• nvcc C compiler
• CUDA FFT and BLAS libraries for the GPU
• Profiler
• gdb debugger for the GPU (alpha available in March, 2008)
• CUDA runtime driver (now also available in the standard NVIDIA GPU driver)
• CUDA programming manual

• Parallel bitonic sort
• Matrix multiplication
• Matrix transpose
• Performance profiling using timers
• Parallel prefix sum (scan) of large arrays
• Image convolution
• 1D DWT using Haar wavelet
• Many more features

Release Highlights

• Support for the new Fermi architecture, with:
• • Native 64-bit GPU support
  • Multiple Copy Engine support
  • ECC reporting
  • Concurrent Kernel Execution
  • Fermi HW debugging support in cuda-gdb
  • Fermi HW profiling support for CUDA C and OpenCL in Visual Profiler
• C++ Class Inheritance and Template Inheritance support for increased programmer productivity
• A new unified interoperability API for Direct3D and OpenGL, with support for:
• • OpenGL texture interop
  • Direct3D 11 interop support
• CUDA Driver / Runtime Buffer Interoperability, which allows applications using the CUDA Driver API to also use libraries implemented using the CUDA C Runtime such as CUFFT and CUBLAS.
• CUBLAS now supports all BLAS1, 2, and 3 routines including those for single and double precision complex numbers
• Up to 100x performance improvement while debugging applications with cuda-gdb
• cuda-gdb hardware debugging support for applications that use the CUDA Driver API
• cuda-gdb support for JIT-compiled kernels
• New CUDA Memory Checker reports misalignment and out of bounds errors, available as a stand-alone utility and debugging mode within cuda-gdb
• CUDA Toolkit libraries are now versioned, enabling applications to require a specific version, support multiple versions explicitly, etc.
• CUDA C/C++ kernels are now compiled to standard ELF format
• Support for device emulation mode has been packaged in a separate version of the CUDA C Runtime (CUDART), and is deprecated in this release. Now that more sophisticated hardware debugging tools are available and more are on the way, NVIDIA will be focusing on supporting these tools instead of the legacy device emulation functionality.
• • On Windows, use the new Parallel Nsight development environment for Visual Studio, with integrated GPU debugging and profiling tools (was code-named "Nexus"). Please see www.nvidia.com/nsight for details.
  • On Linux, use cuda-gdb and cuda-memcheck, and check out the solutions from Allinea and TotalView that will be available soon.
• Support for all the OpenCL features in the latest R195 production driver package:
• • Double Precision
  • Graphics Interoperability with OpenCL, Direc3D9, Direct3D10, and Direct3D11 for high performance visualization
  • o Query for Compute Capability, so you can target optimizations for GPU architectures (cl_nv_device_attribute_query)
  • Ability to control compiler optimization settings via support for pragma unroll in OpenCL kernels and an extension that allows programmers to set compiler flags. (cl_nv_compiler_options)
  • OpenCL Images support, for better/faster image filtering
  • 32-bit global and local atomics for fast, convenient data manipulation
  • Byte Addressable Stores, for faster video/image processing and compression algorithms
  • Support for the latest OpenCL spec revision 1.0.48 and latest official Khronos OpenCL headers as of 2010-02-17

The favourite new drug of clubbers and schoolchildren hit the headlines last week when two young men died after taking it. Sold under a range of street names – meph, miaow miaow, MC, drone and bubbles – and easily available on the web, mephedrone is not illegal. But should it be? Here, four people from different sides of the debate – a user, a mother, a dealer and a doctor – have their say on 'the poor man's cocaine'

The first time I encountered mephedrone, meow meow, plant food or whatever you want to call it, was about a year ago at a friend's house in south London. We were back from a night out at the student union and all wanting to continue the party when my friend's flatmate, Brandon, got back from work and, with a sly smile, disappeared into his bedroom, to return with a huge box. He dumped the biggest pile of powder I had ever seen on the table. "This, my friends, is mephedrone," he said with relish. "And this is the future."

Like many students, I've never been one to say no to a new experience. We all end up running into drugs at some point, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I've always enjoyed a spliff and, on occasion, a little more, so I assumed this was just another casual substance I would be bumping into.

Nicknamed by users as "poor man's cocaine", mephedrone has swept through our nation's youth like a strong dose of salts, permeating every aspect of the party and night club scene. In less than six months, it has come from obscurity; everyone knows someone who's on it. Paradoxically, it was given a chance to become popular because of an EU restriction that prevented the importation of two substances necessary to the production of MDMA (ecstasy to the layman) that made it impossible to make or purchase any MDMA in Britain from late 2008. Mephedrone filled the gap in the market, and at half the cost of MDMA; it was everywhere.

You can snort it, drop it in "bombs" (rolling papers filled with it), and I've even come across people who eat it. The effect is euphoric, in some ways similar to ecstasy but much shorter-lived; you need to take a lot more of it a lot more often. The first time I took it, I could feel my heart pounding; everything seemed as if it was about to explode into life and I was up till the early hours in a wild rampage of excitement. But there any comparison ends. With mephedrone, the romance period is very short: after taking it just a couple of times, your tolerance increases dramatically, to the point that you're doing three or four times more than you were in the beginning to get high. Your appetite for the stuff also increases.

Brandon was well ahead of the curve. He was importing it from China at about a £1 a gram and selling it to students at £15. By mid-October, when our student loans had still failed to appear and finance was getting tight, we hit on the idea of doing the same. We could simply make a trip down to a seedy office in Victoria where we could buy it in bulk at wholesale price and then sell it on to our friends at a profit. Doing this you could turn £100 into £400 in a weekend and have a bit left on the side for yourself.

It became a crash course in drug dealing for beginners, and we weren't the only ones at it. Hundreds of students had spotted the gap in the market. You couldn't set foot in a club or house-party without someone walking past offering you "drone".

Whether or not this was legal is a good question, because although mephedrone isn't covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act, it is illegal to sell it for human consumption. Companies get round this by putting stickers on their product saying just that. When selling it, we would always tell people that it was not to be used to get high – it was almost a running joke. A very dangerous joke indeed.

When on it, you get very edgy (hence the comparison to cocaine) and you constantly crave more. It is possibly the most addictive substance I have ever come across. What makes it far more dangerous is that it is the first of a new breed of designer drugs, made purely to evade the laws surrounding controlled substances.

No one has considered what this will do to people in the short or the long term, and no one cares. Mephedrone might be called "plant food", but it is a plant decomposer, so what it does to your insides I dread to think. I once accidentally left a spoon in a bag of the stuff and came back three days later to find it had stripped off the outer coating and my mephedrone scattered with tiny silver bits of spoon. We still snorted it.

My stance was changed dramatically by my experience of prolonged use. After three or so months of using it at least a couple of times a week, I found myself in the darkest depression. I stopped taking it and suddenly found myself looking round at my friends with their eyes rolling in their heads and realised how much rubbish we had all been talking to each other. Good, straight-edge kids who barely used to drink have become crazed drug fiends, sitting in their house snorting plant food five days a week.

One friend of mine took it once and now has to use an inhaler, because he has permanently damaged his lungs. Another has almost ceased to be a friend, and is now a socially apathetic zombie, chasing mephedrone around London with his girlfriend, no longer able to interact without it, constantly asking if he can borrow 20 quid.

We've always been happy to get wasted on a night out, but I've never seen anything creep into so many everyday lives like this. I am horrified by the effect this drug has had on the people around me, and would urge anyone thinking about taking some tonight to change their plans.

Jack Starks is a student in his early 20s who lives in south London

For all those parents who have read with sadness about the deaths of an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old in Scunthorpe, but allowed themselves to be even slightly reassured that their own teenagers can't have come across mephedrone because they are so much younger, not yet clubbing and living very different lives, think again.

I first heard about mephedrone six months ago, at first from another north London mother whose son had ordered this "plant food" off the internet and who had roused her suspicions when he couldn't explain why he had suddenly developed an interest in gardening.

Then from my own daughter, aged 14 at the time, whose friends had discovered this legal high. She described them as "talking rubbish as if it is the most interesting thing in the world, and that they dribble and lick their lips and gurn and grind their teeth".

She said that people shook, bit holes in their lips and cheeks, were unable to feel their legs, were frightened because their heart was beating too fast and that their skin looked grey.

This might seem like any teenage group that has discovered harder drugs. It is rather like a description of my own group of friends at that age. What is different is that, in those six months, those friends who thought they were just experimenting seemed to need to take greater amounts of mephedrone on more and more occasions. Mephedrone is often sold in five gram bags and, as it is so "more-ish", it seems to be easy – even common – for a user to go through a whole bag.

Surely that kind of ever-decreasing, short-lived high is what makes dealers extremely rich and leads to the kind of desperate endless addiction of the crack-user?

Should all of this mean that we should immediately ban it? Well, I have always had a liberal view about drugs, believing that the criminalisation of drugs just creates an underground. I look at how making ketamine (a horse tranquilliser) a class C drug didn't stop its use among the young.

On an intellectual level, I agree with Professor David Nutt's measured suggestion of creating a "holding" class of D drug category. Within this category, sales would be limited to over-18s; the product would be quality-controlled, at doses limited as far as possible to safe levels; and it would come with health education messages. I also agree with Nutt that what we should look into is why teenagers are so drawn to taking drugs and why binge-drinking is so prevalent in this age group.

On a much more visceral, instinctive level, this "let's wait and see how harmful this drug is" D category doesn't comfort me at all. For this younger age group, the legality of mephedrone is a real attraction. While they can get hold of "weed" to smoke (mostly through older siblings, and even parents), because they are not yet going to clubs but to each other's houses or private parties they are rarely able to get their hands on harder drugs.

They can buy mephedrone off the internet or from headshops (shops selling drug paraphernalia) or stalls. Teenagers of this age seem to think that its legality means that it is safer than other drugs, which might also contribute to the wild abandon with which it is taken.

Health warnings wouldn't do a thing (my daughter says that, perversely, the deaths in Scunthorpe have made her friends even more determined to take the drug) and surely an over-18s rule on the net would be just like those porn sites that ask you to click a button to say that you are over 18 and that's all the proof you need. Prosecution of those selling to under-18s would be almost impossible in cases of website dealing.

For this age group, making mephedrone a class B drug would at least put up some sort of substantial hurdle and make it much harder for them to get hold of.

Just making it so much more difficult to track down may cause enough of a pause for some sort of easing-off from the enthusiastic consumption of what seems to be a particularly addictive drug.

Oh, and while we are waiting for a decision on this, look out for a fishy smell in your teenager's sweat, nose bleeds, restlessness, headaches, insomnia and a traces of yellowy powder on the surfaces in their room.

Sophie Radice is a journalist and mother of two who first came across the drug last year

I have no background in narcotics. My worst offence is a puff on a joint in college, which I found unpleasant. I am at heart "anti" substance abuse, though I am in favour of free choice.

I own and run three normal, legitimate businesses, all of which, thanks to the recession, have had their troubles. Have you ever laid off a loyal member of staff? It's the worst feeling in the world. I was looking for a lifeline.

I first heard of mephedrone in September. A friend heard about a new chemical that was originally a kind of plant food. It was legal and its effects mimicked cocaine and MDMA. I started searching for information on Google and within an hour I knew this would be a winning business.

From the start, I wanted to run this completely legitimately. No shady cash deals, pay tax, give excellent service with a quality product at the right price. Was I comfortable with the concept? No. Did I want to lose my home to the bank? No. Decision made.

In the first weeks, I bought my stock inside the UK, but very quickly I began buying direct from a manufacturer in China. I registered a company and contacted a web designer.

This is where the problems started. Even before the press discovered mephedrone, it was not possible to find good professional help. Undaunted, I built my own website. No banks would touch the credit card side of the business. I fudged round this and I was up and running. I launched the website and within an hour had five sales. My first week I turned over £8,000; the second, £10,000.

Then, last November, mephedrone hit the headlines. Its use was blamed for the death of a 14-year-old girl, although this turned out not to be the case. I thought it was the end. How wrong I was. That week, sales doubled. When mephedrone is in the news, demand rockets. Last week came the death of two boys. (I cannot comment on this tragedy, except to say I do not believe mephedrone was the cause.) One of my websites, which usually gets around 1,200 hits a day, received more than 20,000. The media have made mephedrone what it is.

Before you leap to judgment, do you drink alcohol? It is deadly, with 8,000 deaths directly attributed to it in the UK in 2008. There is a huge trade in illegal drugs in the UK. But people do not have to be criminals. They don't have to buy bags of drain cleaner from dodgy blokes in pub car parks.

The process of importing has become difficult lately, as UK Customs has begun withholding shipments. I have had 40kg seized. No explanation has been given and Customs has made no contact. This is surely illegal.

Mephedrone looks likely to be banned. This is the most dangerous thing that can happen. It is essentially a very safe substance. There is no addiction and to date I know of no deaths directly attributed to it. There are suppliers online such as me who treat this as a genuine business and supply a quality product pure to the customer.

The day mephedrone is banned, I will shut up shop. The taxman will lose hundreds of thousands of pounds and the criminals will step in. Prohibition has always failed. And the genie is really out of the bottle this time. Millions have used mephedrone in the UK. If they are stopped from getting it legally, they will either buy illegally or, even worse, try something new.

No British government would have the courage to exercise the level of common sense needed to keep it legal, what with an election looming and swarms of horrified Daily Mail readers to impress. This government has already sacked the moderate, sensible and knowledgeable Dr David Nutt. Mephedrone will be banned – and be dammed.

Mark is a businessman and owner of several websites that sell mephedrone

I first heard about mephedrone last July. The young man sitting opposite me told me that it had just arrived on the nightclub scene. He had tried it at once. He was well-educated and from a prosperous and stable family (who knew nothing about his drug use). He was in my clinic to withdraw from another "legal high", GBL. After using GBL for a few months, he had been dismayed to discover that he had become dependent. His lament "I didn't know it was addictive" could have been uttered by most doctors and policy-makers.

We are all playing catch-up as new compounds are recognised, banned – and new drugs appear, the risks of which slowly become apparent. Legal highs are mostly compounds closely related to known (and banned) psychoactive drugs. Mephedrone is chemically very similar to ecstasy. The slight variation in structure makes it legal, but also means that mephedrone has different pharmacological effects and toxicity.

This makes difficulty for the advisory council on the misuse of drugs, which advises the government on whether a drug should be banned, as it has little information to go on. It takes experience to find out about the harms of particular drugs. It was only in the late 1990s, after years in which cannabis was regarded as a fairly harmless drug, that studies demonstrated it caused the development of psychosis in some vulnerable adolescents. News that two people died after using mephedrone suggests it may be dangerous, but we don't know enough. Mephedrone can cause cardiovascular problems, but I suspect that the post-mortem findings will identify other contributing drugs.

GBL, which was classified in December 2009, is a case study in legal highs. Many users overdose inadvertently and a small proportion progress to dependence. On trying to stop, users can experience severe withdrawal symptoms. Throughout 2009, most GPs and drug services knew nothing of GBL, and were unable to offer treatment. It was to catch up with this need that a "party drugs" clinic was established in south London . Attendees have reported that, since being banned, GBL is still readily available for same-day delivery, from internet sites outside the UK.

Mephedrone and GBL both enhance confidence and sociability and reduce sexual inhibitions. However, it is easy to lose the plot. The first dose of mephedrone produces intense euphoria, but repeated dosing produces decreasing pleasure and increasing paranoia and irritability – yet some people keep chasing the initial high until exhausted. This binge pattern of use maximises risks and minimises benefits of drug use.

A pre-election environment is a bad time to initiate a discussion about drugs policy, as there is a risk that any debate will degenerate into which party is going to ban more drugs, more rapidly. "Legal highs" are an easy target for moral outrage, precisely because they are legal and something can be done about that. More difficult is trying to address Britain's prodigious demand for drugs, legal and illegal. A non-partisan debate about reducing the harm would be valuable.

Dr James Bell is an addictions consultant at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust

• Drugs
• Drugs policy

Alistair Darling will announce plans to back low-carbon transport and energy projects in 'budget for growth'

Alistair Darling will this week announce a £1bn fund to kick-start investment in green transport and energy projects as part of a "budget for growth".

With Wednesday's budget coming weeks before an expected general election, the chancellor will use his plans for the new low-carbon infrastructure scheme to contrast Labour's support for industry with the Conservatives' more hands-off philosophy.

Business secretary Lord Mandelson, who has spearheaded the government's new, more interventionist approach, told the Observer that the Conservatives "wouldn't lift a single finger" to help manufacturing.

With the public finances tight, the new green fund will be relatively small in scale, but the government hopes to use the cash to tempt private investors to back innovative new ideas. "It's about saying there are ways in which the government can play a role, which are not necessarily multibillion-pound projects," said a Treasury source. He cited the model of the Sheffield Forgemasters plant, where Mandelson last week used an £80m loan from taxpayers to secure a £170m financing package that included support from the European Investment Bank and nuclear supplier Westinghouse.

The Sheffield Forgemasters deal – which will create 180 jobs initially and provide 1,000 apprenticeships – was one of several new industrial investments announced in recent weeks that have been secured with the help of public subsidy.

Mandelson said: "People say: why am I securing Vauxhall, why am I securing the Nissan electric car to be produced in Sunderland, why am I securing the development and production of Ford's green technologies, why did I go to Sheffield Forgemasters to deliver funding for a 15,000-tonne press? It's because if the government doesn't act here, some other government will. If we hadn't bridged the final mile in the way that we did, because the market couldn't or wouldn't provide, then the investment would have gone elsewhere."

With the government committed to reduce UK carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, radical changes in infrastructure and power generation will be needed over the coming decades. Labour hopes that by boosting low-carbon energy such as wind, wave and solar power, and helping to upgrade the transport system to use cleaner fuels, it can help to meet those targets while creating thousands of new "green-collar jobs".

But environmental campaigners warned that £1bn would not go very far. Andrew Simms, director of the New Economics Foundation, said: "If what they're talking about is less than one five-hundredth of the amount that was thrown at the banking system, at a point where investment banks have bonus pots bigger than £1bn, then while the idea is right, the size of the ambition smacks of skewed priorities."

Comparing the task of preparing for a new low-carbon era to the long drive from London to Edinburgh, he said: "You won't get very far on a teacupful of petrol." The Stern review on the economics of climate change suggested it would cost more than £10bn a year to prepare the economy for cuts in emissions on the scale needed.

Mandelson stressed that as well as underpinning growth, the budget would also reaffirm Labour's determination to tackle the public deficit. The latest official figures showed that the public finances are in a healthier state than the chancellor feared at the time of December's pre-budget report, and he could reduce his £178bn estimate of this year's deficit by as much as £10bn.

But Mandelson said that would not alter the government's plans for tax rises and public spending cuts in the years ahead. "We will maintain a tough deficit reduction programme: there's no question about it. It's necessary for the health of the economy, for the confidence of the markets. We will make it absolutely clear that what we have committed to, we will follow through."

However, Darling will also stress that – unlike the Conservatives, who would start cutbacks immediately – Labour will "lock in recovery" by maintaining its financial support for the fragile economy for another year.

The UK emerged from recession in the final quarter of 2009, growing by 0.3%, but Bank of England policymakers have left low interest rates in place, making clear they remain nervous about the sustainability of the upturn.

Separately, Mandelson is also likely to be given the task of overseeing a new state-backed investment bank, which will help to support businesses struggling to secure funding from banks.

• Budget
• Energy
• Carbon emissions
• Transport policy
• Alistair Darling
• Peter Mandelson
• Nissan

Protest groups that were targeted by infiltrators plan legal action to obtain access to police files after disclosures by Officer A

Political activists have reacted with anger to revelations in last week's Observer that their organisations were infiltrated by an elite undercover unit of the Metropolitan police.

Members of one of the groups demanded a public inquiry after the Observer disclosed that a former member of Special Branch, known as Officer A, had infiltrated far-left organisations in the mid-1990s to gather intelligence about potentially violent demonstrators. He was regularly involved in brutal confrontations with uniformed police officers and activists from the extreme right. On numerous occasions he engaged in violent acts to maintain his cover.

Many activists suspected they were being infiltrated by the state at the time, but it is only now that their suspicions have been confirmed. One target of Officer A, a former student union leader who has asked not to be identified, told the Observer: "I suspected that my phone might have been tapped. I believed that there might have been some police spies at the demonstrations that I attended. But however paranoid I was, I never imagined they would go so far as to invest the level of resources needed to give someone a completely new identity for five years and have them spy on someone like me. It really is astonishing."

Officer A was part of a secret unit of the Met known as the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which since 1968 had 10 full-time undercover operatives inside so-called "subversive" organisations to disrupt their ability to create disorder on the streets of London.

While Officer A targeted the far left, other SDS members were simultaneously infiltrating the far right. By the end of his four-year deployment he had become a branch secretary of a leading anti-racist organisation, Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE). He used this position to assist in making contact with smaller groups that had a reputation for being involved in violence.

Hannah Sell, national secretary of the YRE at the time of Officer A's deployment, remembers him well but is furious at the implication that the group was involved in violence. "We organised mass peaceful protests against racism and the BNP. In doing so we often faced violence from the far right and the police."

The Observer understands that many of the tactics now used by police in public order situations were developed in response to SDS intelligence about the best way to control potential troublemakers. This includes the controversial tactic known as "kettling", in which protesters are hemmed in on all sides by police, a technique many believe only heightens tensions.

Lois Austin, YRE chair at the time of Officer A's infiltration, told the Observer: "We believe there should be a public inquiry into police tactics at demonstrations. It should be independent, not one where the police investigate themselves. We want to know about their use of spies and whether this unit is still operational."

The calls for an inquiry come amid fresh criticism of heavy-handed police tactics at the G20 protest in London last April, when newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson died of a heart attack soon after being struck by a police baton and pushed to the ground. It has emerged that plainclothes officers from City of London police mingled with the crowd to gather intelligence. Many former activists who believe they were SDS targets intend to take legal action in an attempt to obtain any police intelligence files about their activities.

• Police

Unite and Labour are in an abusive relationship that stops any chance of worthwhile change

Success hasn't spoiled Charlie Whelan. He was a character assassin and thug long before he became famous. I last met the political director of Unite in the autumn of 2008 as he was encouraging compliant journalists to go after Alistair Darling. I thought I had witnessed all varieties of political hypocrisy, but Whelan still shocked me because he was attacking the chancellor for a crime that was no crime at all to anyone in the centre-left tradition.

Darling had correctly identified that allowing speculators to run riot had left Britain facing the worst financial crisis in 60 years. Gordon Brown had to betray a friend and denigrate an ally for this statement of the obvious because he was the bedazzled dupe who had borrowed as if the riotous market could roar on forever and told City bankers at the Mansion House in 2007 that Britain needed more, rather than less, of their "vigour, ingenuity and aspiration". Despite their loudly professed left-wing principles and equally suspect mockney accents, Whelan and Damian McBride went for Darling for honestly admitting that boom and bust had not been abolished after all. Lobby correspondents behaved like children egging on the playground bully, and allowed "government sources", hiding behind the coward's cloak of anonymity, to tell their readers that the chancellor's job was on the line.

The Thick of It does not give you the half of it. Before Darling, Whelan's target was Martin Bright, the New Statesman's political editor. He boasted to Bright's wife at the 2008 British Press Awards that he had the power to instruct Geoffrey Robinson, the magazine's Brownite owner, to fire her husband and father of her children for not showing due respect to Gordon Brown and for making a documentary about Ken Livingstone's indulgence of the Islamist far right. "He can't allow this. He can't allow criticism of Gordon. If Geoffrey's got any sense, he'll listen." Bright was duly forced out, although the paper insists that it remains a part of the free press, and that its compliance with Downing Street's publicly declared wishes was a coincidence.

I drag up these ugly scenes because the Tory attack on Whelan and Unite is missing the point. Conservatives claim that by making Brown's spin doctor its political director, Unite is using its powers of patronage to take over the Labour party. Unite officers are getting Labour nominations for plum seats – John Cryer in Leyton, Jack Dromey in Birmingham Erdington – while Unite money is funding the fight against the Tories in the marginals.

The money matters, of course, but the story isn't quite right. Manufacturing Birmingham was always going to look favourably on Dromey, who has been involved in industrial disputes since the 1970s. Meanwhile, far from being a Whelan placeman, Cryer was another of his targets. Along with fellow Unite officials, Cryer went on long-term sick leave after Whelan came to the union, the cause of which may be guessed by the grievance procedures they brought against him citing stress.

Unite isn't running Labour. Both are caught in an abusive relationship, and it is hard to know who is the abuser and who is the victim. The union is hurting Brown's cause by dragging him into air strikes just before an election, but the union movement and British politics is suffering as badly.

From the narrow trade unionist point of view, the BA cabin crew are not benefiting from having Whelan, the supposed master of spin, as a comrade. The media always turn on strikers, because managers briskly deunionised most of the industry in the 1980s, and because editors know that more readers will complain about a strike than support it. Even if you accept that bias, you ought to be surprised that Unite is putting its case so poorly. The public does not know that air hostesses and stewards are not revolutionary militants, but reasonable men and women who made a conciliatory offer to accept a pay cut instead of redundancies which extremist managers refused to countenance.

More widely, an opportunity to change the terms of public debate is being missed. Commentators announce that the recession and strikes herald a return to the 1970s, and cannot see that today's crisis is nothing like the collapse of social democracy a generation ago. Margaret Thatcher won three election victories because enough voters believed that exorbitant wage demands had wrecked the economy. This time, no one can plausibly maintain that the unions brought ruin to the country. The folly of the financial elite, and the neglect of the public officials and politicians who should have been regulating, brought us low in 2008. Trade unions ought to be agitating for causes which are close to their hearts: how to create a new Britain which is not so fatally dependent on the manipulation of money markets; how to revive manufacturing; and how to regulate the City so that never again do working- and middle-class taxpayers have to bail out the super-rich.

If they did, they would find that many Mail and Telegraph readers would support them, because they know that their taxes will rise and services will be cut to pay for the City's blunders. Yet Britain's largest union cannot begin an urgent conversation because it is not just tying itself to Labour but to the Brownite faction, which Unite's leaders dumbly believe to be a left-wing alternative to the hated Tony Blair. They don't understand that the Brownites are not rough yet honourable street fighters in the Labour movement, but the Westminster equivalent of Mafia enforcers who try to eliminate anyone who stands in their don's way regardless of their political beliefs. They assail the chancellor for knowing a classic crisis of financial capitalism when he sees it and journalists for criticising politicians who court religious reactionaries. When Brown is gone, they hope to extend the Brownite reign by persuading the unions to put the unprepossessing Ed Balls in his place, even though as Brown's deputy at the Treasury he was as culpable for the regulatory failure as his equally unprepossessing patron.

Outsiders look at our clannish politics and ask why the Conservatives cling to Lord Ashcroft and Labour continues to listen to Whelan when they bring nothing but disrepute to their parties. More striking is the torpor of the trade unions, which ought to be seizing the chance to create a new political consensus, but are letting it slip away.

• Gordon Brown
• Alistair Darling
• British Airways
• Trade unions

Charles Arthur investigates how the ways in which we watch sport, read magazines and do business with each other could change for ever

Don't act too surprised if, some time in the next year, you meet someone who explains that their business card isn't just a card; it's an augmented reality business card. You can see a collection and, at visualcard.me, you can even design your own, by adding a special marker to your card, which, once put in front of a webcam linked to the internet, will show not only your contact details but also a video or sound clip. Or pretty much anything you want.

It's not just business cards. London Fashion Week has tried them out too: little symbols that look like barcodes printed onto shirts, which, when viewed through a webcam, come to life. Benetton is using augmented reality for a campaign that kicked off last month, in which it is trying to find models from among the general population.

Augmented reality – AR, as it has quickly become known – has only recently become a phrase that trips easily off technologists' lips; yet we've been seeing versions of it for quite some time. The idea is straightforward enough: take a real-life scene, or (better) a video of a scene, and add some sort of explanatory data to it so that you can better understand what's going on, or who the people in the scene are, or how to get to where you want to go.

Sports coverage on TV has been doing it for years: slow-motion could be described as a form of augmented reality, since it gives you the chance to examine what happened in a situation more carefully. More recently cricket, tennis, rugby, football and golf have all started to overlay analytic information on top of standard-speed replays – would that ball have hit the stumps, the progress of a rally, the movement of the backs or wingers, the relative flights of shots – to tell you more about what's going on. Probably the most common use is in American football where the "first down" line – the distance the team has to cover to continue its offence – is superimposed on the picture for viewers.

But those required huge systems. AR took its first lumbering steps into the public arena eight years ago: all that you needed to do was strap on 10kg of computing power – laptop, camera, vision processor – and you could get an idea of what was feasible. The American Popular Science magazine wrote about the idea in 2002 – but the idea of being permanently connected to the internet hadn't quite jelled at that point.

"AR has been around for ages," says Andy Cameron, executive director of Fabrica, an interactive design studio which works with Benetton, "maybe going back as far as the 1970s and art installations that overlaid real spaces with something virtual." He mentions in particular the work of pioneering computer artist Myron Krueger.

What's changed in the past year is that AR has come within reach of all sorts of developers – and the technology powerful enough to make use of it is owned by millions of people, often in the palms of their hands.

The arrival of powerful smartphones and computers with built-in video capabilities means that you don't have to wait for the AR effects as you do with TV. They can simply be overlaid onto real life. Step forward Apple's iPhone, and phones using Google's Android operating system, both of which are capable of overlaying information on top of a picture or video.

Within the small world of AR, one of the best-known apps is that built by Layar, which – given a location, and using the iPhone 3GS's inbuilt compass to work out the direction you're pointing the phone – can give you a "radar map" of details such as Wikipedia information, Flickr photos, Google searches and YouTube videos superimposed onto a picture you've taken of the scene. For Americans, it will also pull in details from the government's economic Recovery Act – so that if you're on Wall Street and want to see how many billions went into which building, it will show you.

Or, more usefully, Yelp offers an augmented reality application that will show you ratings and reviews for a restaurant before you walk in – the sort of thing that could make restaurants quiver with delight, or shudder in horror.

Or maybe it wouldn't need to know where it is; only who it's looking at. A prototype application demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February took things a little further again. Point the phone at a person and if it can find their details, it will pull them off the web and attach details – their Twitter username, Facebook page and other facts – and stick them, rather weirdly, into the air around their head (viewed through your phone, of course). "It's taking social networking to the next level," says Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish mobile software company.

And there are fabulously useful applications: at Columbia University, computer science professor Steve Feiner and PhD candidate Steve Henderson have created their Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair (Armar) project. It combines sensors, head-up displays, and instructions to tackle the military's maintenance needs: start working on a piece of kit, and the details about it pop up in front of you. Imagine if you could put on a pair of special goggles when you needed to investigate your car's engine, or a computer's innards, and the detail would pop up. That's the sort of idea that Armar is trying to implement, though for the military at first..

Yet it's fashion which seems to have leapt quickest into this technology. The T-shirt with AR in London Fashion Week was developed by Cassette Playa, a label that has been worn by Lily Allen, Rihanna and Kanye West. Carri Munden, who designed it with the Fashion Digital Studio at the London College of Fashion, described it as "mixing reality and fantasy". Adidas, too, has launched trainers with AR symbols in the tongues: hold them to a webcam and you are taken to interactive games on the Adidas site.

The process by which the strange symbols get translated into images is simple enough: the website takes the feed from your webcam (you have to explicitly allow it to do so, so there are no security worries) and analyses it for the particular set of symbols that the program is looking for. (Some easy calculations mean the symbols can be detected whichever way up you hold the item.) Videos and pictures are then sent back to you.

Andy Cameron says that the arrival of an open-source, hence free, AR tool kit has let companies build their own AR applications, using Flash – the pervasive animation and video technology used for many online ads and YouTube's videos – "which immediately meant you had huge penetration, because Flash is everywhere". (Something like 98% of all computers are reckoned to have Adobe's Flash Player installed.)

"If you build your AR application with Flash, then you can get it out to everybody in the world with a computer with a webcam," says Cameron.

Benetton is using AR in its latest campaign, called "It's My Time" which aims to get members of the public to put themselves forward as potential models, and uses AR to show more details about existing models. But its first most visible use of AR was last year in issue 76 of Benetton's Colors magazine, a quarterly fashion product. Dozens of pages have AR symbols: hold the page up to a webcam, and you see film and more photos of the person on the page. "The Colors editor and the creative director of Fabrica got very excited about it," says Cameron.

Cameron can see huge potential which could even revive the fortunes of print advertising. "Think of a commercial page, an advert, in a fashion magazine. It's pretty expensive. With this – and this is the way that the more hard-nosed people in Benetton saw the advantage – it means that you can get more products on the page." Print an AR code, get people to come to the site, and you can show them so much more, while measuring the return from your effort.

The technical cost is a tiny part of the overall effort. "The printing and photography cost [of the advert] is the same. And the development cost is pretty small."

And of course where advertisers go, the publications that house them are sure to go as well. Esquire magazine in the US and Wallpaper* in Europe have done "augmented reality" editions, with Robert Downey Jr coming to life on the cover of the former, and AR text providing videos and animation in the latter. But there are more possibilities for journalism using AR: for example if you "geotag" newspaper articles (so that you say that an item relates to a particular place) then someone visiting a site could learn about events relevant to the area via their smartphone.

Book publishers too are leaping in: Carlton Publishing will release an AR book in May, featuring dinosaurs that pop out of the pages when viewed, yes, through a webcam. Future releases include war, sport and arts titles which will also have extra AR elements.

Yet in media it's the advertisers who are most excited. The possibilities of geotagged, targeted adverts – which in effect hang in the air until someone comes along to find them with a smartphone – or of AR adverts which open up a whole new world of opportunities (and perhaps discounts or loyalty bonuses) when you follow them through – are yet another glimpse of the holy grail ofads that know exactly who and where you are.

Is there a risk that we'll all become AR'd out – that it will become boring as advert after advert invites us to hold it up to a webcam? "What's hot today is ancient history tomorrow," says Cameron. "There have been a lot of bad uses of this technology with a rush to use it. We have had the chance to reflect on what it means and how to use it. The key is that it should be an enhancement of the stuff on the printed page."

Even so we're still in the early stages, he argues. "It's very primitive – having to use a webcam, holding a magazine up to it. Obviously we're really interested in the opportunities with handheld devices. It's very frustrating that the iPhone doesn't allow access to the live video stream." (Nor does it run Flash, another problem for would-be AR designers.) "People in design are very annoyed with Steve Jobs," he observes. "We don't really understand why Apple won't allow that."

Given that access, he says, "you could hold your iPhone up to a billboard and get something amazing right there". What about the alternative, such as Google's Android-based Nexus phone? "It looks like you could do it on that," he says. But of course the iPhone is a target market. "Maybe Apple wants to keep that for itself," Cameron says. "Maybe they're lodging patents. Or maybe the processor on the iPhone isn't fast enough."

Yet there are some who think that AR has already had its brief time in the sun. At the Like Minds conference in Exeter at the beginning of March, Joanne Jacobs, a social media consultant, described an AR application that demanded you buy a T-shirt and then go and sit in front of your webcam – so you could play Rock, Paper, Scissors. By yourself.

"It's hopeless," Jacobs said.

Cameron admits to some uncertainty about AR's measurable impact. "I don't know if it sells more things, but it seems clearly a good thing if we can get people who may be customers to participate in the adverts." But, he adds: "If people start to play with the adverts in a way that exposes them to more products, that's got to help bring a commercial return."

• Augmented reality
• iPhone
• Social networking
• Advertising

When I came to the U.S. in 1980, I was young and naïve. I used to think that corruption and ethical lapses were just a third-world ill. Eventually, I became a tech CEO and learned the harsh realities of American business. Yes, standards are much higher, and breaches are punished, but the temptations are just the same here as they are in any other country. Ethical lapses (which are a form of corruption) are quite common.  You watch stories about these on TV every other day and read about them on TechCrunch.  It was the ethical lapses of our financial institutions that threw our economy into a tailspin, and for which we are paying the price, after all.

It is best to be aware of the temptations and to prevent the lapses from occurring. As Enron, Bernie Madoff, and Lehman Brothers have shown, it’s a slippery slope. Once you start compromising your values for short-term gains, there is no turning back. Business ethics are not something you need to start worrying about when your company reaches a certain size; they need to be sewn into the fabric of your startup from the get-go. The lessons are the same for tech businesses as they are for investment banks and for third-world economies.

Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer researched the difference between companies that perform at high levels for extended periods and those that implode when they reach a certain size. When analyzing the spectacular failures in the recent financial meltdown, he found that:

· Of the original Forbes 100 (named in 1917), 61 had ceased to exist by 1987.  Of the remaining 39, only 18 stayed in the top 100, and their return during the period 1917 to 1987 was 20% less than that of the overall market.

· Of companies in the original Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index of 1957, only 74 remained in 1997; of these, only 12 outperformed the S&P 500 in the period 1957 to 1998.

· The average CEO tenure in the U.S. is 4.2 years, less than half the 10.5-year average in 1990.

Beer posited three core reasons for the failure of so many Wall Street firms in the fall of 2008: the firms lacked a higher purpose (in other words, they were focused on short-term gains, profits, and bonuses); they lacked a clear strategy; and they mismanaged their risk. Companies like Charles Schwab and US Bancorp were able to avoid the fallout by having a laser-like focus on customer service and on honesty and transparency. Neither company touched the subprime mortgage securitization market, because they saw it as risky and simply not the kind of business that served the company’s long-term interests.

Even outside Wall Street, companies like Cisco Systems, Southwest Airlines, and Costco Wholesale, with the strongest sense of higher purpose, achieved the greatest success. Take Costco. Wall Street analysts have long chastised Costco’s management for paying high wages and keeping employees around for a long time, because this results in higher benefits costs. But the company’s CEO, Jim Sinegal, lives by his belief that keeping good employees is strategic for Costco’s long-term success and growth. The company’s per-employee sales are considerably higher than those of key rivals such as Target and Wal-Mart; customer service at the stores is phenomenal and fast; and Costco continues to expand, both in number of warehouses and in products and services for business and consumer customers. The culture of the company flows downward from Sinegal and his focus on employees and, by extension, to customers.

One of the problems that Beer found with the failed banks was that their employees lacked the ability to “speak truth to power”. Employees felt intimidated by superiors; the institutions’ internal voice of conscience and purpose was silenced by a maniacal focus on short-term profits and whatever scheme would bring them in. The silencing of employees who sought to challenge strategy and risk-management practices likely also undermined the banks’ moral authority and emboldened those who already felt inclined to do the wrong thing. With a muted internal voice, these organizations lacked a moral compass. As a result, they drove off a cliff with astonishing speed.

The same things happen in Silicon Valley companies.  I asked management guru — and head of the CEO Institute of Yale School of Management — Jeff Sonnenfeld for his advice on how startups can sow the seeds for building a Cisco or Costco. Here is Jeff’s advice:

1)  Create a culture of openness and welcome dissent – Internal constructive critics are your best friends — too often, founders are blinded by their own enthusiasm for their creative vision and then are surrounded by sycophants, kissing up. Founders who fall out of touch rapidly lose their ethical bearings. At Intel, founder Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore did not look for sycophantic followers in selecting the brilliant, contentious, but relentlessly honest Andy Grove as their colleague and successor. Similarly, Craig Barrett and Paul Otellini have consistently fought for different points of view internally — without undermining the enterprise, and always reinforcing Intel’s self-critical core ethic.

2)  Lead by example.  The authenticity of the leader’s character is essential — if colleagues don’t believe you, they will not take needed risks on your behalf — such as training subordinates to be able to do their own jobs.  Startups are often defined by the hip clichés of VC firms, adoring press, and HR consultants — but the startups don’t really practice what they preach.

3)  Learn from immediate peers or distant models. Too often, founders atrophy because they believe that the unique quality of their business or technological mission means that they too are truly unique in leadership values.  Steve Jobs has patterned himself after Polaroid founder Ed Land — and tried to learn from Land’s strengths and weaknesses.  Henry Ford regretfully once claimed “History is bunk” but in reality revered Thomas Edison.  Michael Dell put legendary tech entrepreneur (Teledyne) and educator Dr. George Kozmetsky on his board right from the start to learn from this brilliant then septuagenarian.

4)  Recognize your own fallibility as a leader, know your limits, and beware of the myth of immortality.  Entrepreneurs often are horrified at the thought of leadership succession. The founders of great firms such as Google, Cisco, Amgen, and Microsoft have known that they would need to prepare for a day when they no longer could be the lone day-to-day internal boss, primary external ambassador, and symbolic cultural icon. The founder of the original (pre-Starbucks) coffee house chain Chock-Full-o-Nuts started his first café on Broadway 43rd Street in 1923 and was a great national success.  Sadly, sixty years later, as a dying man who had been flat on his back for two years at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, he still clung to the job of leader of the enterprise, his full-time physician serving as acting president.

5)  Remember that institutional character — like a liquid cupped in your hand — is fragile; easily lost; and hard, if not impossible, to regain. Egomaniacal moves, personal grandiosity, greed, and deception create impressions that are hard to erase.  Whole Foods founder, John Mackey, sabotaged the integrity of his own exalted brand, damaging the company’s internal pride and customer admiration far more badly than any competitor could have, due to his self-inflating and his misleading “anonymous” blogging, hiding his identity through an anagram of his wife’s name, “rehodab.”

I’ll add another very important point: Establish an independent board. Venture firms often demand a majority of board seats as a condition for their investments. Conflicts invariably arise. The board begins to serve the needs of VCs and management, rather than of the company itself, which loses the independent voice to warn it not to do the wrong things. The inconvenient truth is that all board members have a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of the company, and not in their own interests. Board members must not engage in transactions in which they or their partners stand to gain. They are legally required to avoid these conflicts of interest.

Finally, remember that in business, you have to make tough choices at every juncture. Though business decisions usually have clear consequences and outcomes, ethical decisions are always hard. Making the right choice doesn’t always bring success, but ethical lapses almost always lead to failure. No matter what the consequence, doing what’s ethical and right is always the better long-term strategy.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

No, we’re not hiring the Hanson brothers to deal with RMT threats. As there is no one better at beating up targets than EVE pilots, we thought we'd enlist your talents in slapping EVE Gate into shape.

As CCP t0rfifrans outlined on his blog introducing Tyrannis, we will be delivering the very first iteration of EVE Gate in the upcoming expansion. It is my task to oversee the technical direction of the Web side of things with EVE Gate, and I wanted to take the opportunity to announce a public “Alpha” test we are planning for EVE Gate and the steps we are taking to make sure we have a very sound foundation to build upon. What we don't want to do is just turn all the traffic completely on the first day and pray it doesn’t break under load. Instead we plan a measured approach that will make sure we have a solid architecture and enough hardware in place.

The process we are following is as follows:

• Develop and prototype an N-Tier web application with scalability in mind from day one (See my first blog on "Cosmos" ) - DONE
• Release and stress an internal alpha to identify and address weakspots - DONE
• Build and utilize load testing and application profiling tools to find and fix bottlenecks - DONE
• Release a public "alpha" stress test to apply real world load to the application to check our hardware needs against estimates and monitor it under real conditions
• Roll out a "beta" launch
• Ramp up to full access in increments

On March 23, we will announce access to a public stress test version of EVE Gate which will be connected to Singularity for all of you to log into and look around. What is critical for everyone to understand is that the intent of this test is to stress the underlying hardware and key architectural components. This will allow us to identify and address bottlenecks and weaknesses well before launch and to make sure we have adequate hardware in place for all the pounding you folks will put on it once you are all browsing EVE Gate routinely from work (when your boss isn't looking). We will be watching your comments closely for feedback as well as closely logging and monitoring the behavior of the software and hardware under load. You can help us out greatly just by logging in, browsing around and trying the application out.

It needs to be emphasized that while it gives you an early glimpse at EVE Gate, the primary purpose of this test is a technical one. The features included in the test are still heavily in development and we wanted to get an early version up and available for you to beat up the hardware well in advance. There will be elements that are not yet done or which are presented as a simplified version for testing purposes. To make this clear the application will be labeled the "EVE Gate Alpha Stress Test"; it will be pretty hard to miss. I am not going to go into depth here on the features that will be included; we have an additional Dev Blog that will be presented soon which will focus on the web based functionality which will come with EVE Gate at launch (calendar, mail, contacts, profiles, broadcast logs, etc).

When EVE Gate does go live with the expansion it will be released as a Beta launch. It will be fully functional and connected to Tranquility for access to production data however it will be a Web site that we will continually modify and enhance. As it is a Web site, we have the benefit of not being tied directly to client releases and can continue to upgrade the site as quickly as we can get improvements completed. Once access is fully ramped up and we are comfortable that it is fully stable and production ready we’ll rip off the Beta stamp.

When I mention an incremental ramp up to full access, what I am describing is a measured increase in the number of players that can access the site when the Beta version goes live. We will do this with a basic signup page on launch day and we will give X number of additional players access each day depending on how things are going. Rather than turning the faucet fully on we are going to open it up a bit, check that all is well, open it up a bit more, etc… until we have it fully open and everyone has access.

Obviously we will open it up as quickly as is feasible as we have a lot more features we want to get to work on (>cough< forums >cough<) but our emphasis is on doing this the right way. Hopefully the ramp up will be quick, and this "Alpha" test I have announced here will play a big part in getting us as much information as possible so we can be ready. The better the info we get out of the "Alpha," the more accurate our hardware setup will be, the quicker we can ramp up full access when we go live.

The team is really looking forward to rolling out EVE Gate for you to use, and we will have greater detail on the features it will include in a future Dev Blog.

Blake Ellis / CNNMoney.com:
Palm's new price target: $0  —  NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Palm's future already looked bleak.  But after reporting worse than expected results for the third quarter Thursday, some analysts think the company's stock is now essentially worthless.  —  Shares of Palm (PALM) plunged 19% to $4.59 a share early Friday, a new 52-week low.

You know those special amps used by Spinal Tap that go to 11, in order to provide "that extra push over the cliff"? It appears Fox News has gotten a hold of some and hooked them up to its coverage of health care reform.

As the reform bill moved closer to a vote in the House, the Fox News noise machine went into overdrive, hurling every false and misleading claim it could muster.

The week in Fox News health care hysteria began with an oldie-but-goodie -- Steve Doocy, Bill Hemmer, and Bill O'Reilly all claimed or suggested that the bill will, in O'Reilly's words, "require American taxpayers to fund abortion." But it doesn't, at least not beyond what is currently permitted under current law. Fox News, unfortunately, is not alone in repeating this falsehood.

Then, Doocy and Hemmer, joined by Neil Cavuto and several other hosts, jumped on the idea that a legislative procedure the House is reportedly considering to pass the Senate's version of health care reform would allow them to do so without a vote. Wrong again -- the House would need to vote to implement that procedure.

Carl Cameron, however, broke through the noise on this issue, pointing out that the process would simply pass the bill "in one vote instead of two" and that the process "has been used, literally, for centuries" -- indeed, Republicans made copious use of the "self-executing rule" when they controlled Congress. Even Charles Krauthammer conceded that it's constitutional. Still, that didn't keep Alisyn Camerota from scoffing that the rule "might as well be a self-immolating rule."

Fox News then pounced on a survey claiming to have found that 46 percent of primary care physicians would consider leaving their profession if health care reform passes. O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and contributor Dr. Marc Siegel all portrayed the survey as having been published by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

Except it wasn't. The article was written by the physician-recruiting firm that conducted the survey, and it actually appeared in an employment newsletter produced by the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, not the Journal itself. Further, the survey itself was not all that scientific -- done via email contacts taken from the recruiting firm's database -- so any claim that the survey's results accurately reflect the view of the American medical community is dubious at best.

Fox News' Megyn Kelly did eventually note that the survey was "not a scientific poll." But that didn't keep Glenn Beck from insisting -- hours after Kelly corrected the record -- that "The New England Journal of Medicine says that if this bill is passed nearly one-third of doctors will quit practice medicine."

(Beck, meanwhile, is keeping up the long tradition of Fox News hosts pushing partisan political agendas by joining with Republican Rep. Steve King to promote an anti-reform rally in Washington.)

Fox News contributor and serial misleader Dana Perino made her own non-contribution to the health care debate, asserting that the reform bill's Medicare investment tax on those making over $200,000 a year is "so disturbing ... because the people who make that money are the small business owners." In fact, fewer than 1.3 percent of small business owners would be affected by the tax.

When the Congressional Budget Office released new numbers detailing how the reform bill would reduce the deficit by $130 billion over 10 years, Fox News didn't want to talk about that -- it spent far more time highlighting how much the bill would cost instead of how much it would save. And when that didn't seem to work, it tried to discredit the CBO as untrustworthy and unreliable. Never mind that when the CBO issued "favorable" numbers last fall on a Republican health care reform plan, Fox News praised the CBO as "nonpartisan."

The Fox News spin is even confusing its own hosts. Brian Kilmeade can't quite comprehend how a bill can cost money yet reduce the deficit, and Kelly admitted, "I don't understand anything they're talking about when it comes to this potential law."

Fox News' inept war against health care reform, while in keeping with its function as the communications arm of the Republican Party in exile, is making itself look like the Spinal Tap of news. It doesn't really need that "extra push over the cliff" -- after all, that's what it's been speeding toward for years.

At this rate, it probably won't be too long before a Fox anchor spontaneously combusts.

A whole lot of shaky earthquake claims goin' on at Fox

How much does Fox News oppose health care reform? It's pretending natural disasters didn't happen if they're inconvenient to the anti-reform agenda.

On March 18, Doocy took exception to President Obama's statement that a provision in the health care reform that would help Louisiana cope with Medicaid shortfalls resulting from Hurricane Katrina might also help Hawaii because it "went through an earthquake. "Hold it. What Hawaiian earthquake?" Doocy asked. "There was an earthquake in 1868 that killed 77. There was an earthquake in 1975 that killed two." After noting that the provision applies to states that have suffered a natural disaster "within the last seven fiscal years," Doocy added: "Essentially it boils down to just one state, and that is Louisiana."

Doocy seems to have forgotten that there was an earthquake in Hawaii in 2006. Not only did it cause tens of millions of dollars in damage, the Bush administration "declared a major disaster exists in the State of Hawaii and ordered Federal aid to supplement State and local recovery efforts" as a result of the quake.

But Doocy didn't need to rely on federal agencies for information on the quake -- Fox News reported on it at the time. (Investor's Business Daily similarly ignored its own reporting to suggest there was no recent Hawaii quake.)

It seems that rather than trust the federal government or his own news organization, Doocy chose instead to trust right-wing bloggers, who were spreading the misinformation. That runs counter to a 2007 memo -- issued after Doocy and other Fox hosts falsely claimed that Obama was educated in a madrassa -- in which Fox News vice president John Moody reportedly wrote, "For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC."

Media Matters has written Fox News requesting that Doocy correct the record. We shouldn't have to, since Fox News is supposed to have a "zero tolerance" policy toward on-air mistakes, but then, these are the same folks that ludicrously insisted that a Fox & Friends graphic in which poll numbers added up to 120 percent contained no errors.

The latest right-wing witch-hunt target: Jim Wallis

Fox News has long been a leader in witch hunts against Obama and his administration (or, really, anyone who can be remotely tagged as liberal). Now Glenn Beck, as an extension of his repeated challenged Beck to a debate over social justice, Beck demurred, his vaguely threatening statements making it clear his witch hunt was more important than reasoned debate: "In my time, I will respond. ... Just know the hammer's coming. ... And when the hammer comes, it's going to be hammering hard and all through the night, over and over."

Right-wing website WorldNetDaily, meanwhile, blundered into the breach with a poorly written article that attempted to put words in Wallis' mouth. WND claimed that Wallis was a "champion of communism," even though Wallis has declared communism to be a "failed" system; asserted that Sojourners has published "a slew of radicals" while ignoring that it has also published a slew of conservatives; and alleged that "Sojourners' official 'statement of faith' urges readers to 'refuse to accept [capitalist] structures and assumptions that normalize poverty and segregate the world by class,' " even though the word "capitalist" -- inserted by WND -- actually appears nowhere in the statement. WND even falsely claimed that Wallis "labeled the U.S. 'the great captor and destroyer of human life.' "

Somehow, we suspect that Beck's upcoming assault on Wallis will be just as divorced from reality as WorldNetDaily's.

Erick Erickson joins the "scumbags" at CNN

Should a blogger who once called a retiring Supreme Court justice a "goat f---ing child molester" be rewarded with a regular commentary gig on CNN? Doesn't matter -- the deal's been done.

CNN announced this week that RedState editor Erick Erickson has joined the network as a political contributor, mainly appearing on John King's new show. The network claimed that Erickson is "a perfect fit" for King's show, adding that "Erick is in touch with the very people John hopes to reach."

Media Matters has detailed Erickson's history of outrageous statements, of which the aforementioned is but one.

Predictably, conservatives defended Erickson's new job, his fellow RedStaters among them. One of Erickson's RedState defenders, however, went a tad off-message: "From Non-Conservatives, to Academics and Liberal Elitists, to self-soiling and unprincipled Professional Politicians and firmly-entrenched good ole boys inside the M(ostly) S(cumbags) M(edia), each of these clowns has a tale of doom about the hell we're headed for compliments of CNN's hand basket."

We have to wonder: Does Erickson consider his new CNN colleagues to be "scumbags"?

This week's media columns

This week's media columns from the Media Matters senior fellows: Eric Boehlert examines the media myth of Obama's "falling poll numbers," and Karl Frisch tells you how to annoy Glenn Beck in five minutes or less.

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This weekly wrap-up was compiled and edited by Terry Krepel, a senior web editor at Media Matters for America.

Roku’s HD player is a great deal at $99, but it’s an even better deal if you buy one now from Amazon. In addition to having a great Netflix box, you’ll also be able to use Amazon’s Video of Demand service, and to get you started they’ll throw in $20 worth of credit.

That’s a pretty good deal, considering that a movie like The Hurt Locker rents for $3.99, or you can rent a TV show for about $3 an episode (watch Human Target, seriously). You’ll give $99 for the Roku HD or $129.99 for the Roku HD-XR, and then Amazon will credit your account so you can start renting as soon as you get the box hooked up. Better hurry though, because the deal is only good until the 31st.

Kevin Nakao is VP of Mobile & Business Search for WhitePages, a Top 40 Web and Mobile Publisher. You can find him on Twitter, and on the Whitepages Blog where he writes about mobile, local, and social media.

While last year’s SXSW seemed to serve as the “coming out” party for location-based services (LBS), maybe this year’s conference signifies the migration of these platforms into mainstream culture. And perhaps the only real “new” concept to emerge this year is the idea that there is finally a real opportunity to make money via “location.”

Here are five things that companies should consider as they look to utilize location-based services (LBS) as part their mobile strategy.

From finding the nearest ski slope on REI’s Ski and Snow Report to a nearby movie on Flixter, there are plenty of Top iPhone applications that have incorporated a “lead with the offer, not the capability” philosophy into their mobile product offering to provide a better service. Build the best service first, then add the bells and whistles.

With all the hoopla surrounding location, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that location’s real appeal to advertisers is the fact that with this functionality, you can reach the on-the-go user, who is ready to buy and consume. Just because Twitter and Facebook offer location doesn’t make that valuable or new to advertisers. Location-targeting via IP address has been around a while. For the same reason radio is a great advertising channel for retailers, LBS advertising is also valuable: because it can reach the consumer near the point of sale.

Foursquare has clearly emerged as the location darling. Consider the fact that after only one year, they’ve reached 500,000 active users (Foursquare recently tweeted they added 100,000 users in 10 days).

However, if you apply any city’s share of the total U.S. population, the results show some pretty low estimates of Foursquare users in individual localities. What emerges is a very “long tail” — a steep, narrow graph — of local user adoption. This shows why it is important to achieve scale if you hope to see return on investment in the location marketing space.

For example, using these rough estimates of a city’s proportional share of the U.S. population, if a local pet supply store wanted to target people in San Francisco, the estimated reach would be 1,310 Foursquare users. Even if you double this audience estimate, the number is fairly small for even a local marketer. We had to hit around 4 million downloads of the Whitepages iPhone app to achieve the minimum scale needed for advertiser geo-targeting. Today, 80% of our campaigns from major brands are geo-targeted.

Editor’s Note: It’s important to remember that these are just rough estimates. Because Foursquare was initially only available in a handful of major metro areas, the geographic distribution of users may not precisely follow the geographic distribution of the population.

Battery life is the single biggest threat to location. With GPS on, the phone is asking the network where it is, and this chatter can drain battery life — anyone with an iPhone knows what I am referring to. Thus, phone manufacturers will play a critical role in the future of LBS. RIM, the manufacturer of BlackBerry devices, faced this problem early on with the energy-tax of e-mail polling, and as a result, their devices now have some of the best battery life.

Foursquare has helped us move forward here as well. “Check-ins” help to address the issue as they offer efficient geo-triggers without having to keep battery-draining GPS features on at all times.

Looking forward, I predict the mobile platform wars will be fought with location and maps. This is an important feature that a platform can use as a point of differentiation for consumers and developers.

In anticipation of that battle, Apple purchased mapping company Placebase, and Google is starting to provide unique mapping features like turn-by-turn navigation on its Android devices. The only hope I see for Windows Mobile is if they do something completely revolutionary on the mobile location front. A development like this was alluded to at the recent TED conference with its augmented reality layering of geo-tagged Flickr photos and real-time video integration.

At WhitePages, we monetize our mobile services through a mix of premium, national display, and sponsored links for local business. Our effective CPM (revenue per thousand ad impressions) for sponsored local links is $30-$50 — double the effective CPM (eCPM) rate we see for premium display ad campaigns from national brands. The eCPM multiple of local targeted ads over ad network rates is a staggering 10x.

Location-based inventory will also become scarce as Apple recently announced that iPhone apps will not be permitted to access GPS capabilities for advertising alone. There now needs to be some consumer benefit and functionality in order to access a user’s location. Geo-targeted inventory on mobile will continue to be at a high premium with no excess supply or ad networks to drive it down.

It is my hope that by this time next year, SXSW –- the festival of “emerging” music and technology –- will have finally moved on from location. It’s clearly happening now, and if integrated wisely, location will be making companies too much money to be called the “cool kid on the block” any longer

- 9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing
- 10 Foursquare Apps You Can Use Right Now
- 6 Foursquare Apps We’d Love to See
- 6 Tips for Getting the Most out of Foursquare
- Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Location-Based Throwdown
- Location, Location, Location: 5 Big Predictions for 2010

Tags: android, business, foursquare, geo-tagging, gowalla, iphone, List, Lists, location based advertising, location-based, Longtail, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, small business

[‘Design Diversions’ is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Andrew Vanden Bossche. It looks at the unexpected moments when games take us behind the scenes, and the details of how game design engages us. This time -- how emotional design can make us think about not thinking about violence.]

Senseless violence in videogames is fun, but more importantly, it can also be intellectually stimulating and thought provoking. While designers and critics alike cry out for more depth in games, pathos is not the only path to artistic merit. For a medium that's constantly patronized, misunderstood, and derided even by its supporters, sometimes satire and irony is the best way to get a point across.

This is the philosophy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, as the most unapologetic of that series so lambasted by those who were the target of the game’s satire. The ultraviolent and candy colored Vice City is an excessively pink world in which violence is comical and cartoonish. Violence in this game is already highly desensitized. Pedestrians die, but after their bodies despawn the world will be back to normal as if nothing happened, maintaining the status quo like a TV serial.

It's the worst possible environment for a serious engagement with issues of violence, but it's a great environment to engage with how we depict violence. Most games take the opposite position of Haunting Ground, and are designed to soften, justify, or excuse violent actions so that players feel like heroes instead of murderers.

It's the same treatment summer blockbusters get. But unlike most of these media, Vice City goes a step further. This is a game that mercilessly skewers the groups most opposed to its existence, freely leaps into self parody, and satirizes the cultural attitudes towards violence that ultimately gave it form. By the end of Vice City it's clear that everyone from the mob to the talking heads on the radio are guilty of the same violence as the protagonist. No one in Vice City is innocent, and neither is anyone in the world.

How to Take the Sense Out of Violence

While technology makes blood and gore more realistic, game designers continue to construct this violence to minimize its impact. In the goriest of games (like Mortal Kombat) violence is there to thrill or disgust, not to inspire existential terror. Designers (and gamers) get excited over realism, but we want it for specific reasons. Despite how much we clamor for realism in graphics and physics, emotional realism actually gets in the way of enjoying games like Grand Theft Auto.

For this reason GTA4 has actually been criticized for being too realistic. GTA4 succeeded in its attempt to be more serious and taken more seriously, but it resulted in a different game experience--one that many fans hadn't been looking for and subsequently found in the much less serious Saints Row 2.

GTA4’s Nico feels more like a person than the caricature that is Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti, and for that reason it can be hard for players to engage senseless violence. Even the normal missions feel a little odd considering the sheer number of people you kill, creating a scenario in which the gameplay and story don’t quite mesh.

Abstracting Emotion

Trauma Center is an interesting example of a game that uses abstraction to eliminate squeamishness. This is a game inspired heavily by medical dramas with surgery-based gameplay. Medical dramas have a wide appeal; exposed organs do not. Surgeons and other medical professionals have to get used to blood and guts, but most people are pretty squeamish about that. Even the bloody fantasy violence of the average videogame can be less intense than the exposed entrails of a living human. Because of this, the designers went to great lengths to create a representation of the human body that wouldn't be grotesque.

Naoya Maeda, the lead 3D and event designer said on the Trauma Team web site that he came up with this abstract approach while thinking of how a surgeon would see the entrails. What's interesting about this approach is that the more realistic option may be less "true." In the game, the player is a doctor and revulsion is not part of the experience. In the same way, Tommy Vercetti attitude towards human life is pretty obvious from the way pedestrians are depicted.

A World of Mannequins

In violent videogames, it’s common to dehumanize the enemy so that players can feel justified in killing them. Zombies, robots, and aliens all serve their roles. With human opponents, it’s common to make them as evil as possible, which may be why WWII is the favorite FPS genre and Nazis the favorite foe. Ultimately though, the greatest tool for removing humanity is simply to leave them undeveloped.

The civilians in GTA don’t mourn, cry, or express themselves. Because they don't exhibit sympathetic actions, it's hard to empathize with them. They exist only to run screaming like Godzilla was stomping through the city. Vice City is inhabited by crash test dummies that respawn endlessly no matter how many times they die. It’s similar to watching Bugs Bunny gets blasted point blank with a shotgun: the next second, he's up and chomping carrots.

No matter how many times the player dies in GTA, or however many generic citizens he wastes, everything in the world will be respawning and back to normal in minutes. In this way, actions that would normally appear reprehensible loose all their emotional impact. If GTA was an accurate murder simulator, depicting the horror of real-world violence and murder with unflinching accuracy, the nightly news stories would have been about kids getting PTSD.

Sensitive Violence

If there is a flaw in this form of violence in videogames, it’s that it isn’t violent enough. It’s emotionally casual, designed specifically to not challenge the player’s feelings of empathy or guilt. Although it takes a lot of design work to make sure the player won’t feel sorry for the extras, seeing how many pixilated crash-test dummies you can run over isn’t emotionally challenging for the player.

Haunting Ground has a near-opposite outcome, but the design is obviously quite intentional. Compare GTA to the visceral Manhunt, and you can see that Rockstar is quite capable of creating an experience uniquely tailored to inspiring certain emotions. That’s a game that really does make the player feel like a murderer.

So Vice City is engineered for players to be as violent as possible without thinking about it. This is where a lot of game stop, having accomplished their purpose, and just let the player have fun. But Vice City fills the game with relentless satire, and this cleverness works in part because it's so violent. The result is a game about thinking about not thinking about violence.

Whose America?

The talk radio blabbering about videogame violence is underscored by the incredible violence perpetuated by the player. With Tommy Vercetti chaining rows of exploding cars and fighting everything from SWAT to the US Army, the irony of legislating against bleeding pixels isn’t lost on the player.

The jingoistic ads run by the game's gun stores unsubtly implicate that GTA is not the cause of America's attitudes towards violence, but a product of it. The entrepreneurial rise of the main character reflects a certain pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-attitude that, along with this construction of violence, satirically constructs Tommy Vercetti as an ideal American.

Vice City is violent videogame about America’s attitude towards violence. Vice City came out after GTA 3, and it was born while the immediate reaction to that game was fresh in the minds of its audience and opponents. As the in game talk show parody unfolds, extremists from all sides fight over which vision of America to cram down the rest of the country’s throat while the player is laughing at them and having a grand old time.

While the guests on talk radio worry about fictional violence, their world is being blown up by the player on a regular basis. After mowing down the city in a tank, players may wonder why they aren't the ones being discussed on the news. Shouldn't they be thinking about real violence? Shouldn't the player? It's fun to live the American Dream as Tommy Vercetti, but is this bitter satire worth bringing to reality?

Even though Vice City goes to great lengths to create emotionally uninvolved violence, it wants the player to be conscious of how different this is from real world violence. At the time, the charge levied against the playerbase and the industry was that videogames confused the two. With the pitch perfect satire of radio pundits and activists, Vice City invites the player to think about whether the game is more damaging to society than the people trying to ban it. Rockstar has a clear agenda, of course, and stacks the deck in their favor. Even so, that’s a lot to think about for a game that’s not supposed to be about thinking at all.

Pathos certainly has its place in videogames, and it's certainly something we need more of. A GTA like game that forced players to confront the realities of murder would be an interesting idea. It couldn't work as a satire, and it wouldn't really be fun, but that’s just fine as it’s another way to engage the player. One of the great things about survival horror games like Haunting Ground is that they've proven that games don't necessarily need to be fun to be compelling.

But let's not underestimate Vice City just because it makes us laugh.

[Andrew Vanden Bossche is a freelance writer and student. He has a blog called Mammon Machine, which is updated less often than this message, and can be reached at AndrewVandenB@gmail.com]

Palm shares take 25 percent plunge after downer earnings announcement originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Palm is reporting dramatically lower sales of its WebOS-based smartphones. It seems the once-dominant maker of PDAs has nowhere to go but down and its plummeting fast, making it a potential target for acquisition by a smartphone competitor.

Palm’s woes continue to balloon after the handset maker announced its earnings for Q3 2010. As a recap, Palm reported $349 million in revenue with a $22 million net loss for Q3 2010 which looks rosy when compared to the $90.6 million revenue and $98 million net loss reported in Q3 2009. Though revenue has increased and net loss has narrowed year over year, Palm continues its downward slide with net loss increasing from $13.7 million in Q2 2010 to the $22 million quoted above. Palm shipped 960,000 handsets in Q3 2010 which represents a 23% increase from Q2 2010 and a 300% increase year over year. This abundance of handsets is Palm’s downfall as the handset maker revealed that it has only sold a mere 408,000 units in Q3 2010, leading to a standing inventory that some estimate to be a staggering 1.15 million. Palm has put handset production on hold (told you so) while carriers sell through the current inventory which is equal to six months worth of retail sales at last year’s rate. As a result, Palm’s Q4 2010 outlook is dire with the company projecting revenue of only $150 million, a figure that falls far short of the $305 million that was expected. Read on after the jump.

Palm’s stock has plummeted a staggering 18% to under $5 since its poor Q3 2010 earnings and its dire Q4 projections were announced. Like a pack wolves, analysts are jumping all over the Sunnyvale, California company, issuing stock price targets as low as $0. Peter Misek of Canaccord Adams, who issued the $0 value, defends his pessimistic view of Palm by writing,

“We believe Palm’s troubles will only accelerate as carriers and suppliers increasingly question the company’s solvency and withdraw their support.With what appears to be roughly 12 months of cash on hand, an accelerating burn rate, a complete lack of earnings visibility, and substantial debt and preferred equity, we no longer see any value in the company’s common equity.”

Palm is at the edge of a precipice and needs either a miracle or a very wealthy suitor to save it from what appears to be inevitable self destruction. Anyone with a Pre or Pixi in good condition may want to box that puppy up and put it in a drawer as it may be a collector’s item someday. We’re half kidding. Kind of.

Read (Q3 2010 earnings)

Read (Inventory)

Read (Worthless stock)