Think Positively in All That you Do - A Gitomer World

DID YOU EAT MY MOTHER ?

One of the most positive individuals to hit the book stands in recent years, deposing Norman Vincent Peale, is an author going by the name of Jeffery Gitomer. What makes Gitomer so absolutely appealing is that he thinks that one should work and that working hard is good for you. It may even help you create a positive attitude in all that you do. Gitomer says that watching the news is not a great way to develop a positive attitude. Turn the TV off and study how you can really help other people.

Canon Sets the Pace for HD Video Cameras

PROTECT SEA TURTLES

In my opinion, Canon seems miles ahead of the competition when it comes to digital reflex and high definition video cameras. Its all the patents they hold and the quality of design of their products. If you have a problem with your Canon camera share it with me, AW Lake. Otherwise I will continue to think that they are the greatest for creating JPG stills and MPEG-2 video files that you can share on the Internet.

Combined with Flash or Shockwave capability using editing 'swf' file creation software such available using Swish Max you have a pretty formidable combination. I now use Canon for all my video needs and have had great success with them. Make sure that when you plug in any video device that you have surge protection. You never know when the lightning might strike, even in winter, but especially in early spring.

If you are thinking of creating video DVDs then buy yourself a copy of the Essential DVD Maker which has loads of tips on how to create DVDs easily and economically. The publication has easy to use images that shorten your learning curve amazingly.

I use my HD Canon video camera to take stills, and it does a wonderful job. Buy the correct card and you have enormous capacity. You may need to buy the HD video film in Japanese camera stores and get the 80+ minute film. The American camera shops may not have HD yet! If you buy a video camera, you will find that the tapes give you probably the best results, and I was told that the hard disk storage cameras are not very good for fast HD work. Ask an expert why, but I think it has to do with storage capacity and throughput.

Even a digital SLR reflex camera can take movies and they are reasonably good. The video cameras will probably have better zoom capabilities and tape is really where its at right now.

What Some People are Saying About the Credit Crisis

History repeats itself. The story of economics is that new generations don't seem to have the capacity to learn from previous generations. Everyone seems to get wrapped up in a frenzy of greed and fear.

Few people around the world will remain unaffected by what is happening in America. It is unfortunate because of the numbers of older vulnerable people on fixed incomes that will be impacted severely. They worked to reap their rewards of retirement only to find the government had not drawn up the rules of play for the banking systems carefully enough and much of their futures were under threat from inaction and complacency.

When I, myself, noticed that much was seriously amiss with the US policies for lending and that it would produce an almighty housing crisis back in 2002, I said to myself, "Here we go again. Its as if the only country that knows how to contain these things is Australia, and that's because it was so very severe there so long ago. Don't people remember the property loan crisis in Texas at the start of the Regan presidency? Look what that did!" It forced me to do things in anticipation of disaster that others thought were pretty crazy. "Well," I said, "If you buy a property in the wrong place right now you will be strangling yourself with a steep mortgage for the rest of your life. I don't intend to do that." Of course, no one listened, not even my own family. "The government would never let such a situation arise," was the reaction I was getting. Yes, faith in a government that had the blinkers on. Just read the reports of the time and judge for yourself.

An explanation of the current sub-prime mortgage crisis can be found on wikipedia. The thing to realize is that the situation is getting worse as the full scale of problems emerges and the global financial system gets to grips with the severity of what has happened to lending in the United States.

Internationally, the crisis was easily evident in the summer of 2007. The full facts of the severity were not visible to policy makers because of the way the loans were packaged and netered banking accounting systems after being bought and sold like commodities. Reporters realized that the crisis was spreading rapidly into much of the economy as Vikas Baja and Louise Story reported in the New York Times in February. Those of us that watched people in Cleveland losing their homes were already very worried.

Fiona Lake reported on the way the crisis was being handled around the world.

SOME INTERESTING LINKS:

1. Primary Mortgages


• Tom Bawden on potential home loan defaults TimesOnLine
• Urjit Patel on aspects of international situation arising from the crisis Brookings



2. Home equity loans

• Robin SidelWall Street Journal
• Ruth Simon Wall Street Journal


3. Consumer loans


• Ben Bernanke urged banks to act quickly to avoid recessionary forces getting out of hand.


4. Spending and credit cards


• Scott Lanman - Bloomberg
• World Situation - Phil Izzo - Wall Street Journal


5. Stock Market


• Peter McKay Wall Street Journal
• Phil Izzo compiles economists reaction Wall Street Journal
  

A Review of Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If you are a stock market investor, this is the book you should be reading if you have not done so already. It would have been easier for you had you absorbed what Taleb has to say many years ago, but now you have had a taste of the negative, you can turn your efforts into the positive. I remember attending the lectures of John Kenneth Galbraith who spoke often of stock market crashes. His ideas were based on a thorough reading and analysis of the 1929 crash. Investing in the stock market is gambling, but it may be the only way that the 'small' investor has to get a portion of the capitalist economic pie. The rewards of investing in stocks and shares can be considerable, but the small investor has always to be aware of the sharks and black holes.

What Taleb does very well is show how self deception can dominate stock market and for that matter credit market advice giving to the point where it absorbs most of the capital of investors who lose almost everything. I might add, in one foul swoop. That's the danger, the risk, the eventual out turn from speculation that is completely outside one's control. We see the Donald Trumps of this world and expect that he has some secrets that he can share. The only problem is that a host of Trump wannabees have lost heavily in the property market. What's Trump's secret you wonder?

Well, you need to read Taleb's book and you will begin to understand how those investing also hedge. Hedging is when you take the risk out of investing realizing that you are not an expert investor or adviser, but part of a largely random process that can be terribly destructive of valuation of capital and almost everything else.

In the UK, the individual in the civil service who mailed a package containing a disk with people's private information thought that he knew the mail system, that it was secure. The upshot was that the individual took a risk and almost everyone in the country, almost 25 million people, lost big time. It would have been better for the government to install a fail safe system of auditing so as not to risk people's private information. This is what hedging is all about. Its about making sure that you are not exposed to risk. You carry on your business. You make money. But, you do not take unnecessary risk.

In foreign exchange operations, CLS Bank, does this very task of eliminating certain kinds of risk. FX dealers hedge their currency positions all the time so that their banks are not exposed to unnecessary risk. When I worked in Barclays Bank we were put on courses that showed us how to build a currency book and maturity ladder that got you where you wanted to be, largely without risk taking. That's the way money remains with you.

This is what the IMF SDR valuation is all about. Smart countries follow the SDR valuations of their currencies so as to avoid risk, avoid Asian financial implosion! What do you think China is doing? If it followed the advice of the US authorities it might be taking unnecessary risk so it has to monitor the value of its currency against all the major currencies. This way it avoids the rsik of an implosion and disasterous surprise and gradually moves in the direction it needs to move. Look at the Chinese exchange rate. Is is moving in the right direction? This is a question that you need to ask in a period of wild speculation in oil as a commodity.

Knowledge Creation Using the Internet

The Internet is not just a means for disseminating information, it is also a vehicle of knowledge creation. In our highly scientific world, we need verification of results of studies and experiments before we consider them to be valid. The Internet is a means by which the results of studies can be directly validated. A person in one lab can actually watch another person conduct an experiment. There is no longer a need to wait to see an experiment performed. Everyone can watch it being performed. This is knowledge creation. Its not technology creation necessarily, but it is knowledge creation, and it is occurring very rapidly and it can occur even more rapidly.

When I did my first studies of technology transfer in the early 1970's, the process of knowledge creation was laborious to say the least. Today, what I did then can be performed over the Internet. It is now possible for a researcher to interview heads of research over the Internet. Wow! Now that is a change.

The Cosmic Lantern

The cosmic lantern is a very strange device that has existed through several millenia. It was recently discovered by the author Arthur Lake in London, England in an antique shop. The lantern has inspired a series of books based on Lake's experiences and those of a host of people that have interacted with the people who have possessed lantern through the ages, and around the globe. Lake has researched the story of the Lantern and its association with Tintagel, Wookey, Glastonbury, King Arthur, Lancelot of the Lake and the Knights of the Round Table.

The story of lantern reveals many of the mysteries surrounding the current search an understanding of the mysteries of the Holy Grail, the learned societies of ancient Druids, and several secret Guilds of London formed in the middle ages that influenced the renaissance in Europe. This series is a must read.

An unusual property of the lantern is that it does not obey normal physical laws and endows its possessor with amazing powers. In ancient times, shortly ofter the Romans had invaded South West Britain, the lantern appeared mysteriously in the possession of a peasant boy, son of a fisherman, who lived in a tree house that sat in the dark regions of Wookey Marsh hidden away from the Roman soldiers. But, only for a time because a famous General of the Roman Army named Vespasian came to learn of the lantern through his Commander of the Roman Cavalry, a man called Corellus.

The story of Wuh Lax and the Cosmic Lantern is now selling exclusively by Togwells at Amazon or from the author directly at Togwells Publishing. This is an independent publishing effort. Support your independent writers.

The Psychology of Handwriting

Your handwriting can reveal many things about you that you are probably unaware. The science of handwriting analysis has progressed significantly. Practitioners of analytical techniques offer their services at a price, so the science has grown up from a past time to a full fledged approach to seeing within human personality. The fact is that everything that we do can be analysed forensically. The results may not be accurate or they may hit spot on in ways that get to the deeper sources of illness and physical conditions as well as personality traits. One has to be careful with claims that handwriting analysis is all powerful. It is still a very young science.

I remember my father, a minister of religion, who visited the sick in a local insane assylum telling me in the 1960's that handwriting analysis was being used to understand mental illness. He said that they were experimenting with a therapy to reach the deeper parts of the brain by training 'mentally ill' people how to improve their handwriting. Apparently, just the training in handwriting arts could result in more organized thought and behaviour at very deep psychological levels.

A french Canadian student of psychology who I worked with in a summer job at Weston's Bakery in Longueuil, Quebec who would tease me that every motion I made could be analysed by a trained psychologist and that I was forever giving off clues about my weaknesses that a trained person could understand and use to recommend therapy, i.e. that I was strange and need help.

Your handwriting does let others know whether you are under stress or likely to be ill.

You too can Draw and Paint Pictures

As a post graduate university level teacher, I am only too aware that everyone should learn how to draw and actually do drawings and sketches on a regular basis. There are many places to learn and you cannot begin too soon. Drawing, like singing or public speaking, may actually save your life or enable you to live longer, so don't ignore it. This is because drawing requires certain parts of your brain to think. Not only do you have to visualize, but you have to link that visualization to motion in your hand, nose or foot, if you draw with your toes.

Strings In Cosmic Space - Are They For Real?

Scientists are pondering the irregularities of what they see as space and time. The notion of a big bang still has many followers, but there are new ideas. One of these ideas has to do with cosmic strings that are enormous entities created in the earliest period of the formation of the universe. The concept of cosmic strings derives in part from the theory that matter is ultimately made up of extremely tiny strings, string theory. Much of cosmic science is based on educated guesses and hypotheses that have yet to be proven.

Scientists work from what they can see through powerful telescopes and observe in their laboratories. If they observe patterns, they try to imagine what these patterns might mean scaled up to the full size of the universe, or scaled down to the tiniest level conceivable of the theoretically small elements of the universe's matter or energy. They also try to imagine what it could have been like had the cosmos emerged from the very tiny to the very large in an event such as the big bang. Astrophysicists, such as Jacqueline Hewitt, tend to start from what they refer to as the standard cosmological model. They work from that to examine the possibility that the standard cosmological model is incorrect and that they understood almost everything wrong.

The point is that they really do not know as yet when the universe actually began. They have a theory, but that is all it is, a very good theory. Such centers need our support for surprisingly enough the churches of religion aren't interested for the most part in doing this form of study.

Religious study centers instead tend to look at the cosmos very differently. They are primarily interested in conserving evidence of the past as it relates to discoveries made by individuals using very different technologies from what scientists use.

Both approaches to understanding the cosmos are very logical approaches. One asserts that it is possible to understand the cosmic universe by means of messages that are around us and that we can tap into using our brains, or that the active elements of the universe are trying to communicate to us with messages in dreams and visions, and other worldly signs and events that we need to interpret.

Both science and religion require faith either to base your logic on what evidence can be proven by means of visible testing and reproduction of tests independently, or on what you understand about the spiritual or communications process between the cosmos elements, such as God, and the faith practitioners, the religious prophets, saints, and savants, the spiritual leaders that tell us what has been their experience and experiences of predecessors.

Both approaches are valid despite both groups claiming what other groups do is bunk, like the notion history is bunk. We can ignore such inter group skirmishes because we know better. There is a role for science and religion in our cosmos and we would be poorer without the squabble between them. However, both approaches need to recognise that they are just that, approaches. In the modern world we tend to like science more because it gives us nice toys to play with, but in reality they are just nice toys and our real enjoyment comes from our relationships with other nice people and with the living 'natural' creatures of our universe, such as dogs and cats.

What we really want to avoid is outright war between the two approaches. This occurs when one or other of the approaches assumes too much about its role in defining what approach people should take. It becomes a problem if religious leaders do not keep to their turf which is only a partial element of the truth as we know it. Neither of the groups has the whole truth, and that is a very real fact. They both look silly in the face of ordinary observation when they claim supremacy and want to assume the political reigns of authority forcing people to conform to one approach or the other.

The great 'British' historical theorist and economic thinker, Karl Marx, said religion was only to be seens an opium of the people and something to be ignored or feared when it came to the dynamics of economic forces and the social struggles of people that were exploited in the name of profit. We know that approach of eliminating religion from the equation was patently false and we know that those people who fostered that approach to have commited many crimes. And, so to have religious leaders claiming to have the truth and nothing but the truth. Both athiests and religious leaders have a tendency to misguide, so treat them with respect, but do a wide circle around those that don't show you are valid way to establish the veracity of what they are claiming. Don't be misled. Drink your coffee and think about it, seriously!