How the Honeycrisp apple went from being nearly discarded to one of the a href="http://www.minnesotaharvest.net/apple_honeycrisp.htm"tastiest best-named apples of all time/a -- NYTimes says "a href="http://select.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/nyregion/15towns.html"the iPod of apples/a" -- and more about a href="http://www.citypages.com/2008-10-01/restaurants/with-honeycrisps-patent-expiring-uofm-looks-for-new-apple/"the patenting and branding of apples/a. br / blockquote"[D]uring its time of evaluation, Honeycrisp, being a beautiful but partially-colored apple, effectively waited in the wings until the big stage was set. I'm not saying the University would not have introduced Honeycrisp against the tide of Red and Golden. I don't know that. It just takes years to get to the point of taking the leap, and maybe 1991 would have been the leaping point regardless of the current. But there's no doubt Honeycrisp jumped into a very favorable current, one that had been started with Granny Smith and had gained irreversible momentum with Gala and Fuji. Its time had come.br / br / But even when your time has come, if you're an apple, it'll still be a while. There are millions of Honeycrisp trees in the ground right now, but a production ranking is nowhere in sight. Like Gala, Honeycrisp will take a few more years before it climbs out of the "All Others" category.br / br / So, if you're David Bedford, and you evaluated a variety for many years until 1991 and then released it, and it's been out now for well over a decade and it's still in "All Others," you've done a wonderful job. That's just the speed of this game. Honeycrisp is on a meteoric rise. This is a thing that's happening very fast, in apple terms."/blockquote

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/26248?ns=guardianpageName=Comment+is+free%3A+A+late+calling+to+accountch=Comment+is+freec3=The+Guardianc4=Banking+sector+%28Business%29%2CCredit+crunch+%28Business%29%2CEconomics+%28Business%29%2CMortgages+%28Money%29%2CBorrowing+and+debt%2CMoney%2CBusinessc5=Personal+Finance%2CInvestments%2CCredit+Crunch%2CBusiness+Markets%2CProperty+Mortgages+and+Interest+Ratesc6=Will+Huttonc7=2008_12_02c8=1127135c9=articlec10=GUc11=Comment+is+freec12=blogc13=c14=Comment+is+freeh2=GU%2FComment+is+free%2Fblog%2FComment+is+free" width="1" height="1" //divpA rare silver lining in this recession is that a veil of mystery is being lifted from the longstanding lending practices of British banks. Suddenly they are understood as not necessarily always in the best national economic interest./ppMortgage and business borrowers alike are newly empowered by the pound;37bn bank bail-out, and change is afoot. Yesterday the Royal Bank of Scotland, now 58% owned by the taxpayer, promised it would give distressed homeowners six months' grace before it moved to repossess their property. Last week it said it would guarantee the level and price of its overdraft commitments to small business until the end of 2009 - providing, it qualified, the risks of their situation did not substantially change./ppThese are concessions of the sort that have not been made in any postwar recession. They make it impossible for Lloyds-TSB/HBOS not to follow suit. HSBC will not want to be outdone. Only Barclays, suffering the burden of the bail-out terms from its sovereign wealth fund investors, is likely to cling to the banking tradition of being providers of umbrellas except when it is raining. It will no longer be politically acceptable./ppBankers, in fairness, are the custodians of other people's money. They have to provide cash to their depositors whenever they want it, even as they tie it up in loans to homebuyers and business. This confidence trick requires careful managing. British banks' approach has been to keep their lending as short-term as possible, to have it collateralised against bricks and mortar, to keep tight control at headquarters and to recall loans at the first sign of trouble./ppIt works, but it is brutal. It does not favour long-term investment. It biases lending towards property rather than business innovation. It does not favour manufacturing industry that needs most support in downturns. It makes home ownership high risk for working-class families. And it exacerbates recessions./ppThere is another approach, more widely used in mainland Europe and Japan. It is best illustrated by a story from yesterday's Financial Times about the Reading-based Magal Group. Owner Gamil Magal wants a pound;1.5m loan from RBS to tide over his engineering firm during the recession, collateralised against pound;12m of assets. The company is solid but now losing money; properly supported it might survive. In Europe and Japan, banks tend to be supportive of their Magals, with whom they have long-term relationships. They certainly demand restructuring and redundancy, but they shepherd the scaled-back firms to recovery, offering not just finance but advice and business knowledge./ppIn Britain banks do not support such relationships. But they do know British financial protocols. RBS, says Magal, responded to his request by sending him an insolvency expert. When RBS was privately owned, he would not have dared complain and tempt such awesome power of life and death. In today's climate, he feels he can go public./ppIf the banks together support all the firms in the manufacturing value chain then each individual firm is more likely to pull through. Magal needs supporting, but so do his customers. RBS cannot have an open chequebook, but unless it and other banks are more collectively accommodating to firms' requests, they create the very risks RBS is alert to./ppUK banks have never been properly accountable for their actions, hiding behind the myth that, as their decisions are taken in markets, they are necessarily efficient. They are not. If more businessmen speak out, and the government has some guts, the next 18 months could see a transformation in British finance. It is long overdue./pp· Will Hutton is executive vice-chair of the Work Foundation a href="mailto:will.hutton@observer.co.uk"will.hutton@observer.co.uk/a/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/banking"UK banking sector/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/creditcrunch"Credit crunch/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics"Economics/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/mortgages"Mortgages/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/debt"Borrowing debt/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/n9llmbmU7O2cqsuftgw_d1pg-Qw/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/n9llmbmU7O2cqsuftgw_d1pg-Qw/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

A dolphin and her baby had to be rescued by marine vets after they swam up a river in Cornwall and became trapped by the falling tide.

Bloodlines: Inside Higher Ed published an article on the recently revived lawsuit by the Havasupai tribe against researchers at Arizona State University. The suit alleges that researchers (other than the original investigator who collected the blood) have used blood samples for purposes other than outlined in the IRB protocols. Said one commenter:
“This is a really interesting case because it opens up some questions of the reasonableness of practices that have been flying under the bioethical radar,” said Jonathan Marks, a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and an expert on informed consent and bioethics. Marks said that while he did not know the specifics of what happened in Arizona, he sees a widespread problem of anthropologists collecting blood for one purpose (with informed consent) and then having other scholars use the blood (without consent). Ethics issues abound, he said, because some of the subsequent research is potentially lucrative and because of the realities that these interactions do not take place on a two-way street.
Building/Burning Bridges: Hanna Fearn wrote for the UK Times Higher Ed Supplement on the divisions between evolutionary and sociocultural anthropology. Sometimes, one is left wondering whether The Great Divide Fearn speaks of is between evolutionary vs. social anthro or between U.S. and British models, as a lot of the British scholars interviewed suggested that the rising tide of evolutionary anthropology is coming from the States. Hmm, if that’s the case, the Chagnon reference might not be the most convincing. (Thanks to Crystal at Travel Scrabble for linking to this).

Addenda: Click here for a response to Fearn’s article by Michael Stewart on Cognition and Culture.

Archeology of Homelessness: Phys.Org reported on the research of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI for the midwesternly challenged) anthropology professor Larry J. Zimmerman and IUPUI student Jessica Welch. The archaeological survey was designed to look at homeless life outside of shelters, where most ethnographies of the homeless take place. Welch, herself formerly homeless, and Zimmerman will be publishing results in Historical Archeology early next year.

Saying Goodbye to ‘the Stranger’: NY Magazine published a fairly lengthy article challenging the isolated individual trope that seems to linger on in urban and online studies (even Louis’s Wirth’s 1938 classic essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life” makes an appearance.) If you can ignore the self-loving parts where the author reminds us how quintessentially urban and wonderful New York is, it’s a pretty good article. (Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily for posting this).

It’s Electrifying! Lorenz at antropologi.info has a great interview with Tanja Winther about her new book, The Impact of Electricity: Development, Desires and Dilemmas.

Ladies and Gents, the punchline: What would a news roundup be without some fun stuff? The first one comes from deathpower.
Cleverest Hegel joke this week: Most Hegel scholars agree there are 3 kinds of people: those who don’t really understand Hegel, and those who never liked arithmetic anyway.
The second is filed under ‘weird toys’ on Visual Anthropology of Japan. Enjoy!

div class="rxbodyfield"p class="ArticleBody" page="1"If your company is headed for a fall, it's usually better to jump than to be pushed. Don't let yourself be blindsided by quickly dwindling company prospects. These eight signs are surefire indications that it is high time to update your r?sum? and start networking./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"bSign No. 1: Closed-door meetingsbr/ /b If all the conference rooms are booked or doors keep closing, the tide may be shifting toward cuts at your organization./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1""Pay attention to what your gut is telling you," says John Baschab, senior vice president at Technisource. "A lot of the time it knows what's going on, even if your brain doesn't."/pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"bSign No. 2: Strange facesbr/ /bIf you look around the lunchroom and all you see are strangers, your company may be surreptitiously replacing permanent staff with temps./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"bSign No. 3: Bad pressbr/ /b Forget the clich? about there being no so such thing as bad publicity. Bad press is a harbinger of tough times ahead./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"bSign No. 4: Back-burner feverbr/ /bIf projects previously billed as vital to the future of the company are being scaled down or put on hold, it's a good sign the future isn't as bright as it once was./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"bSign No. 5: Major decisions are delayedbr/ /b "When decisions that used to take a few days now take one or two weeks, that's a strong sign things are going bad," says Simon Stapleton, a tech careers coach and chief innovation officer at Skandia Investment Solutions./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"bSign No. 6: Your boss acts like she owes you moneybr/ /b She may know the ax is going to fall and can't tell you yet. It's usually better to ask if something is up, openly and calmly, says Nicholas Lore, career coach and founder of Rockport Institute./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"bSign No. 7: Slashed training budgetsbr/ /bIf your organization is no longer planning for the future, it may not have one./pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"bSign No. 8: Slimmer sales forcebr/ /bIf your company is losing big clients or the sales force is being cut, that's a sure clue your employer is taking on water, says Tom Hart, executive vice president at staffing firm Veritude. "You don't want to be the last rat off that ship."/pp class="ArticleBody" page="1"bRelated articlesbr/ IT survivor: a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/12/01/49FE-it-job-survival_5.html" class="regularArticleU" sys_contentid="118350" sys_variantid="388"7 tips for career growth in tight times/abr/ /biRecession fears have tech jobs in jeopardy. Here's how to outlast, outrun, and outsmart the competition/ibr/ bSpecial report: a href="http://www.infoworld.com/archives/t.jsp?N=samp;V=116848" class="regularArticleU"2009 IT career survival guide/abr/ Slideshow: a href="http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/2008/11/181-where_it_jobs_a-1.html?source=fssr" class="regularArticleU"Where IT jobs are headed/abr/ /ba href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/10/08/41FE-tech-jobs-overseas_1.html?source=fssr" class="regularArticleU"bFor a promising IT career, go east, young techie/b/abr/ iThe U.S. and Europe are slowing down, but hot tech jobs beckon in China, India, and Eastern Europebr/ /ia href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/10/16/42FEpromotions_1.html" class="regularArticleU"b20 ways to get promoted in the tech industry/b/abr/ iIf you agree that there's no such thing as an IT project, you may already be on your way up the ladderbr/ /ia href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/02/23FE-how-to-fire-IT-staff-skills-list_1.html" class="regularArticleU"bThe 30 skills every IT person should have/b/abr/ iAn IT manager's guide on how to be better at what you do, no matter how experienced you arebr/ br/ /i/p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=3869ffefda2a6620ae98e3af25771a29p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=3869ffefda2a6620ae98e3af25771a29p=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=3869ffefda2a6620ae98e3af25771a29 style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/