Tim Bowler:

Could the language we speak skew our financial decision-making, and does the fact that you’re reading this in English make you less likely than a Mandarin speaker to save for your old age?

It is a controversial theory which has been given some weight by new findings from a Yale University behavioural economist, Keith Chen.

Prof Chen says his research proves that the grammar of the language we speak affects both our finances and our health.

Bluntly, he says, if you speak English you are likely to save less for your old age, smoke more and get less exercise than if you speak a language like Mandarin, Yoruba or Malay.

arjen:

A few years ago, Israeli and American intelligence developed a computer virus with a specific military objective: damaging Iranian nuclear facilities. Stuxnet was spread via USB sticks and settled silently on Windows PCs. From there it looked into networks for specific industrial centrifuges using Siemens SCADA control devices spinning at highspeed to seperate Uranium-235 (the bomb stuff) from Uranium-238 (the non-bomb stuff).

Iran, like many other countries, has a nuclear program for power generation and the production of isotopes for medical applications. Most countries buy the latter from specialists like the Netherlands that produces medical isotopes in a special reactor at ECN. The western boycott of Iran makes it impossible to purchase isotopes on the open market. Making them yourself is far from ideal, but the only option that remains as import blocked.

Why the boycott? Officially, according to the U.S. because Iran does not want to give sufficient openness about its weapons programs. In particular, military applications of nuclear program is an official source of concern. This concern is a fairly recent and for some reason has only been reactivated after the US attack on Iraq (a lot of the original nuclear equipment in Iran was supplied by American and German companies with funding from the World Bank before the 1979 revolution). The most curious of all allegations of Western governments about Iran is that they are never more than vague insinuations. When all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies in 2007 produced a joint study there was a clear conclusion: Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon (recent speech by the leader of this study here).

Jeff Gerth:

General Electric’s tax department is famous for inventing ways to pay Uncle Sam less. So it should come as no surprise that its CEO, Jeff Immelt, is in the crosshairs as the new chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The job puts him in the limelight as Washington debates ways to make the tax system fairer, respond to competition from low tax countries and cut the federal deficit — competing imperatives sure to confound reform efforts. If the debate does get serious, attention is likely to focus on whether to get rid of some of the special tax advantages that benefit GE and other multinational companies.

Still, GE is in a class by itself. Here are five ways the company pares its tax rate well below the top U.S. corporate rate of 35 percent — sometimes into the single digits.

Strategy No. 1: The Tax Department as Profit Center

GE’s tax department is well known for its size, skill and hiring of former government officials. About 20 years ago, GE’s tax employees totaled a few hundred and were decentralized. Today, there are almost 1,000. The department’s strong suit? Reducing the taxes GE reports for earnings purposes.

Jon Evans

“Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase,” observes Angel of the Year and new Andreessen Horowitz GP Chris Dixon, who says that the turning point between those phases for the Age of Information is…now.

Meanwhile, “profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down,” notes Paul Krugman. Walter Russell Mead agrees: “The old industrial middle class…has been hollowed out, and no comparable source of stable high income employment has emerged.” Recent data supports that: “Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of (American) earners during the economic recovery, but barely at all for everybody else … Median household income is about 9 percent lower than it was in 1999.”

Coincidence? Nope. The great tech revolution of the last 30 years is finally beginning to metastasize into every other human domain–in other words, software is eating the world, endangering almost every job there is. I argued a few weeks ago that this means America has now hit peak jobs. Let me now unpack that a bit.

Peter DeLorenzo:

I happen to think that these themes are thinly disguised attempts at getting back to another, more romantic era, where the simple act of driving was such an adventure unto itself that whole car companies rose up around that notion. These spots are trying in their own way to capture that magic again, even though we live in an era where surprises quickly well up and subside in a fleeting, momentary social media blast, only to be buried by the next story, which is soon to be swallowed up by the next story, and so on.

Are they as artfully done as some of those calls to action of the past? In a word, sometimes. Certainly there are bursts of brilliance in some of the individual executions, with the majestic power of words showing up on occasion and the equally powerful imagery present and accounted for just as intermittently, but it’s hard to find the real enduring power in some of these new car campaigns.

I’m going to remind you of one advertising campaign that set out to create majestic imagery for a car and instead ended up defining the craft of advertising for decades.

I’ll set the scene for you. When Edward S. “Ned” Jordan, a former advertising guy, founded the Jordan Motor Car Company in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1916, he had dreams, big Technicolor dreams of fame and glory and of the world beating down his door.

Jordan’s cars were for the most part a collection of other manufacturers’ parts, but they were high-styled machines, because, as Jordan was quoted as saying, “Cars are too dull and drab.” He was out to change all that, so his designs were arresting and his bold advertising forays, which created an aura for the brand, were even more so.

And change it he did. In the June 1923, edition of the Saturday Evening Post, an ad for the Jordan “Playboy” – a rakish roadster – appeared. In it, a flapper girl was wrought low behind the wheel, with a cowboy racing beside her off the right rear fender, framed by wide-open skies. And the words:

“Somewhere west of Laramie there’s a bronco-busting, steer roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lighting and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he’s going high, wide and handsome. The truth is – the Playboy was built for her. Built for the lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race. She loves the cross of the wild and the tame. There’s a savor of links about that car – of laughter and lilt and light – a hint of old loves – and saddle and quirt. It’s a brawny thing – yet a graceful thing for the sweep o’ the Avenue. Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale. Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight.”

The Financial Times.

John Battelle:

I know that when I do write here, I tend to go on, and on – and those of you who read me seem to be OK with that. But sometimes the best posts are short and clear.

That was my thought when I read Journalists Need Advertising 101 by Brian Morrissey, writing in Digiday last week. In fewer than 500 words, Morrissey issues a wake up call to those in journalism who believe in the old school notion of a Chinese wall between editorial and advertising:

What’s crazy is journalists seems almost proudly ignorant of the business of advertising. …it’s time journalists take a real interest in how advertising works. I’d go even further. It’s time they get involved in making it. Hope is not a strategy, as they say, and it’s better to deal with the world you live in rather than the world you wish you lived in.

Philipp Franziskus:

After a long day of work I sometimes had this feeling that I had done a lot of things but nothing really important. I had made all these little decisions that take a fair amount of time and I felt exhausted. But my business didn’t move forward during that day. What was the problem?

A truly fascinating thing I have found to help me focus more on important tasks is killing some variables in my life.

Variables are usually recurring tasks that are not important but take a lot of attention because you have to make decisions. The more decisions you make the more you feel exhausted even when you actually didn’t do something important.
To keep my mind focused on my important goals, here are three things have worked well for me over the last years:

Cristene Gonzalez-Wertz:

If “muchness” were actually a word, it would be that modern blend of the right things greater than the sum of their parts. Or at least that’s the way I’d define it. So how will consumers discover their own personal muchness in 2013?

1. “Expressive Devices”

It used to be that 3D printing was for prototyping or for people who wanted to connect their Lego blocks to their K’nex. However, this technology is finally moving out of its geeky roots into the potential for people to make their own “art,” from Nokia allowing consumers to 3D-print device cases for the Lumia 820 or in Paris, for Fashion Week. The flexibility of the materials, and now the ability to combine them in a single item generates unprecedented levels of customization. And in all it’s geeky chic-ness, Wired announced a 3D Print-Off. We think so much of this whole notion of 3D printing, it’s one of the 3 pillars our Institute for Business Value colleagues are putting in an upcoming study (more on the other two over the next few months).

John Keane:

Lying on his desk is a biography of Martin Luther, the man who harnessed the printing press to split the Church. To add to his collection, I hand my pale-skinned host a small book I’ve mockingly wrapped in black tissue paper with red ribbon, tied in a bow. The noir et rouge and dead arm pranks aren’t lost on him. Nor is the significance of the book: José Saramago’s The Tale of the Unknown Island. Inside its front cover, I’ve scribbled a few words: ‘For Julian Assange, who knows about journeys because there aren’t alternatives.’

I’d been told he might be heavy weather. Fame is a terrible burden, and understandably the famous must find ways of dealing with sycophants, detractors and intruders. People said he’d circle at first, avoid questions, proffer shyness, or perhaps even radiate bored arrogance. It isn’t at all like that. Calm, witty, clear-headed throughout, he’s in a talkative mood. But there’s no small talk.

I tackle the obvious by asking him about life inside his embassy prison. “The issue is not airlessness and lack of sunshine. If anything gets to me it’s the visual monotony of it all.” He explains how we human beings have need of motion, and that our sensory apparatus, when properly “calibrated”, imparts mental and bodily feelings of being in our own self-filmed movie. Physical confinement is sensory deprivation. Sameness drags prisoners down. I tell how the Czech champion of living the truth Václav Havel, when serving a 40-month prison spell, used to find respite from monotony by doing such things as smoking a cigarette in front of a mirror. “Bradley Manning did something similar,” says Assange. “The prison authorities claimed his repeated staring in the mirror was the mark of a disturbed and dangerous character. Despite his protestations that there was nothing else to do, he was put into solitary confinement, caged, naked and stripped of his glasses.”