!-- pageType= magazinesmall slug= st_kia section= techbiz subsection= people headline= Mr. Know-It-All: Call-Center Etiquette, Offensive Podcasts, Awkward Transactions authorName= Brendan I. Koerner creditType= illustration credit= Christoph Niemann -- p strong Dear Mr. Know-It-All, is it cool to ask call-center operators what country they're in? I'm not a bigot or opposed to outsourcing, but I like to know who I'm dealing with./strong /p pFire away with the geolocation query, but be wary of how you broach the topic. Call-center operators deal with countless xenophobic jerks, who typically follow the "Where are you located?" question with a stream of invective. An operator may thus turn defensive in anticipation of the same treatment from youmdash;unless you're careful with your tone and timing. "If the very first thing out of your mouth is, 'Hey, what country are you in,' I think that's rude," says a href="http://www.kathleenpeterson.com/"Kathleen Peterson/a, founder of PowerHouse Consulting, which advises call-center operations. Resolve your business first, then feel free to ask about location when there's a natural lull in the conversation. At that point, make sure your voice exudes affability, as if you were simply inquiring about the weather in Omaha./p pAnd, should you learn you're on the horn with someone on the planet's flip side, go easy on the inane chitchat. "A call-center agent has a job to do and probably doesn't want to answer questions about the population of Bangalore," says a href="http://www.globaltelesourcing.com/exper-colton.htm"Bill Colton/a, president of Global Telesourcing, a call-center service provider./p pThe operator may decline to answer your question or try to convince you that he's in Kansas even though his accent screams Ukraine. Such deception indicates that a company either wants to hide the fact that it's outsourcing or doesn't think too highly of its customersmdash;make a mental note of it./p pstrongI've been helping my nongeek friend build a Flash-intensive Web site. It's gotten to the point where I'm spending a dozen hours a week on it. How should I ask for compensation?/strong/p pYour pal surely didn't intend to exploit you. Odds are he doesn't know how much work goes into codingmdash;an impression you encouraged by not demanding dough up front./p pAssuming you want this relationship to survive, bring up the problem without making your friend feel like a total heel. a href="http://www.negotiatingwithgiants.com/introduction.html"Peter D. Johnston/a, the author of emNegotiating with Giants/em, recommends telling him that a sudden influx of paying gigs precludes you from doing more work, but you'd be happy to point him to a replacement. "That approach can get the issue of time and payment out on the table in a nonthreatening way," Johnston says. Presuming he's hesitant to switch horses midstream, your pal should offer to make his project worth your while./p pRefrain from pressing for back pay, however, or you're likely to look like a greedy ass. Those hours you've already spent slaving away in the digital mines? Consider them a lesson in the veracity of an age-old maxim: "Never mix business with pleasure."/p p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/st_kia2_f.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"emIllustration: Christoph Niemann/em/div /div /div strongEveryone in my office has sharing enabled on iTunes. One of my coworker's libraries contains several podcasts of sermons I find highly offensivemdash;they contain lots of antigay blather. Should I confront her?/strong/p pIt depends on how you gleaned those sermons' content. If you couldn't help noticing incendiary titles along the lines of "Fags Go to Hell," then a little indirect confrontation is in ordermdash;tell a manager, pronto./p pBut if the titles were innocuous, and you thus had to listen to the podcasts in order to be offended, pause a moment before taking action. You may have a valid case, but you'll have to decide whether this fight can ever yield anything more than a Pyrrhic victory./p pIt would be one thing if your colleague was blasting these sermons through her speakers for all to hearmdash;or, for that matter, telling everyone around the watercooler about the Lord's contempt for sodomites. But a shared iTunes environment such as yours is strictly opt-inmdash;you can easily avoid listening to the offensive content./p pThe best meatspace parallel is a coworker who keeps a small stack of religious pamphlets in plain view, which you can just ignore. True, there have been cases in which employers have been successfully sued for writing Bible verses on paychecks or broadcasting prayers over public address systems. But those situations were a lot more in-your-face than what's going on heremdash;in part because they involved bosses rather than colleagues, but also because the employees couldn't escape the proselytizing./p pAn aggressive lawyer could still argue that the mere presence of those tracks on the network creates a hostile workplace. But that strikes Mr. Know-It-All as making a sermon on the mount out of a sermon on a molehill, especially considering that the suit could very well be a losermdash;you might be hard-pressed to prove that the screeds, tucked away in an iTunes library, are severe or pervasive enough to constitute harassment./p pAs odious as you might find your coworker's views, it's probably best to give her a pass. Look on the bright sidemdash;now you know who to avoid at the office holiday party./p pemNeed help navigating life in the 21st century? Email us at /ema href="mailto:mrknowitall@wiredmag.com"mrknowitall@wiredmag.com/a./pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:20d0f30c717b55767a97d16ab4484e9d:g1tf9adfc25jpXgkH8uKhMR%2BngoXs%2BDFLKAaS7SFOP%2FLsmDz%2BdZ%2F6fQrx2gCko%2FwpvWvkl9QfvTDow%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:f0a383436fbc6fa75c537e470d5de6dc:bFugwmegC8RftsXvM3wKBIF5b9LsYeK6cuDyo3RWg0hgPOsFGY%2B8JjdAtvTrVLTKC%2FVJddTgKHOM'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:c162596b45dd2aaf4f1644ef15064491:jxJd6gkLweGPjQ7tNdPUOWCP%2F2ZdfPQ6SO9V2ASSUZdHik%2FrWfaAfshSTEVebcxTQ36rF1lguDCm'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:02ff51d0d029db5fc136e971b6cd6b84:rcQ6Cotybfh21x45NhbpE%2BXMhW0EYpHhwkXIVs87B7yA%2BVfjzP4jvUE6g5CDDOwgoWK94X7Lmgct'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=b2cecfe46439f19c1186d417c1984534p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=b2cecfe46439f19c1186d417c1984534p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=b2cecfe46439f19c1186d417c1984534" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=2ZiwRz"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=2ZiwRz" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/474334199" height="1" width="1"/

!-- pageType= magazinesmall slug= ff_blodget section= techbiz subsection= people headline= Financial Industry Scapegoat Reinvents Himself as Financial Reporter authorName= Daniel Roth creditType= photo credit= Mike McGregor caption= Henry Blodgetis back, and his straight-talking analysis of the Web world is earning him new fans. -- pstrongHenry Blodget/strong has never gotten used to the chorus of hate that follows his every move. He's merely learned to live with it. When he started his personal blog in 2005, the comments a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/2005/10/welcomeand_than.html"dripped with disgust/a. "You are a boldface liar," a reader wrote. "Give me one reason why I should believe what you are writing," said another. And that was just in response to Blodget's innocuous first entry. /ppDuring his years as a star Wall Street analyst, his pronouncements were welcomed and celebrated; now he couldn't say hello without getting savaged. Just last August, TechCrunch mentioned that Blodget would be one of more than two dozen tech celebrities a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/15/4-new-experts-henry-blodget-josh-kopelman-tim-o%E2%80%99reilly-robert-scoble-join-techcrunch50/"judging a contest/a for startups. Blodget knew what was coming, even if his hosts didn't. "Blodget is scum.... He is no longer the arrogant prick we saw in the '90s, but he's still scum," someone wrote. "A lot of people lost money listening to this dirtbag." "Blodget is a Web 1.0, bubble-creating has-been." "He is unethical." "He's as crooked as they come."/p pI meet a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/henry_blodget.html"Blodget/a at the offices of his new business, a year-old site called a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/"Silicon Alley Insider/a, shortly after the TechCrunch beat-down. Alley Insider is one of many tech business blogs that feed news, earnings info, and rumors to investors and corporate insiders. But Alley Insider has one thing that others don't. Blodget. He's smart, he's skeptical, and he's got the kind of self-assured voice that sells well in the blogosphere. As the market sinks, his opinions are even more in demand, though he's still hated by a large portion of his prospective audience./p pThe site shares two floors of a Manhattan office building with programmers and business staff for some of Alley Insider's sister companies, all of which were started by former DoubleClick CEO a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/kevin_ryan"Kevin Ryan/a. Blodget works in a double-wide cubicle near a window, separated by a low wall from the site's two other editors. They spend their days crawling Twitter and RSS feeds, calling sources, and pumping out about a dozen daily takes on the business world, most with Digg-friendly headlines (no easy accomplishment with bone-dry business stories). "Is Facebook Distracting Us From Porn? No" is a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/is-facebook-distracting-us-from-porn-no"typical/a, or "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/googles_ginormous_food_budget_7530_per_googler"Google's Ginormous Food Budget/a: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million a Year." Blodget tells his team to think of the site as talk radio: He wants readers to feel compelled to check in several times a day to get the Alley Insider view on everything going on in their world./p pFor privacy, we duck into a small conference room, and Blodget, tall and skinny, sinks into a ridiculously deep leather chair. His floppy dirty-blond hair gives him a youthful, almost carefree air, but the deep circles that ring his eyes tell a different story. He's managing a 24-hour news startup. It's midday and he's been posting since 5 am. And then there's the burden that comes with being Henry Blodget, digital punching bag./p p"There are obviously a lot of folks who say, 'Now wait a minute, isn't that the guy who....'" He lets the thought trail off. He's legally barred from talking about the incidents that led to his vilification. "To them, I'm emthat/em Henry Blodget. There's not much more I can say. I still can't address specific points. So it's like, 'OK, here's my face. Throw the fruit. When you want to stop throwing the fruit, if you want to listen, great. If you don't, fine.'"/p pIt's been almost a decade since the impulse to greet him with rotten mangos first struck. Back in 1998, as a 32-year-old analyst with investment bank CIBC, he a href="http://www.thestreet.com/markets/analystrankings/977502.html"declared/a that the stock price of Amazon.com would nearly double to $400. Three weeks later it did, and Blodget was a hero. Soon he packed up his spreadsheets mdash; he's never more comfortable than when he is lining up numbers in rows and columns and teasing out their secrets mdash; and moved to Merrill Lynch./p pInvestors followed the new oracle's every utterance, and bankers wanted Blodget to bless the stocks of companies they were hoping to do business with. The lines on his graphs always seemed to point one way mdash; steeply up and to the right. He wasn't just predicting profits, he was selling a revolution: The old metrics didn't apply. Blodget may have counseled people to own only a small percentage of Internet stocks mdash; 10 percent at the most mdash; but nobody listened./p !-- pagebreak -- div id="embed" style="width:370px;" div id="pic" style="width:350px;" img style="width:350px;" src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget3_f.jpg" alt=""/ div id="caption" Launched in 2007, Silicon Alley Insider is gaining on some of its established rivals. br/ emSource: Compete/em /div /div /div pThen came the crash. Five trillion dollars in wealth vaporized in 24 months, leaving behind unquantifiable amounts of rage among the masses of day traders who had believed briefly that they, too, were market savants. When the bubble burst, so did Blodget's aura./p pStill, it wasn't the crash alone that crushed him. It took Eliot Spitzer to turn Henry Blodget into emthat/em Henry Blodget. Spitzer, then New York's crusading attorney general, investigated Merrill in 2001 for conflicts of interest. He discovered a clutch of emails from the young analyst showing that while talking up certain stocks to clients, he was trashing them internally. Companies like 24/7 Media, Excite@Home, and InfoSpace mdash; firms Merrill was publicly cheering mdash; in private were deemed by Blodget to be "shit," "crap," and "junk" (respectively). According to Spitzer's findings, Blodget would have pulled in $12 million in 2001 mdash; quadruple his earnings in 1999 mdash; if he hadn't accepted a buyout that year. In 2003, Merrill's boy genius agreed to pay a $4 million fine and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the securities industry./p pPublic disgrace usually drives a person into hiding, or at least into a different career. Jerry Levin, the brains behind the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, today runs a href="http://moonviewsanctuary.com/staff"Moonview Sanctuary/a, his wife's spa; Spitzer, forced to resign as governor last summer, is currently discovering the a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2008/06/10/spitzers-next-act-distressed-real-estate/"joys of real estate management/a; Health South CEO Richard Scrushy, while on trial for accounting fraud, a href="http://www.richardmscrushy.com/biography.aspx"became a televangelist/a. Not Blodget./p pOne former colleague says Blodget spent the months when he was being investigated trying to grasp why he was singled out for something that was commonplace in the industry. He figured the controversy would blow over once the public realized his conduct was not unusual. "He was incredulous that the investigation got traction; he said it was silly," a friend says. But there was too much anger in the wake of the bubble, and Blodget's embarrassing emails made him an easy scapegoat. Later, when he was inclined to argue his case, the settlement terms prevented it./p pSo Blodget did what came naturally. He began writing about the companies he used to cover, a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2104656/"first for Slate/a, then on his own blog, a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/"Internet Outsider/a. Was this journalism mdash; or was it therapy? Rather than hide, he started saying in public what he had once said only in private, using the same brutally frank voice that got him in trouble with Spitzer. He marketed his notoriety to a new Web readership hungry for smart, independent analysis./p pWhen Ryan, an Internet Outsider reader, approached him about starting an industry news site, Blodget jumped at the prospect of a bigger stage. Before working on Wall Street, he'd been a freelance writer; now he could combine the two vocations, borrowing freely from both journalism and equity research./p pThrough Alley Insider, Blodget is trying to erase, post by post, Spitzer's portrait of him as a duplicitous, money-grubbing shill for big business. Blodget has always believed that the Internet changed everything, so naturally he believes it has the power to change the world's perception of him. The venue offers all Henry, all the time (and even when his other writers are posting, it's clear they're channeling him). The result is a unique blend of x-ray analysis and tech evangelism./p pAs we talk, Blodget gets up from his chair, antsy to return to his laptop. I ask him if he understands what he's up against. If the hate has lasted this long, why expect it ever to fade away? "If all I knew about me was what I read during that period," he says, "I'd probably have the same reaction."/p pstrongOn a late summer morning/strong, Blodget waits in the lobby of the Nasdaq building in midtown Manhattan. He's all banker today: blue suit, red tie, black cap-toed Oxfords, his shirt so deeply pressed there are creases down the sleeves. It's 10 am and, ready for his second breakfast, he pries open the plastic case of a turkey and Swiss sandwich and starts wolfing it down. In a few minutes he is supposed to conduct a video interview for Yahoo's Tech Ticker finance site. As soon as Blodget started appearing as a regular host in February, the Furies a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/650/Jerry-Yang-Strikes-Back;-Here%27s-Microsoft%27s-Next-Move?tickers=yhoo,msft"reemerged/a. "Did you not find any other decent, credible guy than Henry Blodget?" one of the first comments read. "Why spoil this new feature with such a scum and spoil the Yahoo reputation?"/p pAs producers prepare to tape the show, Blodget wipes his crumbs off the table. He explains the guiding vision behind Alley Insider. "We don't want to do things we don't care about," he says. "It's nice to say theoretically we're the judge of what's important and what's not, but come on, give readers credit. They'll tell you immediately what they want, and that drives coverage. People are fanatically interested in Apple, Google, Microsoft. It wasn't a tough call to know what to write about."/p pBlodget's focus on content is matched by his apparent indifference to the look of the site. Alley Insider employs a cookie-cutter template of scrolling headlines and thumbnail photos dragged off the Web. But design limitations notwithstanding, by September the site was getting nearly 500,000 visitors a month, rivaling a href="http://allthingsd.com/"AllThingsDigital.com/a, the citeWall Street Journal/cite blog edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Since the beginning of the year, traffic to the site has more than doubled, and Blodget's words now carry surprising weight. When a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/apple-s-steve-jobs-rushed-to-er-after-heart-attack-says-cnn-citizen-journalist"he reported/a early this fall that Steve Jobs may have been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack mdash; citing an anonymous (and, as it turns out, fraudulent) post on a minor user-generated news site run by CNN called iReport mdash; Apple's a href="http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/technology/apple/"stock dropped/a nearly 10 percent. Critics blamed Alley Insider./p p"I read citeThe New York Times/cite, citeThe Economist/cite, and Alley Insider," says a href="http://www.firebrandpartners.com/principals/index.html"Scott Galloway/a, head of investment equity firm Firebrand Partners, who is best known for his successful public fight to get on the board of citeThe New York Times/cite. "Henry takes a no-mercy, no-malice approach to Web business and media." Valleywag recently called him "the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to."/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img" img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget2_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption" div class="wide_caption_txt" The team at Silicon Alley Insider (left to right): senior editor Dan Frommer, COO Julie Hansen, cofounder Kevin Ryan, and editor in chief Blodget. br/ emPhoto: Mike McGregor/em /div /div /div br/ br/ pFor all the success today, it took Blodget amp; Co. some time to figure out a winning formula. When Ryan, a New Yorker, launched the site in 2007, he wanted to cover the local startup and media scene. Blodget signed on as CEO and editor in chief, bought a minority stake, and hired citeForbes/cite journalists a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/peter_kafka"Peter Kafka/a and a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/dan_frommer"Dan Frommer/a to help him develop content (Kafka was later hired away by AllThingsD). The first few weeks, the site read like a tourist's guide to spotting B-list Internet companies in the big city, with each firm's location prominently announced: "NoHo-based Meetup has quietly launched a Facebook application"; "Flatiron-based YellowJacket Software has raised $1.25 million." Blodget branched out, taking on the bigger names himself mdash; Apple, Dow Jones, NBC, JP Morgan. It quickly became clear to him that New York's tech industry was too small an arena to contain the ambition of the site. And nearly half the readers were in California anyway./p pAlley Insider soon dropped its Silicon Alley focus but stuck with the moniker. And Blodget began to draw more heavily on his research experience. He created financial models of the companies he was talking about and posted the spreadsheets as Google docs so anyone could download and toy with them. He analyzed the potential revenue YouTube could bring to Google, mapping out his assumptions about viewership and ads watched, and offering a clear bottom-line conclusion. Readers weighed in with their critiques, which Blodget used to sharpen the model. He figured he wouldn't just write about Wall Street, he would also usurp part of Wall Street's business by providing high-quality research, the kind brokerage customers used to prize./p pBut visitors to the site wanted more than analytics. They also craved the edgier Henry of the Spitzer emails. Blodget obliged. In one post, a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/ben_stein_is_an_idiot"Blodget declares/a citeNew York Times/cite economics columnist Ben Stein to be either "an idiot" or possibly just "delusional." He suggests that the anonymous sources cited by archrival TechCrunch in its reporting on Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/yahoo_stock_fades_as_techcrunch_microsoft_takeover_sources_sober_up"must have been drunk/a." And in November 2007, when E-Trade lost $9 billion in value as its risky mortgage bets turned to dust, Blodget offered only one piece of advice to the company's shareholders: "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/etrade_etfc_total_cost_of_screwup_9_billion"Cry/a."/p p"On Wall Street, I'd consistently submit a report that would say, 'This is going to be roadkill,' and it would come back rewritten as 'We see some weakness,'" Blodget says. "Now I can say, 'It's going to be roadkill.' That's very satisfying."/p pBut even as he delights in railing against corporate giants, he's still disciplined enough to run the underlying numbers mdash; Blodget loves the drama, but he loves the spreadsheets just as much. One post about craigslist should have been something only an accountant could love: a complex set of assumptions and analyses to determine what the company might be worth. Yet Blodget wrote the whole exercise as if it were a mystery plot, parceling out details and stringing the reader along until the very end./p pWhen Yahoo announced this summer that it had hired Bain amp; Co., a consulting firm usually brought in when a company is about to start swinging the ax, Blodget a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/yahoo-fat-farm-how-many-people-does-yahoo-need-to-fire-to-get-fit-"sharpened his own pencil/a. "We're mad as hell ... especially now that Yahoo's wasting millions on Bain." He offered his own, free advice (spreadsheet attached) cataloging how many people Yahoo should fire in each division mdash; 1,804 from its "positively obese" sales and marketing arm alone mdash; in order to goose operating margins to a "more respectable" 20 percent from its current 7 percent. "He pushed us early on to ask, 'What does this mean for profits? How does any news affect a company's numbers?'" Frommer says. "It's great if it makes a company look bad or look good, but is this really going to affect the numbers?"/p pBlodget is also trying things that no mainstream-journalism-trained blogger like Swisher or GigaOm's a href="http://gigaom.com/"Om Malik/a would ever dare. He makes serious-sounding offers to buy companies that he wants to demonstrate are significantly undervalued. It's pure showmanship, but with Blodget's background in finance and his ties to folks up and down Wall Street, no one knows just how far he will take the joke./p pHis first target was CNET. With the a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/announcing_our_friendly_takeover_offer_for_cnet"slightest of winks/a, he wrote a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/cnet_update_on_our_offer_and_restructuring_plan_part_1"post after post/a explaining how he'd a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/jana_here_s_our_plan_for_cnet"purchase the company/a. At first he proposed a sort of reverse merger, with CNET buying Alley Insider for $50 million in stock, at which point Blodget's team would take over every aspect of the company. Then he detailed the operational changes he would make./p !-- pagebreak -- pRyan got nervous about Blodget's new direction. Blodget's deal with the government forbade him from giving individual research advice, but it didn't say anything about jumping into the private-equity space. Still, there might be legal issues. "Look, why don't we run this by a lawyer just to make sure, because we're getting into securities stuff here," he said to Blodget. When the lawyer asked them "Is this a real offer?" there was a brief silence. For the first time the two really thought about it./p p"You know, yes," Ryan replied. "If they said yes, we would accept $50 million at that time to buy them. So it is a real offer. But we're actually asking them to buy us." The lawyer signed off on the convoluted reasoning./p pAfter Blodget's taunting posts went up, investment firm JANA Partners announced a hostile takeover attempt of CNET. It failed, but by spring 2008 CBS a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/cbs_buying_cnet_for_1_8_billion"stepped in to buy/a the company for $1.8 billion./p pFor one CNET executive, memories of Blodget's unwanted attentions still rankle. "The way you make a big name for yourself on the Web today is to make, for lack of a better word, ridiculous statements," says Zander Lurie, former senior VP of strategy and development at CNET and now CFO of CBS Interactive. Lurie found himself reassuring employees who sent him Blodget's postings and wondered whether their company was at risk. "Everyone knew there was nothing in the offering: He didn't have the capital, the expertise, or any specific insight into our business," Lurie says. "He makes the ridiculous statement and it gets sent all around, and then he claims credit when there's an event the following year, which obviously he had nothing to do with. Less than zero to do with. We all have reputations. And his track record is well known."/p pBlodget has been a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/how-the-new-york-times-nyt-can-save-itself"waging another/a half-serious acquisition fight, this time for the New York Times Company. All he wants is the Web site mdash; the print side is dead, he says. He thinks the paper needs to cut about 80 percent of its costs, at which point it would be the perfect size to be the digital paper of record for a long time to come. "It's a serious offer from our perspective, but it hasn't been taken seriously," Blodget says./p pstrongIn the wake of Wall Street's latest meltdown/strong, Blodget finds himself in even greater demand. He's doing regular TV appearances and is posting again on Slate. When NPR wanted someone to talk about the Wall Street culture of greed, they a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94667073"brought in Blodget/a. The reporter introduced him by pointing out that Merrill is now gone, "and Henry Blodget is gone, too; he's banned from Wall Street after being charged with fraud."/p p"Thanks," Blodget said, stuttering for a second, "especially for that horrific introduction." They both laughed. But by the end, the host was treating Blodget like an elder statesman./p pRecently Blodget has been expanding his franchise. He and Ryan have launched two sister sites: a href="http://www.clusterstock.com/"Clusterstock/a, which will compile and analyze Wall Street research on a much wider range of industries, and a href="http://www.businesssheet.com/"the Business Sheet/a, which will focus on corporate scandals. A third is in the works. For each new site, Blodget provides the bulk of the early posts, seeding the new enterprise with the Blodget touch./p pBlodget is broadening beyond tech to get ready for what he sees as a coming shakeout in the news-blog industry. He says he might even start making acquisitions if the price is right. Ryan's suite of companies has raised $50 million in the past few years, possibly enough to buy out some other interesting small blogs. The winning formula for this new kind of business remains elusive: It's a matter of finding the balance between gossip and analysis, between aggregating news from other sources and doing original reporting. Revenue models that go beyond basic advertising have also been slow in coming. "If you look at the development of every new medium, there's been a new form of journalism that has been made possible by it, and there has always been this period of transition," Blodget says. "There is collective experimentation as people figure out what works and what doesn't, and usually you have some very important publications that are built."/p pAnother way to expand is to sell to a larger media company. Blodget says he'd consider an offer, but Alley Insider is still defined almost entirely by one man. If he left, the value would plummet. Also, some media institutions mdash; the grayer, stodgier ones mdash; may find Blodget's unique baggage unacceptable. The endless barrage of comments, the angry mob that seems to follow him everywhere, may be too much for the sensitivities of some management teams, even in these freewheeling days of media transformation. When Blodget wrote a few small items for citeThe New York Times/cite, the newspaper's a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11pubed.html"ombudsman went haywire/a. "The citeTimes/cite luster may help Blodget," he wrote last year, "but some of his taint rubs off on the citeTimes/cite."/p pIt's just the sort of comment Blodget has come to expect from, well, everyone. That may change, but only if this latest reinvention succeeds in burying his past forever. In which case, he will have been right: The Internet really does change everything./p pemSenior writer Daniel Roth /em(a href="mailto:daniel_roth@wired.com"daniel_roth@wired.com/a) emwrote about the a href="/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi"future of the electric car/a in issue 16.09./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:e5509a1338aa2d046a0f36f53c86fd46:KTSfKmr30cBfHohgGm6zBCE5aLDI579Ry5%2FoG9QrW9e1KIT2xpDAJhCNE%2FP6%2BodTaIRTxDwhJCc5xg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:85af8ef1f22075639f5e1be7151d039b:KjXRBL7FimCdPfkcPkDUOZbe%2BR8tiL4gaeJxl%2FnucFQ8UL28mzRmZSeHpMqoJwFUINppaALMULUa'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:db4d557cf92ff9467e13e01b1aee6530:PWDj6Lri2aPp2F0l1o37LwimABRJS%2Bw%2FOQMMPSWuRMZRLZhLRGI4Q9jz2JLAIoyYna2BguNYIBWs'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:064842e7a9d26f4e96559df7ad75369c:Ri7lRQ2YuIojw9J42qFhanIkt9g%2B2lNj7ky0mPfhji4DJCDrd66IrgRLO78oVkOke9RGBuQDA3ra'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=V04TVZ"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=V04TVZ" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/474334201" height="1" width="1"/

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=492ac4b6796c7abf0000e603maxX=300maxY=297" border="0" alt="eliot spitzer happy.jpg" title="eliot spitzer happy.jpg" width="300" height="297" /Five years ago, after a previously-little-known Attorney General named Eliot Spitzer got me kicked out of the securities industry, during a period when I was sure that, among other things, no one would ever be caught dead professionally associating with me again, an editor named Jacob Weisberg at emSlate/em reached out a helping hand. With a big smile, Jacob said he liked the idea of my launching my "comeback" (his word) by covering the Martha Stewart trial for the magazine./p pI've never stopped being grateful to Jacob and his emSlate/em colleagues for that, and over the years, I've had the privilege writing several series and more than a hundred columns for the magazine. Those assignments opened the door to others (including a book on how not to get screwed by Wall Street), and ultimately led me to emSilicon Alley Insider/em. /p pIronically enough, it was also through emSlate/em that I actually got to meet Eliot Spitzer for the first time (I had been near his office before, in 2001, when his prosecutors spent five days grilling me, but I had never actually met the man). A year or so after the Martha Stewart affair, Eliot dropped by a emSlate/em event before launching his run for governor. I met him in the buffet line:/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"strongME/strong: Hi, Eliot, Henry Blodget, good to meet you. You made my life a bit rough there for a while!/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"strongELIOT /strong(3,000-watt smile): That's my job!/p p(Yes, he was charming. I even voted for the bastard.)/p pAnd now I see that a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2205995/"emSlate/em has a new columnist/a: a very well-known ex-Governor named Eliot Spitzer, who has recently had a rough patch of his own. I can imagine Jacob Weisberg's huge grin as he signed up his newest reputationally-challenged charge, and I can imagine Eliot's smile in return. And now that several bizarrely connected twists of fate have placed all three of us on the same team, I can't wait to shake both of their hands./p pI amem definitely /emgoing to the emSlate/em Christmas party this year./p p /p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/SRAEyDJk_Zyq3p6I2p3DsWEe118/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/SRAEyDJk_Zyq3p6I2p3DsWEe118/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=QyQZvVHX"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=QyQZvVHX" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=tOegvvTN"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=KGqEscxh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=phoPq8TI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=phoPq8TI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=VM96QDMS"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=BqfDt0VI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=xK9xjLH8"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=EcwV1jj0"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/K6HALUYaVrc" height="1" width="1"/

Peace Corps Online writes "Vascular surgeon David Nott performed a life-saving amputation on a boy in DR Congo following instructions sent my text message from a colleague in London. The boy's left arm had been ripped off and was badly infected and gangrenous, there were just 6in (15cm) of the boy's arm remaining, much of the surrounding muscle had died and there was little skin to fold over the wound. "He had about two or three days to live when I saw him," Nott said. Nott, volunteering in with the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, knew he needed to perform a forequarter amputation requiring removal of the collar bone and shoulder blade and contacted Professor Meirion Thomas at London's Royal Marsden Hospital, who had performed the operation before. 'I texted him and he texted back step by step instructions on how to do it,' Nott said."pa href="http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/03/2345206amp;from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=08/12/03/2345206"/a/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/03/2345206amp;from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/J9oK3A1iF3f1GUfJKxDC3n0h4fQ/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/J9oK3A1iF3f1GUfJKxDC3n0h4fQ/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/94qb9C_BhJU" height="1" width="1"/

A colleague and I are attempting to create a screencast using video created with Snapz Pro X. We successfully, eventually, managed to delete the appropriate frames and merge the clips together (to the best of our knowledge) and so we decided to export the movie.

We were somewhat less cautious than might have been sensible given it was the first time we were using this program but as it had taken him a fair amount of hours to get the movie into a useful state it's not surprising. We clicked file > export movie... and then I believe we got a pop-up asking us to choose QuickTime or the other option - which is the default. He clicked export and so our movie was exported in MPeg 4 format.

When we tried to then open the movie it opened in iTunes but, though it played, the whole movie was just black as if every frame was a black picture. It was precisely the correct length, just black.

We wondered whether it was a mistake we made so we went back to iMovie and clicked 'export to QuickTime' this time around and it did indeed open with QuickTime but again it was black.

I thought it might be that the movie had already been saved in the black MPeg 4 state and so we had just exported the black movie to QuickTime. I'm fairly sure that's the wrong answer and it doesn't help us understand why it exported a black movie in the first place.

Any help will be much appreciated. Sorry for the long question - I thought it would be better to give you as many details up front. If we do work it out, I'll post the answer back here too in case someone else does the same things wrong that we did.

psmallSylvie Barak a href="http://www.theinquirer.net/"the Inquirer/a, Wednesday 3 December 2008. 13:05:00/small/ppi SMS surgery /i/ppIT HAS BEEN revealed that a British volunteer surgeon in the 'Democratic Republic' of Congo managed to carry out a complex shoulder amputation using only a scalpel and instructions sent via text message from a colleague on holiday in the Azores..../pimg width='1' height='1' src='http://feeds.theinquirer.net/c/554/f/7127/s/27d25c9/mf.gif' border='0'/div class='mf-viral'table border='0'trtd valign='middle'a href="http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/sendemail2.html?title=Amputation by text messagelink=http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/12/03/amputation-text-message" target="_blank"img src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/emailthis2.gif" border="0" //a/tdtd valign='middle'a href="http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/bookmark.cfm?title=Amputation by text messagelink=http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/12/03/amputation-text-message" target="_blank"img src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/bookmark.gif" border="0" //a/td/tr/table/divbr/br/a href="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/25853516723/u/89/f/7127/c/554/s/41756105/a2.htm"img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/25853516723/u/89/f/7127/c/554/s/41756105/a2.img" border="0"//a

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/32642?ns=guardianpageName=Politics%3A+Report+on+Damian+Green+arrest+sent+to+CPSch=Politicsc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Damian+Green%2CConservatives%2CHouse+of+Commons%2CPolice+%28politics%29%2CLondon+politics%2CLondon+%28News%29%2CPolitics%2CWhitehall%2CUK+newsc5=Policy+Society%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CLocal+Government+Society%2CUnclassifed+Contributorsc6=Andrew+Sparrow%2CHelene+Mulhollandc7=2008_12_03c8=1128029c9=articlec10=GUc11=Politicsc12=Damian+Greenc13=c14=h2=GU%2FPolitics%2FDamian+Green" width="1" height="1" //divpA report on the Damian Green affair has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service "for consultation", the acting commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Stephenson, said today./ppIn an appearance at the London assembly, Stephenson also insisted that the police had permission to search Green's office in the House of Commons, that he had not been under political pressure to order the investigation, and that the police had not sought to bug Green's office./ppStephenson, who was flanked by Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor and chair of the Metropolitan police authority, did not refer to Green by name as he briefed the assembly and he said that he was reluctant to give details of an ongoing investigation. But he said, in view of the public interest in the affair, he wanted to set some facts straight./ppHe said that the Metropolitan police were called in after concerns were raised about a series of leaks from the Home Office. He said that the decision to arrest Green was only taken after the arrest and questioning of the civil servant allegedly involved, Christopher Galley./ppStephenson said that three premises associated with Green were searched with the authority of a warrant. And Green's office in the Commons was searched "after authority for a consensual search was obtained from the serjeant at arms", Stephenson said./ppHe went on: "Officers have an obligation to locate and secure evidence to avoid any circumstances where potential evidence could be lost," he said./ppStephenson said Green had been released on bail until February./pp"An initial report on evidence has been given to the CPS for consultation on the next steps of this inquiry," he said./ppStephenson told the assembly that he wanted to correct some of the claims made about the inquiry in the press./ppTories have revealed that Green had his offices searched for bugs after they were raided by the police because he was concerned that electronic listening devices could have been planted. Stephenson said Green's fears were untrue./ppStephenson also said that the idea that the police tried to use Galley to "entrap" Green in telephone calls after Galley's arrest and release was untrue. He pointed out that Galley had denied this himself earlier this week./ppAnd Stephenson insisted that Green had not been arrested using anti-terrorism powers, in connection with terrorist offences. He was arrested by counter-terrorism officers because special branch, which used to deal with cases like this, has merged with the counter-terrorism command./ppStephenson went on: "The decisions taken by officers will be judged through the criminal justice system and any other mechanism that the appropriate authorities deem necessary."/ppHe said: "Clearly this was going to be a sensitive investigation and it is right we should be held to account at the appropriate time ... at issue in this investigation, and the work of the service as a whole, is our ability to maintain operational independence. The police must be able to act without fear or favour in any investigation, whomsoever may be involved, where there are reasonable grounds to suspect they may have committed criminal offences." /ppAnd he stressed that ministers had not been involved. "I would strongly refute that I or any senior officer under my command have or would allow any improper influence on operational actions for political purposes," he said./ppStephenson outlined the investigation conducted since the arrest of a junior civil servant on November 19 by officers from counter-terrorism command. /ppHe said that officers from this branch of the force were involved because they include former special branch officers whose responsibilities include official leaks. /ppStephenson said: "It is our duty to follow the evidence wherever that may take us. It was as a result of the initial investigation and arrest that the decision was made by officers under the command of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick to arrest an MP and to search three addresses connected with him under authority of warrants." br / br /Johnson was grilled over his decision to make public a private meeting with Stephenson after the arrest of Green was revealed./ppLen Duvall ,the Labour assembly member who was ousted as MPA chair by Johnson in October, asked the mayor why he had leaked the details of his conversation with Stephenson to the press./ppJohnson insisted he had not sought to bring to bear political influence on police operations involving a Tory colleague./ppHe said it was "entirely right" for him in his capacity as chair of the MPA and as a "layman" to raise with Stephenson the likely political consequences of the arrest of an MP in a leak inquiry./ppJohnson said he had only sought to "warn and counsel" Stephenson./pp"Nothing I said turned the course of that inquiry," said Johnson. /ppHe added: "Perhaps I should be arrested for leaking the details of my own conversations."/ppJohnson told the assembly that the police should be left to get on with the inquiry. "It has just got to run its course and after that time it may be that within the MPA we should look at what went on and whether anything went wrong."/ppHe resisted suggestions that the MPA should "countermand" police operations./ppDetails of Johnson's row with Stephenson were released by his office to the press last week./ppAs news of the arrest of Green emerged, Johnson told Stephenson he found it "hard to believe" that anti-terrorism police had been used to "target an elected representative of parliament for no greater crime than allegedly receiving leaked documents./ppThe Tory mayor told the new acting commissioner that he would need to see convincing evidence that this action was necessary and proportionate. He suggested that this was not the common-sense policing that people wanted when London faces a real terror threat./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/damian-green"Damian Green/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/conservatives"Conservatives/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/houseofcommons"House of Commons/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/police"Police/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/london"London politics/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/london"London/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/whitehall"Whitehall/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/bZQTWvANhZSe09sfvF1jhr7UuXE/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/bZQTWvANhZSe09sfvF1jhr7UuXE/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

Category: Business
Released: Nov 30, 2008
Price: $0.99

Description:
Call your secretary, personal assistant or colleague directly with just the touch of a button. No need to scroll through your contact list or address book again. No need to hunt for a phone number. Call Assistant is quick and easy to use and the only initial setup required is to enter the number via the iPhone Settings area.

Website: http://www.afaridan.com.au
Support Website: http://www.afaridan.com.au

Note: The description above is the official one supplied by the application developer and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of this site or its staff.


Get it on iTunes: Call Assistant

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/29840?ns=guardianpageName=Science%3A+Body+swap+research+shows+that+self+is+a+trick+of+the+mindch=Sciencec3=The+Guardianc4=Human+behaviour+%28Science%29%2CNeuroscience%2CScience%2CWorld+newsc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=James+Randersonc7=2008_12_03c8=1127800c9=articlec10=GUc11=Sciencec12=Human+behaviourc13=c14=h2=GU%2FScience%2FHuman+behaviour" width="1" height="1" //divpBrain scientists have succeeded in fooling people into thinking they are inside the body of another person or a plastic dummy./ppThe out-of-body experience - which is surprisingly easy to induce - will help researchers to understand how the human brain constructs a sense of physical self. The research may also lead to practical applications such as more intuitive remote control of robots, treatments for phantom limb pain in amputee patients and possible treatments for anorexia./ppThe research follows a related study from the same group last year in which the scientists convinced volunteers that they were having an out-of-body experience. It was the first time it had been done in the lab and showed that the intensely spiritual experiences that patients sometimes have while on the operating table, for instance, can have a scientific explanation./pp"We are interested in how normal perception works, how we recognise our own body. And we do that by studying these perceptual illusions," said Dr Henrik Ehrsson at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. "Critically it depends on the visual perspective and the so-called multisensory integration or the combination of visual signals and tactile signals."/ppIn the new study Ehrsson and his colleague, Valeria Petkova, attached two cameras to the head of a dummy. These were hooked up to two small screens placed in front of their subjects' eyes. This gave the illusion that the person was looking through the mannequin's eyes. For example, when they looked down they saw the dummy's body and not their own./ppTo create the illusion of occupying the dummy's body, the team stroked the abdomen of the subject and the dummy at the same time while the subject watched the stroking via the cameras on the dummy's head. As a result, subjects reported a strong feeling that the dummy's body was their own. The technique is similar to the "rubber hand illusion", in which a subject can be convinced that a rubber hand is his or her own, but this is the first time the illusion has been extended to a whole body./ppThe illusion was so convincing that when the researchers threatened the dummy with a knife they recorded an increase in the subject's skin conductance response - the indicator of stress that polygraph lie detector tests rely on. "This shows how easy it is to change the brain's perception of the physical self," said Ehrsson, who led the project. "By manipulating sensory impressions, it's possible to fool the self not only out of its body but into other bodies too."/ppThings got even weirder when the researchers dispensed with the dummy and put the cameras on the head of another person. After carrying out the same double stroking routine the subjects were convinced that they were occupying another person's body. The illusion persisted even when the other person came over and shook the subject's hand, producing the sensation of the subject feeling as if they were shaking hands with themselves./ppThe researchers plan to use the out-of-body illusion to try to treat amputee patients that experience phantom limb pain in the arm or leg they have lost. "We have begun to realise that there could be a link between pain perception and the feeling of ownership of the body," said Ehrsson./ppAnother potential angle for research is body image in patients with anorexia. These people become obsessed with reducing their own weight even when they become dangerously thin. "Possibly this approach could be used for new diagnostic tools and maybe therapeutic tools to train people better to recognise their actual body size," he said./ppAnother application is in remotely operated robots, for example in nuclear power plants or surgery. "The hope is to elicit a full-blown illusion that you are the robot," said Ehrsson. /ppThe results are reported today in the journal PLoS One./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/humanbehaviour"Human behaviour/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/neuroscience"Neuroscience/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/vnhkntb0WRPif9pHE4oKf-V0Dp0/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/vnhkntb0WRPif9pHE4oKf-V0Dp0/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/47906?ns=guardianpageName=Society%3A+Surgeon+carries+out+amputation+by+textch=Societyc3=The+Guardianc4=Health+%28Society%29%2CMedical+research+%28Science%29%2CMobile+phones+%28Technology%29%2CTechnology%2CCongo+%28News%29%2CWorld+news%2CUK+news%2CScience%2CSocietyc5=Society+Weekly%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CTechnology+Gadgets%2CHealth+Society%2CCorporate+ITc6=Sam+Jonesc7=2008_12_03c8=1127862c9=articlec10=GUc11=Societyc12=Healthc13=c14=h2=GU%2FSociety%2FHealth" width="1" height="1" //divpA British surgeon volunteering in the Democratic Republic of Congo saved the life of a teenage boy by amputating his shoulder using instructions texted by a colleague in London./ppDavid Nott, 52, a general and vascular surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster hospital, was working with the charity Meacute;decins sans Frontiegrave;res (MSF) in the town of Rutshuru when he came across the badly injured 16-year-old in October./ppThe teenager's left arm had been so badly damaged - either in an accident or as a result of the fighting between Congolese and rebel troops - that it had already had to be amputated. But the flesh and bone that remained had become badly infected and gangrenous./pp"He was dying" said Nott. "He had about two or three days to live."/ppThe doctor realised the boy's best chance of survival was a forequarter amputation which requires the surgeon to remove the collar bone and shoulder blade. The only problem was that it was an operation Nott had never performed. But he remembered that one of his colleagues at home had carried out the procedure./pp"I texted him and he texted back step-by-step instructions," he said./pp"Even then I had to think long and hard about whether it was right to leave a young boy with only one arm in the middle of this fighting./pp"But in the end he would have died without it, so I took a deep breath and followed the instructions to the letter."/ppSuch an operation, if performed in the UK, would require careful planning with every sort of modern medical product on hand if things went wrong./ppBut in Congo Nott had just one pint of blood and an elementary operating theatre./ppDespite the basic conditions, the operation was a success and the teenager made a full recovery./ppMore than 5 million people have been killed in Congo since the early 1990s when the Rwandan genocide spread into what was then Zaire./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/health"Health/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/medicalresearch"Medical research/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/mobilephones"Mobile phones/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/congo"Democratic Republic of the Congo/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ELmUiroX86miaJP2-MRmEwEdsuE/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ELmUiroX86miaJP2-MRmEwEdsuE/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

A British doctor volunteering in DR Congo performs a life-saving amputation using text message instructions from a colleague.

A British doctor volunteering in DR Congo performs a life-saving amputation using text message instructions from a colleague.

A British doctor volunteering in DR Congo performs a life-saving amputation using text message instructions from a colleague.

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/38354?ns=guardianpageName=Art+and+design%3A+%27I+was+shocked+by+the+hatred%27ch=Art+and+designc3=The+Guardianc4=Mark+Leckey%2CCulture+section%2CTurner+prize%2CArt+%28visual+arts+only%29%2CArt+and+design%2CAwards+and+prizes+%28Culture%29c5=Art%2CNot+commercially+usefulc6=Charlotte+Higginsc7=2008_12_03c8=1127709c9=articlec10=GUc11=Art+and+designc12=Mark+Leckeyc13=c14=h2=GU%2FArt+and+design%2FMark+Leckey" width="1" height="1" //divpMark Leckey has been handed two kinds of hangover cure the morning after winning the Turner prize - a packet of ibuprofen and an orange tube of Berocca. But the hangover doesn't show: the artist is neat as a pin in dandyish pink jeans, delicately polka-dotted shirt and a bleached-gold mane straight out of the George Michael school of haircare. /ppWhen the Turner prize is not being decried as insanely controversial, it is written off as dull and well past its sell-by date. This year's show fell into the latter category. Leckey, like many a winner before him, has discovered the hard way that a cheque for pound;25,000 and an instantly improved career come at the price of a public mauling. The Independent yearned for something that wasn't "about wearing your theory-stuffed brain on your sleeve". The Telegraph wrote off the entire show as "technically competent, bland, and ultimately empty". /pp"What I was warned to expect, but still shocked me, was how much obloquy and hatred the prize generates," he says. "I love the Stuckist conspiracy theory, that Nicholas Serota is a kind of machiavellian Skeletor who manipulates the government and the people." He will have had good advice, too: at Monday night's ceremony he was hand-in-hand with a Tate curator who has overseen previous Turner prize exhibitions; one of this year's judges, Daniel Birnbaum, is a colleague at the Frankfurt art school where he teaches. ("I know