We’re now in year three of the worst financial crisis since the great depression, and it’s a little difficult to say exactly where we are. Equity markets have just had their strongest quarterly performance in decades (and in some cases, ever). Bankers are starting to feel a little more confident about calling an end to the crisis. The financial media, being the natural cheerleaders that they are, are back to saying that everything is looking up again, and even an number of respected analysts (you know, the ones who missed the crisis in the first place) are getting a bit more optimistic. Even Nourel Roubeni is starting to sound a little more bullish. Gone are the days, apparently, of watching Maria Bartoromo have palpitations on CNBC, which was occasionally the high point of my days about a year ago.

Um, not so fast. There are several things here being conflated. First of all, the strong economic recovery that’s being seen in China and some of Asia, and certainly in much of Latin America, is not about to be replicated in Europe or the US. Full story »

Ever since the Internet began gaining popular awareness in the mid-1990s, the topic of how businesses can productively use various new media technologies has been a subject of ongoing interest. Along the way we’ve had a series of innovations to consider: first it was the Net, and the current tool of the moment is Twitter. In between we had, in no particular order, Facebook (not that Facebook has gone away, of course), CRM, mobile (SMS, smart phones, apps), blogging, RSS and aggregation, Digg (and Reddit and StumbleUpon and Current and Yahoo! Buzz and Technorati and Del.icio.us and seemingly thousands more), targeted e-mail, YouTube, SEO, SEM, online PR and, well, you get the idea.

We certainly hear examples of businesses getting it right with new media, but in truth these cases represent a painfully small minority. Full story »

Results: Our closest match yet ended regulation in a tie between Eels and Santana. The numbers: #8 Eels/E 39%; Santana/Carlos Santana 39%; Richard Thompson 9%; The Animals 7%; Peter Frampton 5%; Squeeze 2%. We then staged a sudden death overtime period, which Santana won by a 76%-24% margin. Santana advances to the Great 48.

Our search for the greatest band of all time now shifts to the Red Rocks region and our final preliminary pod. In it, a wicked tough pool of challengers confront a man who attained 5-star success as a solo artist and as part of two separate bands. Full story »

A recent edition of Forbes magazine explores the ROI — return on investment — of the cost of attending the nation’s more prestigious schools of business. Generally speaking, graduates of these top 75 schools need 4 to 4 1/2 years to recoup tuition, fees and foregone compensation.

Part of my job as a journalism professor is to recruit students. Because I was a journalist, I’m interested in finding bright, hard-working young men and women who’d like to follow the calling of the public service mission of journalism. (I remain optimistic, perhaps foolishly.)

Parents of prospective students, of course, routinely ask: “What’s your record on job placement?” That I can tell them, based on surveys of our grads six months after matriculation. (And it’s an excellent record, too.)

But here’s the question I dread:
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As of 9:00 am MDT, when we were going to close the polls and declare a winner, we have a tie. We are now closing the poll and asking you to vote in the following sudden-death tiebreaker, which includes only the top two vote-getters – Eels/E and Santana/Carlos Santana. The tie-breaker will close at 2:00 pm MDT. If it remains tied at that point, we will leave the poll open, checking it every few minutes, until one artist gets a tie-breaking vote.

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After a similar attempt resulted in civil war in Madagascar, the South Korean government bought 1,000 sq km of land in Tanzania for use in agriculture.  Mindful of the politics involved, the South Koreans are setting aside half of that land for local development.

To quote from a recent BBC article:

Lee Ki-Churl, a corporation official, said he expected Tanzanians to benefit from the deal. “Some African countries export fruit and import fruit juice, or export olives and import olive oil, simply because their past colonialists did not teach them how to process food,” he told the AFP news agency. “We plan to set up an education centre for Tanzanian farmers in the food-processing zone in order to transfer agricultural know-how and irrigation expertise to them.”

I think it is both patronising and ignorant to assume that Africans don’t farm the way modern western farms operate because they are uneducated.  This almost seems to imply that Africans are too stupid to help themselves. Full story »