand its physical plant; its president, Lawrence Summers, had described as “extraordinary investments” what ordinary people would call crushing debt. The only way to balance the looming deficits was through huge investment returns. The speculating worked for a while, but when the bubble burst, Harvard was left almost insolvent.

A presidential resignation might have been expected, but Summers, the president most responsible for Harvard’s unsustainable growth plan, had resigned already–he is now a top economic adviser to Barack Obama. In any case, plenty of costly mistakes were made after he left. In this era of heightened corporate accountability, one might have expected instead a shake-up of Harvard’s board. But Harvard’s directors are invulnerable.

…
The Corporation is stunningly secretive. The members are listed on a Harvard web page–but with no contact information. Their meetings and agendas are unannounced, their decisions unreported. The Fellows, scattered across the country, are isolated from the institution they govern. Even the university’s statutes–the closest thing to a constitution limiting the Corporation’s discretionary power–are almost impossible to locate. The colonial-era board structure is failing the modern university.

…
Rubin is now gone from his leadership role and his board membership at Citigroup, hauling away $126M from a firm that was $65B poorer than when he joined it, with 75,000 fewer jobs. But he remains on the Harvard board, in spite of the financial meltdowns at both Citigroup and Harvard and his poor oversight of the problematic president he persuaded Harvard to hire.

An interesting article about corporate control of government, again via The Huffington Post, is ‘Shadow Elite’: Outsourcing Government, Losing Democracy. A quick quote from the article:

We’ve learned the hard way, most starkly in the Great Depression and now in the Great Recession, that men and women are anything but angels, and that government first and foremost must protect the American people from the unmitigated avarice of the private sector.

The problem is, what has happened to that lofty, Founding Fathers notion of government as our protector? To me, the most important contribution, and the most disturbing part of Janine Wedel’s brilliant new book, “Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market”, is that she has laid bare the lie that we have functional separation today between the public and private sector. Over time, capitalism and democracy have become gradually melded into corporatism in the corridors of power in Washington (and in many other national capitals around the world). Public and private are now substantially blurred, as the “transnational” political elites and the financial elites have become literally the same people. It is a condition which leaves the people feeling unrepresented, unprotected and utterly disregarded, a prop in their own play, a hollow feeling the great Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti once eloquently described as “cosmetic democracy.”

I’m sufficiently intrigued by this article that I plan to read Ms. Wedel’s book.

The final article I’ll mention today is from the NYT: A Fox Chief at the Pinnacle of Media and Politics. Provides a pretty concise summary of the impact of the largest media corporation on politics, and describes Roger Ailes’ role in making Fox News the success it is. An interesting side point from the article is that Murdoch supports Fox’s conservatism, even though it is contrary to his own politics, apparently because it makes good money for him.

Related posts:

1. Misdirected Charity
2. True North leadership insights
3. Parallel Universes (and This One)
4. Controlling Our Evolution Through Technology: What You Can Do

Through their work with the Department for Health and Human Services, Google has developed an aid to help you find nearby flu shot providers: the Google Flu Shot Tool.

The tool finds locations for the H1N1 flu and regular seasonal flu. The tool works on the latest information it has, but that is not always going to be the current information. Hence, it cannot tell you whether a clinic has recently run out of the flu vaccines, so you should call ahead.

No related posts.

So very many things are happening now that are good for book lovers. For example:

• Wal-Mart and Amazon are in a price war of sorts, and that has driven prices down for some books.
• For a limited time, you can upgrade to the electronic version of any O’Reilly print book you’ve registered at oreilly.com, for just $4.99.
• Amazon has an upgrade feature that will let you read some of your books online (not all books are available for upgrade).
• Amazon has re-instituted its Saturday delivery option. Last Thursday afternoon I ordered two books on my Amazon Prime account, with free two-day shipping, and noticed that the delivery date would be Saturday. That was a nice surprise. What was an even nicer surprise was that the books were actually delivered on Friday, less than 24 hours from when I ordered them.
• Amazon also has a one-day delivery service available for selected large cities.
• Barnes & Noble is expected to announce its e-book reader tomorrow (the 20th), with one of its special features to be “book lending” (lend to friends).
• Plastic Logic announced today that it will unveil its proReader in early January. Sounds like this will go head to head against Kindle DX, as it is intended for business professionals.
• Spring Design announced today a dual-screen e-book reader designed for the Android Operating System. Given that Verizon is soon going to be unleashing its Droid implementation of the Android Operating System, this could become a major deal for e-book reading.
• I recently mentioned a strategic partnership between O’Reilly and Microsoft Press, which will make lots of new DRM-free tech content available to us.
• And then of course there is the rumored Apple iPad, and the expectation that it will function as an eReader extraordinaire (among other things). I am pretty anxious to see this come about.
• And Google just keeps getting more and more into the e-book business. The Independent has a good writeup on this.
• Update: I just found out that Safari Books Online has a lot of new features. For an example of the new features, see here. The Safari blog has several other posts that describe additional features.

I’m probably overlooking some news because there is so much of it. Bottom line: good times for those of us who love books.

Related posts:

1. Web Resource for Prolific Technology Readers
2. Why I Am Not Buying Barnes & Nobles’ Nook
3. Pack your books into your PDA
4. Can Google’s Android Improve Productivity?

I’ve been a fan of O’Reilly Media Publications for years, and continue to be. If you need to learn something about programming and/or web development, in my view the O’Reilly books are simply the best to be found. And, back when I attempted to do some Windows programming as a hobby, many years ago, I was huge fan of Microsoft Press books.

And now, surprisingly, Tim O’Reilly announces that O’Reilly Media and Microsoft Press have a strategic partnership. It’s good to see the Microsoft books come under the stewardship of O’Reilly, and I am especially pleased that Microsoft agreed to make Microsoft Press e-books DRM-free. That is huge!

Anyway, since several of you are into web development, I thought this would be of interest to you.

Related posts:

1. Fellow BookAholoics: It’s a Great New World for Us
2. Three huge tech developments this week
3. Microsoft Office 2010 Rollout Has Rough Start, But Be Patient
4. Google and Microsoft Competition is Already Benefitting Us