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$6,600,000 | 4 Bed | 5 Bath | 1 H.Bath | 4,876 Sq.Ft.
One Thousand Museum by Zaha Hadid, Miami's most prestigious new residential tower, blurs the lines between art and architecture. This limited collection of museum-quality homes offers an unprecedented level of service and amenities. 4 bedrooms plus service quaters and 5.5 bathrooms, family room, custom closets and flooring.
The MLS data provided for the property above (MLS#A10455461) is provided courtesy of Cervera Real Estate. Source: Southeast Florida MLS. Information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed. The listing data on this page comes in part from the Internet Data Exchange (IDX), a collaboration between the following REALTOR (R) associations in the South Florida Multiple Listing Service (MLS): Realtor Association of Greater Miami and the Beaches, Realtor Association of Greater Ft. Lauderdale, Realtor Association of Miami-Dade County, Northwestern Dade Association of Realtors, South Broward Board of Realtors. All rights reserved. The information being provided is for consumers' personal, non-commercial use and may not be used for any purpose other than to identify prospective properties consumers may be interested in purchasing. Use of search facilities of data on the site, other than a consumer looking to purchase real estate, is prohibited. Federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin in the sale, rental or financing of housing. Sildy Cervera is the Sales Director of Cervera Real Estate in South Beach.
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Eating Paleo and Running 100+ miles
Last March I did a Whole30 and I have stayed pretty strict Paleo since then – only reintroducing honey and alcohol occasionally. I had such amazing results and felt so incredibly good, it just wasn't worth it to me to reintroduce any of the foods I got rid of during the Whole30. One of the biggest results I've seen is how the Paleo-diet and lifestyle has impacted my running, training and recovery. I've run 4 50Ks, a 70 miler, a 100K, a 50 miler, multiple back-to-back races and long training runs, and most recently a 109 mile race, all on a strict Paleo-diet. If you are curious about the science behind all of this, I strongly recommend reading It Starts With Food, The Paleo Diet and Paleo for Athletes. I won't go into the science here, but what I will share here is what my nutrition looked like for the Hot TWOT – a 109 mile race with 32,000 feet of climbing that took me 43 hours to complete – and how it worked for me. We are all an experiment of one. This is what works for me and I hope it helps others who may be struggling with the nutrition piece of training, like I was before going Paleo.
As I mentioned, my diet is already strict Paleo. This means I eat grass-fed, pastured meats, seafood, eggs, lots of veggies (organic as much as possible), some fruit (again, organic) and a good amount of healthy fats (avocado, olives, nuts, coconut). I do not eat any grains, legumes, dairy, sugar (I read labels very carefully – sugar is hiding everywhere), or processed foods. I occasionally eat honey and drink alcohol but I did another Whole 30 starting on Labor Day, so I didn't have any alcohol in the month (actually 5 weeks) leading up to the race. The week before the race I made sure to eat a lot of carb dense vegetables and fruits like spaghetti squash, acorn squash, sweet potatoes, bananas and zucchini – Paleo "carb-loading" you could say. I had some of these veggies at every meal in the week before the race. The morning of the race, about 2 1/2 hours before race start, I ate spinach, mushrooms and chicken sausage stir fry, 2 poached eggs on an avocado half and I had a banana about 15 minutes before the race started. I carefully chose my race day food based on what foods I knew were good fuel to sustain my energy, tasted good, had no sugar/dairy/grains/legumes and were easily portable or stored in a cooler. Since this was an unsupported race, I had to plan food that could be in my drop bags, cooler and car. It really wasn't that hard to do.
During the race I ate the following. I'm really bad at remembering exact amounts, so I will just post my approximate intake. I also provided links, since some of these things can be tricky to find.
-sweet potato gu (my homemade concoction, stored in EZ Squeezees pouches, consisting of 1 cup sweet potato baby food, 1/4 cup coconut milk, 1/4 cup applesauce blended) (approx. 6 – 6 oz pouches)
–GoGo Squeeze fruit pouches (approx. 8)
–Ella's Kitchen baby food (approx. 4)
-bananas (approx. 8)
–cashew butter (2 pouches)
–Trader Joe's freeze dried bananas, strawberries and coconut flakes
–Applegate Farms chicken sausage (2 links)
-black olives
-sweet potatoes (3)
–chicken broth (with no sugar – very hard to find – the Imagine brand is the only one I've found, small containers will keep in dropbag and you can drink without heating – ideally your own bone broth would be best, but I wanted some to keep in dropbags so the vacuum sealed containers worked well)
–Key West Pink steamed shrimp (cooked beforehand, packed carefully in ice packs in lunch box cooler to keep cold)
-sweet potato chips
-tomatoes/sweet peppers/cucumbers and Goddess dip
-V8 (really tasted good late in the race and has good sodium too)
–Epic meat bars (bison and turkey – 2)
-1 hamburger with an avocado (from Jack Brown's in Harrisonburg, delivered warm by my mom – ahhhhmazing!)
-Kombucha (2 bottles)
-Tazo Awake iced tea (kept in my Hydro Flask bottle with ice)
I had strong, steady energy throughout the 43 hours of running and was hungry and able to eat easily. I stuck with the GoGoSqueeze, sweet potato gu and bananas/cashew butter for the first part of the race until about mile 27, and then added in other things as the race went on. I ate shrimp and olives at mile 93 and they were pure heaven – as was the hamburger after Loop 3 – and the Boulevard Wheat Beer – totally not Paleo – that I had at the finish! I didn't have any nausea, stomach issues or other common intestinal issues that I've had before in a long run. This experience was similar to the other runs I've done fueling this way. As I've said before, we are all an experiment of one – and this is what truly works for me. In the days after the run I continued to eat carb dense veggies and plenty of protein. I ate when I was hungry (which was quite often in the days after the race!) and made sure to replenish my body. I felt almost 100% recovered body-wise by Tuesday – 3 days after the race finished at 3:30am Sunday – and was able to easily run 6 miles on trails. I was still really tired, but again, following a Paleo lifestyle has helped me see the value and importance of sleep. I took 2-3 hour naps for the five days after the race and went to bed early, making sure I had at least 8 hours of sleep. I listened to my body and gave it what it needed. As a result, my recovery was super fast and I felt completely recovered by the following weekend.
Paleo has worked for me in so many ways. It's worth a try, especially if you're struggling with nutrition in your running adventures. I'd love to hear from you if you've tried this and if you have any other real food ideas to add to the list of food to fuel with. Happy running…and eating!
Scenes from Grindstone
Grindstone 100 – 2013 was canceled tonight because of the government shutdown. Thinking of happy trail memories from the training weekend in August as I post this. Ultrarunners are pretty good at maintaining relentless forward progress, so many of us moved to Plan B and this weekend will bring Hot TWOT, with 100 miles of trail play on The Wild Oak Trail – and Grindstone 100 will be run again next year. Happy running everyone!

subset: commoncrawl


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DOHA (Reuters) - At least 19 foreign nationals, including 13 children, were killed in a fire that ripped through an upscale shopping mall in Qatar on Monday, the country's interior ministry said.
The children were from New Zealand, Spain, Japan, the Philippines, and Benin, among other countries. A Spanish diplomatic source in Madrid told Reuters that four of the dead children were Spanish.
It was not immediately clear what caused the blaze, which media reports said broke out at a childcare area at the Villagio Mall in Doha's west.
Qatar's interior ministry only confirmed that the fire had started somewhere between Gates 3 and 4 in the mall and that an investigation was under way.
"There don't seem to have been any fire alarms or sprinklers at the mall," a relative of a two-year-old child who died in the fire told Reuters, speaking by phone from Qatar's Hamad hospital.
A ministry official said that all buildings in Qatar abide by safety regulations "with no exceptions" and that an investigative committee would be formed to look into safety requirements issues.
Smoke was seen billowing from the mall, which was evacuated. Ambulances and police vehicles blocked entry into the shopping complex.
"We tried to get to the children's area but the extremely high heat stood in our way," Brigadier Hamad al-Duhaimi of the Qatari civil defence told reporters.
A ministry official told journalists that none of the dead were Qataris. Four of the dead adults were teachers and the other two were civil defence personnel, the official said. Seventeen people were wounded, including four children, the official said.
The dead included three New Zealand children, believed to be two-year old triplets, who were in the childcare centre.
"The family are obviously dealing with terrible grief," Prime Minister John Key told reporters.
"Obviously there are very serious questions that will need to be answered," he said.
Many expatriates live in Qatar, a gas- and oil-rich Gulf Arab state with one of the highest standards of living in the world.
The Villagio Mall, which opened in 2006, is an Italianate-themed shopping complex with a hotel, theme park and canal plied by gondolas.
Additional reporting by Emma Pinedo in MADRID, Mahmoud Habboush in DUBAI, and Gyles Beckford in WELLINGTON; Writing by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Paul Tait


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University of Vermont
Rev. Willard Preston (1825 - 1826)
The fourth president of UVM, the Reverend Willard Preston, was born in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1785, and graduated from Brown University with high honors in 1806. He received a license to preach in 1808. After serving in various churches in Rhode Island and Vermont, he was installed as pastor of the First Congregational Church in Burlington in 1823 and was elected president of the university on January 12, 1825.
The most notable event to occur during President Preston's short term of office was the visit to the university of the Marquis de Lafayette on June 29, 1825, to lay the cornerstone of South College at the "Old Mill", a new, three-part structure that was being erected to replace the original College Edifice. The Reverend Mr. Preston resigned as president of the university on August 8, 1826, due to differences with members of the corporation. After he left Burlington, he became pastor of the Independent Presbyterian Church of Savannah, Georgia, where he served with distinction for more than a quarter of a century. The University of Georgia conferred the degree of doctor of divinity on him prior to his death at the age of seventy on April 25, 1856.
President Preston's resignation in 1826 marked the end of the university's founding years. Perhaps, in light of all the difficulties it had experience, it would be more accurate to say that UVM had actually been founded and refounded during its first quarter-century of operation. Now the university was about to embark on a bold new course of action under the innovative academic leadership provided by its next president, the Reverend James Marsh.
FIG.11 Cornerstone Old Mill laid by General Lafayette in 1825
Last modified September 28 2012 10:52 AM


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Pork strips stir-fried in a sweet chili sauce.
Preparation Time: 10 mins
Cooking Time: 10 mins
Yield: 4 x approx. 1 cup servings
Heat oil in a wok or large skillet. Add onions, chili and pork and fry until golden brown, about 5 minutes.
Add brown sugar, water and fish sauce; bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for 4 to 5 minutes or until sauce is thick and syrupy, stirring while cooking. Sprinkle with chopped coriander.
Serve with steamed Jasmine rice.
Serving suggestion is not included in the nutritional analysis.


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Generally I quite like Adam Curtis's documentaries. I admire the fact that at a time where expository documentaries presenting wide scale socio-cultural arguments are hugely out of fashion he makes films which probe big issues around power, politics and history. I hugely enjoy the aesthetic of his work, the heavy usage of archival material to visually illustrate the points the narration makes. In All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace I also particularly enjoyed the soundtrack (it was mainly a collection of Nine Inch Nails material) which combined excellently with the visual material to provide an affectively potent piece of media.
However while I found the argument made in part one of the documentary to be somewhat partial and lacking, I was immensely disappointed by the contents of the second part. The central argument the documentary makes is that from the 1950's onwards there was a movement which began with cybernetics and sought to reduce humans to mere nodes in complex networks of matter and energy rather than following the enlightenment view that humans were distinct from the rest of the world, and unlike the determinate automatons of nature, that humans and humans alone possessed free will. Curtis appears to regard this idea as a dangerous proposition which de-emphasised the sanctity of individualism, and which undermines analyses of power and politics presenting instead the notion that systems can self-organise without a command and control hierarchy being in place.
Now the first thing which is crucial to point is that the Enlightenment view of humans as being ontologically distinct from the rest of the natural world as championed by Curtis is of course complete nonsense. It is based on on the nature/culture dualism which has roots in monotheistic theology and has no basis in fact. The notion which stemmed from the cyberneticists that humans, other living creatures, and machines could be understood as complex systems governed by circular causality – that is, feedback – is not a dangerous ideological myth, it is factually correct. The utility of the cybernetics movement, and indeed the disciplines which grew out of it such as systems biology, complexity theory, autopoiesis, connectionist AI, cognitive sciences etc all did so because the basic premises that feedback is a crucial process in dynamic systems was correct.
One of the places where Curtis goes hopelessly wrong was his definition of feedback. Curtis explored negative, or self corrective feedback, which was one of the two types of feedback loop discovered by the cyberneticists but completely omits positive feedback from the film. While the majority of the early cybernetics was dominated by issues around reducing noise through negative feedbacks, positive feedback has played a crucial role in contemporary understandings of how change occurs in dynamic systems, particularly within the domains of chaos theory, complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics. Indeed, current understandings of open systems, systems which are dynamically balanced at a point far from equilibrium, and maintain this dynamic balance through taking in flows of energy (such as food for many living systems) are largely predicated on knowledge which can be traced back to cybernetics. Yet Curtis's film fails to mention anything about this. Probably because it totally undercuts the narrative he portrays. What makes this ironic is that while claiming that the natural world is too complex for the analyses derived from cybernetics to provide useful models, we see images of swarming creatures to illustrate this argument. Swarming is of course an emergent behaviour which can be simulated and replicated using just three very simple rules; 1) Keep moving in the same direction as your neighbours 2) Keep close to your neighbours 3) Avoid colliding with your neighbours. This is a classic example of the kind of self-organisation which Curtis is trying to argue does not occur.
Similarly Curtis goes on to argue that unlike humans, who have free will and so can make choices, machines are purely determinate automatons, whose every action can be predicted. Which is true of many kinds of simple, linear and closed machines. But which is clearly not true of cellular automata, artificial neural networks or other systems which are based on emergence. Presumably the reason these types of system are not mentioned is that they would undercut the nature/culture dualism Curtis seeks to maintain which imbues humans with special properties not found elsewhere in the universe.
While the majority of the film presenting a very misleading picture of the legacy of cybernetics, the final section then deals with alleged examples of contemporary self-organising systems and protest movements. Which was so utterly woeful that it actually made the rest of the film appear competent. I was expecting to see the Zapatistas, the alternative globalisation movement, the Peoples Global Assembly, the World Social Forum or a range of other organisations who have organised in non-hierarchical ways to present a political alternative to the discredited radical politics of Leninist vanguardism, whereby a small elite violently seizes power in order to then create an egalitarian democracy. The motivation behind the movements which have used these types of democratic, grassroots organisation to mobilise pro-democracy movements has largely been to organise in a way that reflects the kind of politics a group seeks to achieve, rather than to attempt to create an egalitarian society via dictatorship.
So what did Curtis have to say about this? Sadly the answer was nothing. Instead of focusing on the methods of these types of movement we instead were told that the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine was an example of self-organisation and a leaderless non-hierarchical movment. The Orange movement was in fact a movement heavily funded by groups such as the US State Department, who according to the Guardian had spent $67 million in the Ukraine in the two years before the disputed Presidential run off. It was a 'leaderless' 'self-organising' movement which was centred around trying to get one particular corrupt political candidate, Viktor Yuchenko, elected over a rival, corrupt political candidate, Viktor Yanukovich. Largely it was a struggle between the western half of the country, aided by western governments who wanted Yuchenko to prevail pitted against the eastern half of the country and Russia who wanted Yanukovich to prevail. In other words it had nothing to do with spontaneous self-organisation, non-hierarchy or systems thinking. It was a great example of corrupt politics as usual.
The only reason I can muster for Curtis to use such a ridiculously awful example to illustrate the point is that using a more relevant example would have undercut the epic narrative he sought to explicate. Which ultimately is a big part of why the kind of grand narrative based expository documentary is so out of fashion, while its easy to make a compelling argument based on affective manipulation through audiovisual means, an hour (or even three one hour parts) just isn't enough time to really explore complex issues in any amount of depth. Which means that documentary filmmakers end up creating narratives which are hugely misleading, which is exactly what Curtis does here.


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John Terry has sensationally quit the England football team less than 24 hours before the Football Association hearing into the Anton Ferdinand saga was expected to begin.
Chelsea captain Terry announced his immediate retirement from international football, accusing the FA of making his position "untenable".
The 31-year-old said in a statement on Sunday night: "I am today announcing my retirement from international football.
"I would like to thank the England managers who have selected me for my 78 caps.
"I have had great pleasure in sharing that honour with all the players that I've played with.
"I would like to thank them, the fans and my family for their support and encouragement during my international career.
"Representing and captaining my country is what I dreamed of as a boy and it has been a truly great honour.
"I have always given my all and it breaks my heart to make this decision.
"I want to wish Roy (Hodgson) and the team every success for the future.
"I am making this statement today in advance of the hearing of the FA disciplinary charge because I feel the FA, in pursuing charges against me where I have already been cleared in a court of law, have made my position with the national team untenable.
"I now look forward to playing for Chelsea FC, and challenging for domestic and European honours, and I want to thank the fans and the club for their continued support."


text:
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Harris County sheriff's deputy killed by drunken driver
A 16-year veteran of the Harris County Sheriff's Office was killed by an alleged drunken driver who ran a red light early Sunday.
Sgt. Dwayne Polk, 47, most recently assigned to the transportation unit, was in uniform driving his tan-colored Chevrolet Silverado around 3 a.m. at the intersection of West Little York and North Shepherd.
Andres Munos-Munos, 22, sped through the red light at the intersection in his white GMC pickup, crashing into the driver's side door of Polk's truck, said Houston Police Department spokesman John Cannon.
The deputy died at the scene.
"The HCSO family is in mourning," said spokeswoman Christina Garza.
"Tough morning," tweeted Sheriff Adrian Garcia at 6:03 a.m. "The HCSO suffered a terrible loss & we are all grieving. Keep HCSO members & their families in your prayers."
Followers responded they would indeed pray. One called for stricter drunken driving laws that would more strongly equate the crime to murder. A federal panel last week recommended that states reduce the allowable blood-alcohol content to 0.05 percent from 0.08 percent.
A 2009 community newsletter from a neighborhood in northwest Harris County lamented that Polk, one of its contracted deputies, was being rotated to a new assignment after six years. "I consider Sheriff's Deputy Polk a friend, I know you join me in wishing him the very best in his new endeavors," the newsletter's author wrote.
Polk grew up in Houston with his two brothers, three sisters and many cousins. The Bible was among the books his mother used to teach him and his siblings to read, according to a 2012 obituary for his younger brother.
While HPD processed the suspect Sunday, Garcia spoke with Polk's family.
"It was tough speaking (with) his son this morning. But he will have many big brothers (at) HCSO looking out 4 him," the sheriff tweeted from his cell phone Sunday.
Cannon said evidence at the scene and statements from Munos indicate that he was intoxicated. The man was taken to Ben Taub General Hospital after he complained of minor injuries.
Munos, who lives in Houston but is not a U.S. citizen, has been charged with intoxication manslaughter, according to Harris County court records. A spokesman for the Houston office of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could not be reached to clarify the man's legal status.
Records also show Munos accepted a plea bargain agreement for two charges stemming from a June 2012 arrest. He served 30 days in county jail after pleading guilty to driving while under the influence and unlawfully carrying a weapon.


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Jobs Near Lubbock Christian University
Lubbock, TX
Lubbock Christian University was founded by members of the Churches of Christ dedicated to restoring New Testament Christianity. To honor its heritage- the university is committed to imparting this faith and its values to future generations.The mission of Lubbock Christian University is to educate students- imparting values for scholarship and for living. Through its baccalaureate and graduate programs- the university challenges students to think critically- to excel in their disciplines- and to model Christ


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Jon & Kate are on the mend.
Former reality star Jon Gosselin has apologized to ex-wife Kate Gosselin for having to endure a parade of girlfriends after the pair split in 2009.
"I am sorry, because I did stuff I wouldn't want done to me," Jon Gosselin told People.
U.S. & World
The divorced dad of eight copped to having been passive-aggressive during his 10-year marriage to Kate but said time and therapy helped him come to terms with his flaws.
He said that Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the former Michael Jackson adviser, used to tell him when he lived in New York that Gosselin could either use his fame to "sell out" or "for good."
"I didn't grasp that at the time," Gosselin said.
The 35-year-old has recently begun a new gig as a director of sales and promotions for Gameface Int. and is dating Liz Jannetta, a 27-year old single mom, People reported.
He said he's lately been calling up his ex for parenting advice.
"She's a great Mom," Gosselin told People. "We just have different parenting styles."
Gosselin famously said he was "relieved" that his kids would have a life away from the cameras when "Kate Plus 8" was cancelled last August.
He said he hasn't ruled out a return to TV himself, but that so far he's only been offered "crazy stuff."


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18 Property Brands Created by WJ Agency
23 Apr
Click above to see a slideshow of 18 brands developed for the housing, development and hospitality industries by WJA's creative department.
23 Apr
Click above to see a slideshow of 18 brands developed for the housing, development and hospitality industries by WJA's creative department.
21 Nov
We've been working with the Riverstone Residential Group to brand and market the premier mixed-use luxury loft development in Downtown Berkeley. Berkeley Central is located at 2055 Center Street, "Steps Away from Everything You Love in Downtown Berkeley." Click above to view the slideshow of our branding process.
30 Sep
Click photo to view slideshow. Broadstone Development and Alliance Residential hired Wagner/Junker to create a new identity and marketing strategy for the renovated the Hollywood Tower, a landmark apartment building in Hollywood California. After thorough market research and creating a target customer profile, Eric Junker lead the Wagner/Junker creating team in designing all aspects of […]
21 Sep
Click photo to view the slideshow. When Wagner/Junker was retained by the Las Vegas Design Center to develop the brand identification for the country's newest and largest design facility, we where charged with developing all in and out-of-house branding and marketing materials,including brochures, newsletters, collateral materials, online and email promotions.
21 Aug
Click photo to view the slideshow. Few San Francisco residents knew the Parkmerced neighborhood. Those who did largely thought of it as a bleak mid-century planned community in the foggiest corner of the city. When Stellar Management purchased the 150 acre 3000 unit community and began to renovate the aging infrastructure, they hired Wagner/Junker to […]
7 Jul
Click photo to view the slideshow. At 11-stories, blü stands as Beverly Hills' first and only luxury high-rise residence, offering 360° views, boutique hotel-style amenities and concierge service, including exclusive VIP arrangements with neighborhood businesses. However, because blü was an adaptive re-use project, the property owners faced the challenge of imbuing the former office building […]
2 Jul
Click above to view slideshow. The Siegel Group collaborated with Wagner Junker to create identity and branding for a new 150 room Las Vegas boutique hotel. RUMOR embodies a powerful combination: chic setting, hot location, cool pools, modern rooms and unexpected amenities in a boutique hotel setting. Wagner Junker has designed all brand touch points […]
7 May
This series of sequential posters where used as part of an outdoor-focused advertising campaign for The Metropolitan Hollywood, an upscale residential development on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Client: Metropolitan Hollywood Creative Director: Eric Junker Design: Thomas Lee Bakofsky Writing: Eric Junker, Jeff Wagner Photography: Ed Lacasse
9 Nov
The Wagner Junker shop provides lively and inspired creative concepts to clients in a broad spectrum of industries. Click above to view the galley.
3 Oct
It's official – Miss America has retained WJA for public relations and event marketing support for the 2012 Miss America Pageant live from Las Vegas. For the 3rd year in a row, WJA has been selected to work with the Miss America Organization. "We couldn't be happier to be joining their team once again," notes […]


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The Global Business Network was founded in 1988 as a think tank to shape the future of the world. It's succeeding.
On April 21, 1994, between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. – the Twilight Zone, you might call it – I rendezvoused with a blend of fantasy and reality in which, you'll be happy to know, the future of the planet was successfully resolved.
The encounter occurred aboard the presidential yacht USS Potomac, the same steel-hulled craft that, half a century ago, carried Roosevelt to his meeting with Churchill wherein they secretly plotted World War II. It cruised on the San Francisco Bay as helicopters hovered above, dropping smoke flares to mark a jumper from the Golden Gate Bridge.
The twilight was a glorious gold, fading to a cool blue-gray.
Reality started turning to smoke, however, as I listened to the people on board bartering the globe. Those identifying themselves as Middle Easterners and Africans – controlling the world's gold, oil, diamonds, and rare earths – quickly made deals that they said raised US$300 billion. They needed it badly, they felt, to protect themselves from a Russian named Boris.
Over by the bar, a lean, shifty-looking man actually went by that name. The Europeans said they feared such a man might be the 21st century's Adolf Hitler. This led to sophisticated discussions about America's war machine. How fortuitous, everyone agreed, that it still exists. Several people on the boat speculated as to the circumstances under which it might be leased.
Those who said they embodied the interests of Asia largely ignored those who represented North America. They were too preoccupied with their bucking and surging economies. The Americans were mildly surprised. But since they were focused utterly inward, intent only on transforming their newly lean multinational companies into mean global forces, they shrugged it off.
Sideshows abounded. The fool Brazilians cutting down the planet's oxygen production, it was agreed, must be dealt with. So the wasteland of the Sahara would simply have to be forested. Africa's Rwanda-like chaos-wars might even be damped by such a project, some felt.
There were surprises. Microsoft was quietly discussed as far more effective a world shaper than the International Monetary Fund. The Latins were startled by how much better the North Americans were at presenting a future for Brazil, Chile, and Argentina than were the South Americans themselves. I, meanwhile, was having a marvelous time wandering about in the guise of a world-weary diplomatic sleazeball representing "international institutions" like the United Nations and the World Bank. Almost involuntarily dropping into a British accent, I sidled up to a chap who supposedly was a neighbor of North Korea and said, archly, "Say, old man, have you any security problems you find sticky? Pity. Perhaps you might give us a ring."
In one dimension, this was all a game. A trivial little game really, conducted by an outfit that at one level is only a vanishingly tiny $4.5 million international consulting company – Global Business Network.
But that is only one layer of reality. To this day, I ponder how history may have shifted during that "game" that I was a part of because I, too, am a member of the Global Business Network. "Membership" is a tricky word at GBN; there is no initiation ritual. One simply gets more and more tangled in its swirling mists. I was first asked to join a discussion on the network's private BBS. Then I started receiving books that members thought I might find interesting. Then I got invited to gatherings at fascinating places, from Aspen to Amsterdam. Finally, I was asked to help GBN project the future regarding subjects about which I had expertise. By then, the network seemed natural.
The GBN members who rehearsed the future on that boat hailed from the Singapore Ministry of Defense, the Australian department of taxation, the Mexican Stock Exchange, the London Stock Exchange, Volvo, Fiat, Petroleos de Venezuela, Allstate, DuPont, ARCO, Saatchi & Saatchi, the American Express Bank in London, and the Executive Council of the Club of Rome. And that scarcely begins to define the group. For spice, there were the likes of Jon McIntire, former manager of the Grateful Dead, and theoretical neurophysiologist William Calvin.
Nor does that game and list of players delimit the group's ambitions. The agenda for the next day was modestly labeled "The Restructuring of the World Economy."
Toward the end of the boat trip, Jay Ogilvy, a co-founder of Global Business Network, reclined in a rattan deck chair of the style favored by those who, back in the '40s, created our modern world.
"I like this," he said, sipping his sauvignon blanc as he gazed at the bosom-like hills of Marin.
"I like it a lot."
He was referring to the pleasures of lording like a potentate over a rented boat.
But once again, not entirely.
Ogilvy is one of five white men of a certain age who, in 1988, created a company/think tank/men's club whose explicit purpose is to shape the future of the world.
It is succeeding.
The Joint Chiefs of staff, for example, hired Global Business Network to help figure out what the nature of military threats to the United States might be for the next 30 years. (The most challenging possibility: what would they do should they face decades of peace?)
How about the LA riots and the collapse of the California economy? GBN helped Pacific Gas and Electric Company anticipate the consequences of both, causing the utility company to put major and early emphasis on convincing industry not to leave Northern California.
Back when the Japanese stock market was flying and Japanese car companies seemed invulnerable, GBN helped Nissan North America Inc. imagine how it would stave off bankruptcy and where it might move its factories if, as actually came to pass this year, the unthinkable happened and the yen dropped below 100 to the dollar.
Back when AT&T thought of itself as a collection of telephone cables, GBN helped the company imagine the modern world in which mobile communication defines the future, and entertainment drives the system.
What happens when broadcast television collapses and the underpinnings of entire industries disappear? That was of interest to Leo Burnett Company, one of the world's major advertising agencies; Universal, one of the world's biggest producers of broadcast programming; and ABC, the television network - all clients of GBN who listen to its advice.
How will we handle the crisis when, as seems plausible later this decade, half of the US nuclear-power-generating capacity becomes too expensive to operate? GBN has thought about it.
What happens if computer shopping kills off every mall? A retailer with gross annual sales larger than the GNP of some European countries keenly wanted to know. They went to GBN for a hint.
Suppose the Asian economic miracle fails, brought down by regional wars and a bellicose China, and the whole territory begins to look like El Salvador in the '80s?
GBN has profited from untangling concepts like "loyalty," "altruism," "community," "honesty," "individualism," "justice," and "fun" for Dentsu Inc., the Japanese advertising agency that is the largest in the world.
GBN is currently indirectly helping the White House plot a course for sustaining the planet should there come a world ecology crisis – a sudden shift in the Gulf Stream brought on by global warming, for example, coupled with the aforementioned nuclear crisis.
In the world of consulting, this is beyond all imagining. "Given GBN's size, it's an absolute miracle that I've even heard of it, much less that I have an image of it" as a world leader in futurism, said Melvyn Menezes, manager at Gemini Consulting, the $516 million Morristown, New Jersey-based firm which has offices around the world.
But then again, at only one plane of truth is GBN a consulting company. In its other, more mysterious guises, GBN pops up in the darnedest places.
When a very informal group of GBNers, as they call themselves, became interested in the future of money, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco was so impressed with the intellectual and financial power and connections of those who asked for the visit, it rolled out the chief operating officer. As he presided, woodenly, a rather more fluid woman staffer described her plans to have the Fed electronically dematerialize the world's checks. An encryption hacker with a dastardly imagination brought along by the GBNers grilled her about the security of these trillions. As an aside, she discussed the resiliency of $100 greenbacks as the currency of choice in some 30 countries.
The day before, when Genentech Inc., one of the world's leading biotech companies, had discovered GBN was coming, it was sufficiently awed that it rolled out its director of bio-organic chemistry, director of pharmaceutical R&D, director of business development, and several of its hottest, young, jeans-clad scientists. The primary thing the GBNers learned from this encounter was that when bioengineers create new forms of life, they rarely, if ever, discuss the ethics and societal implications of what they're doing. "Just wait till this technology moves off-shore," said GBN co-founder, Stewart Brand. "The developing countries' corporate motto is gonna be" – he smirked and waved his hand – "Ahhhhh, Just Do It."
A private computer bulletin board through which members stay in touch reveals why "Global" is this brotherhood's first name. Members chew to boredom the technical vexations of reaching the Internet from the remote portions of extinct empires. It's the kind of complaint that is really a subtle form of one-upmanship: it announces one's arrival in, say, Tashkent, with an assignment important enough to require a laptop.
Indeed, GBN has influenced your life. The magazine you're holding in your hands was co-founded by Executive Editor Kevin Kelly. Kelly is a member of the GBN cabal. To the cognoscenti, the GBN inspiration has been obvious – perhaps essential – in every issue of Wired.
The origins of Global Business Network, oddly enough, lie in the oil business. The reasons for its existence can be traced back to the '60s, 20 years before GBN was founded.
The golden age of American stability – the '50s – was breaking up on a number of sharp rocks: the Baby Boom, contraception, wars of national liberation, drugs, new technology, the rise of the Pacific Rim, and rock and roll.
It was abundantly clear to those who wished to think about it – markedly few of whom were in the Fortune 500 – that not only was change and upheaval upon them, but it was not going to stop. In fact, even change was changing – becoming unprecedented in magnitude and ever more impossible to prophesy.
This was not so obvious a proposition as one might think. The strategic planning of the time assumed one could project existing realities out in a more or less straight line and achieve satisfactory results. If General Motors was the world's preeminent automobile manufacturer, it would continue to be so. If IBM based its business on mainframes, that would be OK forever. Rapid discontinuous change? Why plan for that? Hadn't happened much in 25 years.
But one year, 1973, changed everything. The quadrupling of energy prices redrew the world's power map and fundamentally rocked the industrial economies. Only one organization, Royal Dutch/Shell's Group Planning, anticipated the energy crisis. Don't take my word for this. The evidence is presented in Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, the bestselling 1992 Pulitzer winner that gives Shell's Group Planning the credit. (Yergin, too, is a member of GBN. Watch the wiring diagrams here. This fraternity is not called the Network for nothing.)
It is virtually impossible to overestimate the importance of foreseeing that radical discontinuous change in the world of oil prices back in the '70s. The planners at Shell were not only pioneering a new way of thinking about the future; they had so much confidence in it as to go to comrades-in-arms and tell them to end their businesses. If the consumption of oil was going to crash because of soaring prices, the economic survival of Shell depended, for example, on stopping the building of supertankers immediately. This was thought by most to be insane. Everyone "knew" the oil industry to be invulnerable. Friendships terminated. Anguish ensued.
But Shell Group Planning, whose alumni would eventually found GBN, had it absolutely right: as a result, in 1990, Shell won its 70-year war with Exxon, passing it to become the largest oil company in the world. Group Planning was also right in predicting the second price shock in 1979, with its attendant upheavals, and the ultimate price collapse of the '80s that led to, for example, the economic depressions of Houston and Denver.
For an encore, Group Planning also anticipated the rise of Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Thus, it is little surprise that in 1988, a year when Pentagon planners were saying that for the next 30 years, without question, the major threat facing the United States would be the Soviet Union, the very first sentence of the first scenario book that the newly formed Global Business Network wrote, was "The Cold War is over."
Global Business Network was founded by Shell alumni such as Peter Schwartz and Napier Collyns to be a sort of Group Planning not just for one company, but for the world. Today, even the Pentagon is impressed, for GBN's kind of thinking is becoming recognized as the cutting edge of "futurism."
GBN's renown is largely due to the work of a Frenchman, Pierre Wack (pronounced "Vack"), who as head of "business environment" research for Shell Group Planning in the '70s, helped pioneer an utterly improbable idea.
Wack burned incense in his office and spoke in riddles and parables. His speeches were mesmerizing, like those of a stage magician. When he retired in 1981, it was to a medieval château in the south of France. He looks like Yoda.
Wack claimed that if the rules of the world were constantly changing, it was hopeless to get the "right" forecast. Hiring more or better forecasters to project existing realities in a straight line was pointless. The stakes were too high, the changes too widespread. Just look at the unexpected upheavals of feminism, to pick one example. Who would have guessed back in 1970 that women entering the workforce in America would help cause the number of cars on the road to double, and all-day traffic jams to become common?
The only stability, he argued, was in accepting uncertainty. Organizations would have to be systematically open to heresy.
Wack thus developed "scenario planning."
Scenario planning is gracefully described in The Art of the Long View, by the man who in the '80s held Wack's old job at Shell – GBN co-founder Schwartz. Scenario planning is the methodical thinking of the unthinkable. It searches for wisdom in unusual places. It assumes that there will never be enough information on which to base a decision, if that decision requires certainty about the future. Therefore, it is important to prepare a wide range of possible decisions based on an entire range of possible futures. Never being wrong about the future is better than occasionally being exactly right.
In this view, the best way to deal with the possibility of falling over a cliff is to help people figure out in advance how tall and steep the cliff is. Also to calculate how many different kinds of cliffs there are. And how to recognize when a cliff is coming, and which kind it is.
This is not trivial. Not only must one know what possible futures exist, but one must know how to recognize into which previously anticipated future one is entering. For, as Cicero wrote, "It was ordained at the beginning of the world that certain signs should prefigure certain events."
One astonishing example of scenario planning in action occurred in the early '90s. At the invitation of a multiracial group of South Africans, Adam Kahane, a Global Business Network member and alumnus of Shell Group Planning, shouldered no less a task than seeing whether scenario planning could help turn that pariah nation into a multiracial democracy.
The Mont Fleur scenarios – as they became known, after the small town near Stellenbosch, South Africa, where, in 1991, they were first devised – were the first in the world to attempt the turnaround of an entire country.
These Mont Fleur tales tried to describe nothing less than the ways the world might be tomorrow.
The amazing thing about them is that their narrative power was so compelling that they caused everyone from the radical African National Congress to the crypto-fascist National Party to agree objectively that they were accurate descriptions of the possible future realities.
There were four main futures for South Africa. Everybody, after intensive discussion, agreed that the following were logical and plausible:
> "The Ostrich Scenario." If the white power structure just stuck its head in the sand - did not face the world economic and political isolation, did not deal with internal black unrest except by repression, and did not conduct negotiations with the majority - the result would be massive internal resistance, international condemnation, violence, flight of capital and skills, and economic deterioration. Then things would get really ugly.
> "The Lame Duck Scenario." If negotiations did occur, but the result was a grudging transition to the new, in tiny steps and dragged out indefinitely, the country would be marked by indecision, lack of confidence, lowest-common-denominator waffling, uncertainty, and a resultant lack of outside capital infusions to either turn the economy around or solve social problems. Nobody would be truly satisfied.
> "The Icarus Scenario" (fly now, crash later). Suppose negotiations occurred, and the transition to the new was rapid and decisive, but the result was a populist government that went on a huge spending spree to try to cure all the problems of generations overnight. As has happened so often in Latin America, deficit spending would cause a brief boom, but ultimately the country would become an economic basket case, and the poor as well as the wealthy would end up worse than before.
> "The Flight of the Flamingos Scenario." Flamingos take off slowly, but fly high and together. In this scenario, negotiations and a quick transition lead to effective, sustainable, clean, inclusive government, generating the economic growth that allows social problems to be addressed. Everyone lives happily ever after.
The amazing thing about these scenarios is not that they were drawn up. The amazing thing is that they had such power – were logical, persuasive, easily understood and communicated – that to-the-death enemies, all of whom had it in their power to prevent the flamingos from taking off, began to see a feasible, positive path toward a successful national democratic future together.
The beauty of such scenario thinking – whether in South Africa or elsewhere – is that it basically allows people to tell each other stories about how the world might work. The key element is not whether they are "right" or "wrong." The key element is a sort of literary criticism, in which people dig down to understand the assumptions and perceptions that underpin the imaginations in each scenario, and evaluate their plausibility, their credibility.
This is not a linear, mechanistic, numbers-driven process. It is more of a dance. The process is sufficiently intuitive that, back on the GBN computer network, I discover that one of the more elegant participants is an artist – Brian Eno, the Grammy Award-winning experimental musician.
Such storytelling also allows people to find the most pleasing scenario. Then they can start figuring how to make it happen, as was the case in South Africa. It is all rather like the way a painter creates a new work. Indeed, the point is not to focus on outcomes so much as to understand the forces that would compel the outcome; less on figures, more on figure-ground.
Quite a stunt.
In fact, during the day I first encountered GBN – as mysterious people filled my head with far-out ideas – the first thing that popped into my mind was Isaac Asimov.
On August 1, 1941, Asimov began a series of stories that came to be known as the "Foundation" series. In it, a conspiracy of high-minded people had figured out a science called "psychohistory" that could reliably anticipate the future.
They foresaw a coming galactic Dark Age and launched a plan to cause – to force – a future in which enlightenment would return and triumph over brutal barbarism and savage warfare in only 1,000 years, rather than the 30,000 that it would otherwise require.
At any rate, that first night I could only think one thing about GBN: Holy shit. This is The Foundation.
Subsequent events have only marginally disabused me of this framework of understanding.
One of Wack's iconoclastic beliefs was in putting a premium on listening to heretics – whom he called "remarkable people."
In this view, all the statistical data in the world is of less value than a bracing afternoon with an outcast, renegade, nonlinear thinker.
The members of GBN themselves are such "remarkable people." Co-founder Peter Schwartz, 48, for example, has a welcoming smile, quick wit, halo of hair, and full beard. He resembles the genial host of that kind of restaurant where large men eat large steaks while making large decisions. He is by training an astronautical engineer. He worked for NASA. This allows him to get off lines like, "I am a rocket scientist. I can tell you. Scenario planning is not rocket science."
Schwartz has also studied Tibetan Buddhism and worked closely with Willis Harman, a key figure in the transpersonal psychology movement in San Francisco. Before accepting a post at Shell's Planning Group, he worked at SRI International, the famed Menlo Park, California, research outfit that came up with the widely used psychographic measuring system known as VALS (for "values and life styles"). SRI also developed the computer mouse. Schwartz's is a tame résumé by the standards of GBN.
Member Peter Gabriel, for example, the innovative rock musician, won an MTV Video Music Award for his "Kiss That Frog" video. Rusty Schweickart, who was the lunar module pilot of Apollo 9, is a co-founder of the Association of Space Explorers, an international professional society of astronauts and cosmonauts. Mary Catherine Bateson is the author of With a Daughter's Eye, a memoir of her parents, pioneering anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Doug Carlston is head of Brøderbund, the world's hottest producer of learning software like "Living Books" and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Orville Schell is the widely read China scholar. Alex Singer directed episodes of some of televisions best series, including Lou Grant, Cagney and Lacey, Hill Street Blues, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. There are a ton of members focused on the transformation of the former Soviet bloc.
I gotta tell you. This makes for one hell of a cocktail party.
Okay, so Royal Dutch/Shell was a major influence on GBN; SRI was another (co-founder Ogilvy is also from the latter). If scenario planning is its engine, remarkable people are its fuel.
Its product, however, is nothing less than accelerated evolution. Such rapid evolution is frequently described as "group learning." Its value is stunning. It assumes that morphing into new shapes is the only sustainable advantage any competitive organization has.
This ability to morph is embedded in GBN itself, which, from its offices in an industrial neighborhood of Emeryville, California, can and does – with only 30 employees – present itself in so many bewildering guises that describing it as a tiny consulting company with 55 major corporate clients is as silly as describing Yale's "Skull and Bones" as just a fraternity.
GBN is a "network," which by definition connects to other power structures. There are also different ways in which a person can be inside or outside the organization. That makes GBN like the elephant being felt up by the blind men. Its elements can add up in mysterious and perplexing ways.
At its core GBN is a cause, a club, a conspiracy, and a collection of highly energetic particles aimed at bumping up against huge organizations with positive results.
"It's a convention of curious kids," says Eric Best, a GBN staffer. "They want the opportunity and license to explore anything with the smartest people they can find.
"At a time of macro change, it's a collection of magpies and blue jays that set up the screeching when a big animal moves in the forest – because the forest needs that. When we tried to boil it down to two or three words, the phrase 'ruthless curiosity' came up."
GBN can come together in so many ways that describing it organizationally is an almost hopeless task other than to note that there are basically four classes of connection: the five co-founders, the staff, about 90 network members (the eclectic braintrust), and the 55 corporations that are paying customers.
More satisfying than presenting a wiring diagram of GBN is to say how it feels.
Global Business Network, first of all, has an Anglo-American cast.
The grand old man of the organization is co-founder Napier Collyns, 67. An avuncular British liberal of keen insight and random concentrations, one would almost expect him to be a dedicated breeder of orchids.
Coming from the London office of Shell, Collyns helped impart a scholarly, tolerant, upper-crust seasoning to GBN. He is the kind of person who winces when pressed about the profit-making aspects of Global Business Network. That all seems so, rather, base.
GBN, however, also has a California capacity for American boogie. That is brought to it in part by Stewart Brand, 55, another co-founder. Brand has been an American cultural icon for half his life. This is the man who, in the '60s, won the National Book Award for inventing The Whole Earth Catalog. Its motto was so American as to bring a tear to the eye: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." That might as well also be the motto of GBN.
In the '80s, Brand stuck with his maxim by creating the Well, one of the nation's most influential computer bulletin boards, with which GBN trades staffers, and through which - on a private conference - GBNers stay in touch. (The Well, in turn, feels like a San Francisco bar fight.)
Brand also has become the distinguished chronicler of MIT's Media Lab – where, it has been said, "the future is invented." His interest in the implications of cyberspace continues to be a recurring preoccupation of the members of Global Business Network.
There is another sense, however, in which GBN feels Anglo-American. This allegedly universal set of iconoclasts is relentlessly white and male and middle-aged – even more so than many dinosaur American corporations. Discussions of music tend to focus on the avant-garde, the experimental, jazz, and classical.
While GBN's European, American, and Asian clients from governments to oil companies to telecommunications conglomerates are geographically, culturally, and racially quite diverse, there are only 15 women in the core network of 90 GBNers, and only one black, one Latino, and one Asian.
Collyns gets quite defensive when this is pointed out. "If anyone knows of a professional scenarist with lots of experience who is a woman, please let us know. Training takes longer," he harrumphs on the computer network. Everyone points to the misogynistic aspects of the oil and gas industry from which scenario planning sprang as the historical precedent GBN has to overcome. Stewart Brand points to the number of women and minorities at a recent scenario training exercise as the beginnings of a new and virtuous circle.
Barbara Heinzen – who made it through Shell to become one of the world's few woman scenarists, and who is a member of GBN - does not buy all of this. "There is some diversity," she noted, "but not as much as we might see in another three to five years' time, if we continue to develop as a truly global network."
But the women and the minorities who are part of GBN are remarkably inclined to cut the organization some slack. They point to the omnidirectional, informal, friendly, and open-minded atmosphere.
Nancy Hicks Maynard, the former publisher of The Oakland Tribune who has been a panelist on Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Washington Week in Review, agrees. "I've spent a lot of time working on issues of diversity. But I've been very pleased with the reaction to what I have to bring to GBN. Not necessarily being a black woman, but to my work experience, where I've lived – the way my crazy brain is wired."
She compares GBN positively to outfits that may appear more diverse, but, "There's 10 of us, and two of that: there's a very mechanical feel to it that is not at all welcoming to the people being included. They are not there for who they are in a deep sense – who's a good linear thinker, who's an iconoclast, who's a good convergence thinker, bringing the pieces together. GBN just feels comfortable."
GBN feels articulate, artistic, even literary, as well as visionary. It's quite charming to be rafting down the Rio Chama in northern New Mexico on a GBN expedition in which you're pulling an oar next to Joe Traub, a pioneer of the science of "complexity," or launching a pirate raid/water fight against the boat of Pamela McCorduck, an explorer of hypertext – a new medium that allows her to represent memory as a dynamic, complex system. All the while, Peter Warshall, the ecologist, is describing the complexities of the wilderness through which you float, and Lee Schipper, the transportation visionary, is doing a Lenny Bruce shtick. Just as fascinating are the paying clients, like Robert Salmon, the Parisian vice chairman of L'Oréal – an outfit deeply interested in GBN's take on the future of women around the world.
GBN feels powerful. A high-ranking corporate officer can get quite upset if you present him with a convincing scenario that suggests an entire multibillion-dollar class of investments on which his company has depended for generations might well become worthless within the next five years.
(This sort of thing is also rather fun.)
Finally, GBN feels optimistic.
At an April GBN meeting, one of the most closely studied scenarios was one developed outside GBN by Roger Cass, titled "The Belle Epoque." It made a closely reasoned (and heavily caveated) case that the coming decades could see the greatest flowering of the human spirit since the Renaissance, with democracy ascendant, international trade flourishing, prosperity growing, and intellectual achievements proliferating as unlimited thoughts bloom and are cross-pollinated on the Net.
This sort of optimism is important. One of Peter Schwartz's favorite stories, repeated over and over again, is how in 1980, IBM calculated that the world market for personal computers over the following 10 years was 275,000 machines. The actual number, he smirks, was 60 million.
IBM was caught not by its inability to foresee problems, but by its inability to imagine greatness.
That is to say, it scarcely takes a rocket scientist to generate a disaster scenario.
But to envision success takes talent.
And courage.
There is a rather New Age sort of romanticism to all this. (Not surprising: when co-founder Ogilvy, 52, was a young assistant professor of philosophy at Yale University, Garry Trudeau created a Doonesbury character around him named "Dr. Consciousness.")
Yet GBN's headquarters are not in the rarified air of the Berkeley hills. They are in a converted factory in the industrial flatlands of Emeryville, down by the footings of the Bay Bridge. The trendy seven-foot designer grasses someone has thoughtfully planted grow through rusted triple-strand barbed wire.
"Business" is GBN's middle name, and it ultimately lives or dies by its ability to shake down big bucks from hard-headed clients such as Sears, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, Campbell's Soup, and Bell South. Yet the only co-founder of GBN with an MBA is Lawrence Wilkinson; characteristically, he studied classics at Oxford University before that. One wonders how this sort of touchy-feely séance plays back in the halls of power in Washington, London, and Singapore. I mean, really. Sharing knowledge as a way to achieve profit? Isn't this all rather zen?
The answer seems to be that so many top corporate managers around the world are so utterly shell shocked by change that nothing seems implausible anymore. The rise of China, the fall of IBM, the acknowledgement by many that they have absolutely no idea what a career in their industry will look like in 20 years, much less how to educate and prepare their staffs for that future – all they know is that business-as-usual means death.
To the extent that scenario planning offers any logical path at all, GBN starts looking good to business.
Capitalists have deeply internalized, for example, the lesson of laughing at W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician whose "quality management" ideas led the Japanese to glory. They don't laugh so much any more at any idea – no matter how outlandish it may sound on the surface – if there seems to be a kernel of opportunity in it. After listening to a few Genentech scientists at a GBN conclave talk seriously about someone creating a slave class of genetically modified chimps, very little else a corporate officer hears at a GBN meeting seems preposterous. Besides, if it's the chief economist of the American Express Bank in London sitting next to you who's just said something weird, one feels less self-conscious about stretching one's thinking.
"I'll go out on a limb and take a stab at articulating the 'capitalist' perspective on this rather unique breed of cat," posted Dan Simpson, director of strategy and planning at The Clorox Company, a GBN client member.
"GBN is a rather unique set of competencies and connections," he wrote, "that offers the businessperson three things:
- Technique;
- Food on the Future (challenges to thinking about the future);
- Food on the Present (challenges to rethinking the present differently).
"Whenever I refer colleagues to GBN, it is always in response to the question, Who would you recommend to help us in developing our very first set of scenarios?
"The network is a curious blend of scientists, musicians, artists, economists, anthropologists, and information technology gym rats who form a mosaic by which us capitalists can view our business environment and even our company."
Another corporate client, J.R.W. "Wick" Sloane of Aetna, adds, "People are hungry for new views. The current argot is outside-the-box thinking. By and large, people believe that systemic shocks will make or break companies, and that little curiosities today could be major trends soon. Environmentalism is one example. Thirty years ago a quirky movement. Superfund today.
"I take the GBN mailings and send them out to about 100 people from time to time. People are fascinated, interested, and look for more."
In order to close the circle on these futurists, I asked Peter Schwartz to give me three scenarios for the future of GBN, at least one of which would have to be The Official Future.
He complied, but in such a corporate way as almost to lull me into the belief that his was indeed nothing more than a tiny little company housed in a converted factory.
The Official Future involves GBN spinning off television shows for PBS, new publications, that sort of thing. The most interesting offshoot in this scenario addressed that age-old question: if you're so smart, why ain't you rich? "We find that we are in a position to see a lot of companies that are emerging intriguingly in new fields," Schwartz said. "We're thinking about starting up a venture fund to invest in them." Entry would be on the order of $5 million a pop.
But the other scenarios were pretty much what you'd expect of any young company. In "Slow Slide," the phone stops ringing. "Wildest Dreams" involves an extraordinarily high buyout bid from one of consulting's giants.
Not a whole lot in these scenarios about The Men's Club, or The Shape Shifter, or The Foundation, or even Remarkable People. It is enough to shake one's belief that the Global Business Network might be anything extraordinary.
But then, but then....
Back on GBN's private computer network, Sloane, the insurance executive in Connecticut, posted to the group asking for information about how things were going in South Africa.
From Cape Town came back no less an authority on the subject than Adam Kahane, that instigator of the Mont Fleur scenarios that changed the country.
Reading the words Kahane typed to his fellow GBNers, I once again flashed back to Asimov and his depiction of The Foundation. Kahane's eerie posting reminded me of a passage in Asimov in which an agent for The Foundation's founder, Hari Seldon, is speaking to a new recruit:
"'You must realize that Dr. Seldon's plans include all eventualities with significant probabilities. This is one of them. It will end well; almost certainly so for the project; and with reasonable probability for you.'
"'What are the figures?' demanded Gaal.
"'For the project, over 99.9 percent.'
"'And for myself?'
"'I am instructed that this probability is 77.2 percent.'
"'Then I've got better than one chance in five of being sentenced to prison or death.'
"'The last is under one percent.'"
For it is possible to get the giggles about the work of GBN at the same instant one realizes it can be deathly serious. Kahane, for example, referred to the scenarios South Africa had in fact gone through on its way to joining the rest of the globe in a marvelously camp secret-agent-sounding burst: "We're in Flamingos now. Icarus is still a danger – but one that is present in everyone's mind, and is therefore less likely to occur. Lame Duck is also less likely for the same reason. Ostrich is past now. The MF [Mont Fleur] team will be reconstituted (with a wider range of viewpoints) this August. I will facilitate again. Two key members of MF-1 are now in the Cabinet."
Peter Schwartz, the spark plug of GBN, did not giggle online. He of course took it all seriously.
"Since Flamingos was the most balanced and optimistic scenario, it is an interesting outcome," he mused. "It is rare that the best case is the real outcome."
"On reflection," wrote Schwartz, the Hari Seldon of GBN, "it would be interesting to explore why that was so."
Life is not going to be easy in the 21st century for people who insist on black-and-white descriptions of reality. The shape of the truth isn't static; it shifts depending on where one stands. Bottomless truth lies in the gray.
There are multiple layers of truths about this organization. GBN is a network. All networks shimmer with gray boundaries, vague membership, and multiple - often contradictory - goals. Like the search committee for the MacArthur "genius" grants, Global Business Network assumes that if you are one of the hundred-or-so remarkable people in whom they might have an interest, they know how to find you. It's spooky.
And the network is a tangle. This article on GBN was commissioned by a magazine whose executive editor is a member of GBN. It is running in a magazine which mentions a GBN member in almost every issue. Four GBNers have already been on its cover. And, as I mentioned at the beginning, it was written by a journalist who is a member of GBN.
Hari Seldon would definitely get a kick out of this.
For information about GBN, e-mail email@example.com or look for GBN's World Wide Web home page at http://www.well.com/Community/gbn/.
Who's Who in GBN:
A sampling of GBN's member roster turns up a collection of heretics and remarkable people:
Peter Coyote,
a film and television actor and one-time leader of the Diggers, the famous commune formed by members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the Haight-Ashbury of the '60s.
Bruce Sterling,
cyberpunk icon and author of four science-fiction novels and the nonfiction The Hacker Crackdown.
Eric Drexler,
the godfather of nanotechnology, the incipient revolution in manufacturing based on the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules.
Paul Hawken,
founder of Smith & Hawken, the ecology-friendly gardening enterprise, and host of the PBS series Growing a Business.
Pamela McCorduck,
author of Machines who Think and four other books on the intellectual impact of computers.
William Gibson,
a founder of the cyberpunk vein of fiction writing and author of Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Virtual Light.
Jaron Lanier,
a musician and pioneer of the virtual reality industry.
Bill Joy,
co-founder of Sun Microsystems, the pioneer in powerful workstations.
Lawrence Lasker,
a writer and producer who has seen his movies WarGames and Awakenings nominated for Best Screenplay and Best Picture Oscars.
Mitch Kapor,
the developer of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the advocacy group for computer users.
Amory Lovins,
co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and America's foremost seer on energy futures.
Richard Rodriquez,
the author of Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father and a prominent writer on the Mexican-American immigrant experience.
Danny Hillis,
co-founder of Thinking Machines Corp., the trailblazer of massively parallel computers
Donella Meadows,
co-author of the ground-breaking The Limits to Growth.
Don Michael,
one of the few futurists who saw the feminist revolution coming.
Michael Murphy,
co-founder of the Esalen Institute, the source of the human potential movement.
Gary Snyder,
a beat poet and a leader of the '60s cultural revolution.
Michael Naylor,
senior vice president of technology and environment for Rubbermaid Inc., the innovative creator of mundane and necessary household items.
Walter Parkes,
head of Steven Spielberg's production company, Amblin Entertainment.
John L. Petersen,
an expert on the changing nature of the concept "national security."


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Our Purpose
Cave Creek is Arizona's most unique western town and offers spectacular beauty and excitement for the residents and visitors that visit our distinctive locale and for the businesses that call this special place home.
The Cave Creek Merchants & Events Association is focused on the development, management and implementation of Cave Creek's signature events and providing marketing leadership for our merchants and organizations.
Cave Creek. Perfectly Exciting.
Cave Creek Merchants Working Together As A Team In Our Community
We believe that when everyone works together, everyone benefits. Therefore, we are excited to be working closely with other business leaders to build a strong foundation and to enhance long-term opportunities for your business or organization in our unique and distinctive town. This goes for our residents, too.
"Cave Creek merchants are unique because they combine a hard work ethic with a commitment to the well being of the community. This rare combination of personal dedication to one's business and a willingness to make the town better and attractive to locals and visitors is what makes our town and the Cave Creek Merchants & Events Association so special." Mayor Vincent Francia, Town of Cave Creek
"We look forward to future collaboration and partnerships with the Cave Creek Merchants & Events Association as we work together in the promotion of events and programs that will invite the foot traffic that will assist our business community in its continued success." Patty Villeneuve – Director, Carefree Cave Creek Chamber of Commerce
"We look forward to working with the Cave Creek Merchants & Events Association and will be providing a CCMEA News and Events feature in every issue in order to benefit our local merchants and residents." Don Sorchych, publisher, Sonoran News
"For several years we have worked diligently in partnership with Cave Creek businesses to drive customers to Cave Creek. Building and supporting events in the town through the CCMEA is a critical piece to enhance what is already a major revenue stream for the merchants in Cave Creek." Hope Ozer, publisher, City Sun Times


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"Who has all the power? They do. That's it," replied Mr. Ahmad Ibrahim Manasrah, member of the Wadi Fukin Local Council, when asked about the current situation of his village, situated south-west of Bethlehem. He spoke directly, starting with the most accurate conclusion he sees and feels each day.
Last week Israeli authorities stopped the construction of a park and children's playground in Wadi Fukin, on the grounds that it was built without a license. After showing the Palestine Monitor around the site, Mr. Manasrah expressed his feelings of shame at the park's unfinished state. A simple idea bursting with love and good will, blocked and stunned so quickly. The incomplete park is empty, with no children, no life.
With part of the village in Area B, another part in Area C, and over 3000 dunums area isolated behind the separation wall, the usually assumed convenience of having one's own village intact and under one administration is completely unthought of, shattered. Yet it is just one of the many problems residents of Wadi Fukin have to deal with on a daily basis.
Both Mr. Manasrah and Mr. Ibrahim El Hroub, Vice President of the Village Council, explained how Wadi Fukin, 'the Valley of Thistle,' lies in between two hills, on top of which are the settlements of Betar 'Illit and Hadar Betar. The waste water dumped by the settlers into Wadi Fukin pollutes the irrigation water and the agriculture produce is consequently contaminated, rendering it inedible. Big boulders of rock are also thrown into the valley as if it were a rubbish dump. Construction debris destroys olive trees and is dangerous to anyone walking in the vicinity. "It is not safe for us to work there. I also had trees and they destroyed them," said Mr. Manasrah.
Over the past years, most of the indigenous residents of Wadi Fukin have been forced to leave their homes due to a variety of complications—isolation from clinics and other facilities, loss of agricultural land, lack of potable water and and unemployment—seeking refuge elsewhere, mostly in Bethlehem's Deheishe refugee camp.
Wadi Fukin's silence and inactivity speaks loudly within the village. Betar 'Illit, on the other hand, has around 35,000 inhabitants, 43 schools, 2 clinics, public transportation, gardens, playgrounds and is still expanding. One can see and hear the cranes and construction going on just a little ways off up the hill from Wadi Fukin, which, on the other hand, has around 1,300 inhabitants left, one school, no reliable clinic - especially at night, no gardens or parks and, as a whole, is disappearing at an alarming rate.
No buildings or houses are allowed in the part of the valley that falls within Area C—the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and military control—an area the village reserves for agricultural purposes. In truth, the garden is an open space not a built-up closed structure, and hence, does not need the required Israeli granted construction permit. In one way or the other, both the agricultural and recreational aims of Wadi Fukin are blocked.
The President of the Village Council, Mr. Ahmad As-Sukkar, explained that they were receiving funds from Heks-Eper, a European based organization for International Aid, in order to create the park, yet since they had to stop, the funds have been suspended until further notice. "We have a hearing at court in 45 days, then we will know what will happen," he said.
"There are no lively facilities, truly, no such facilities at all. Everything is prohibited and suffocated for our children. So we started to make a playground just at the edge of our village. Just a simple garden," said Mr. Manasrah, explaining how it is far from actually becoming a functional park. "They pass laws on everything, the roads, the gardens..everything. They send us orders to stop construction, claiming we are offenders of the law, but we are not. We just want to work with the land, we want to support our fathers, that's all, no harm. That is the aim of our garden," he said.
The Council members highlighted the fact that most people need to apply for working permits within Israel since they are not able to find work in the village. In the end, they are forced to depend on the same authority that deprives them of their liberty. The contradiction is unsettling. The same authority which in once instance allows Israel's network settlements to continually expand, facilitating their annexation of privately owned Palestinian land, simultaneously declares a small garden to be illegal.
Power in this case allows for the ability to define what is legal or possible, at a given time and place. Strong and rigid, yet versatile and subtle, power hides behind such noble ideas as truth and justice, as well as administrative formalities, which often aid in obscuring the underlying irony of an endless and organized mess of manipulation.
Stopping the park's development is not just an isolated incident, it is a continuation of a much larger and often hidden Israeli strategy of exercising uncontrolled power and stripping the Palestinians not just of their land but of their will and strength. Wadi Fukin's cage-like situation is representative of many other Palestinian villages throughout the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and present day Israel.
Video by Laurent Vinckier, subtitles by Samuela Galea.
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From Stacy Moses, I tried it and there was not a piece left!
1 package prepared good seasons dressing (Stacy says to use balsamic vinegar instead of red wine vinegar for this recipe)
2 onions, diced
4 tablespoons yellow mustard
3 – 4 pound brisket
Salt and pepper to taste
Cooking Instructions:
Prepare salad dressing mix according to directions, using balsamic vinegar in place of red wine vinegar.
Place brisket fat side up, lightly salt and pepper the top.
Spread mustard over salt and pepper (can use more mustard to cover brisket)
Pour prepared dressing over brisket and top with onions, add about a cup of water around brisket.
Cover the brisket well and bake at 350 until tender about 2 to 2½ hours.


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Miley Cyrus might be busy almost kissing her female dancers in London – but boyfriend Liam Hemsworth still has her heart.
The 17-year-old teen star took to her website on Friday to clear any rumors that she split with her 20-year-old Aussie beau.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Young Hollywood Heartthrobs!
U.S. & World
"Just wanna clear up a rumor. Liam and I did not break. EVER!" Miley wrote.
The duo, who met while filming "The Last Song" in 2009, also have the full support of the Cyrus clan, according to Miley.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: She's Just Bein' Miley!
"We are so happy and a lot of that has to do with the amazing relationship he has with my family," she continued. "We are both so busy right now, so having them by our side supporting us and our career is such a blessing! So any type of rumor that said there was drama with them is completely false. Thanks for letting me clear that up."
To see Miley's racy performance of "Can't Be Tamed," on Thursday's "Britain's Got Talent," CLICK HERE!
Copyright 2010 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Hollywood's Smokin' Hot Couples
Related Content from AccessHollywood.com:
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Young Hollywood Starlets!
PLAY IT NOW: Miley Cyrus' Parents Gush Over 'The Last Song' & Miley's New Beau
PLAY IT NOW: Preview Clip: Miley Cyrus & Liam Hemsworth In 'The Last Song'
More from Access: [ Miley Cyrus Liam Hemsworth Young Hollywood ]


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A spreading scam is exposing Facebook users to malware. An email arrives with "One of your Friends added a new photo of you..." and it needs to be ignored.
The jist of the note is that one of your friends added a photo and that you're listed as a close friend. Included is a slick, Facebook-like blue greeting. The click button reads, "View photo with you in the attachment." Yeah, don't be clicking on that.
The Next Web and Sophos report that malware is Troj/Agent-XNN.
U.S. & World
Check Facebook Security for any additional measures you can take to protect yourself. Bottom line: don't open attachments unless you know the sender.


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A Manhattan elementary school principal said she's "appalled" by a homework assignment that used scenarios about killing and whipping slaves to teach math.
Adele Schroeter has ordered sensitivity training for the entire staff of P.S. 59 following last month's assignment, the New York City Department of Education said in a statement Friday.
U.S. & World
A teacher had asked fourth-graders to write homework questions that blended math and social studies, the DOE said. The teacher then used the students' questions, including the slave-related ones, as homework for the class.
One question pertained to the number of slaves who died while taking over a ship. It asked how many slaves were still alive. The other said a slave was whipped five times a day and asked students to calculate how many times a month he was whipped.
A student-teacher said she was shocked by the wording and later refused to hand out the worksheet in another class.
"I'm just like, 'Wow, this is really inappropriate,'" Aziza Harding told NY1.
The DOE said the situation was "obviously unacceptable." It said "appropriate disciplinary action" would be taken, and said the chancellor had spoken to the principal.


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French movie star Marion Cotillard can breathe a little easier now that her accused stalker has been charged.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation filed a criminal case against a New York City woman named Teresa Yuan, who had sent a series of threatening messages and videos to a Cotillard fan Web site.
The actress, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of legendary singer Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose," and her family had "become concerned for their physical safety," according to the FBI's complaint, filed in a Brooklyn federal court.
That's because Yuan had spoken in her unhinged videos of killing the actress in a game of Russian roulette.
"After it happens I'll feel no regrets whatsoever," she said in one. "That's apparently how it feels to be a killer."
Yuan also growled menacingly in one video and suggested in emails that she had tracked Cotillard's travel schedule and intended to meet her.
After her Thursday arrest, Yuan was released from jail Friday on $50,000 bail. But with the government's complaint against Yuan, it orders her to keep away from the French star and refrain from contacting her.
Yuan's lawyer refused the New York Daily News comment on the case.
After winning her Oscar, Cotillard went on to star in Hollywood hits like the psychological thriller "Inception" and Woody Allen's new "Midnight in Paris." She then retimed with "Inception" director Christopher Nolan for "The Dark Knight Rises," due next year.
Marion Cotillard's Suspected Stalker Is Arrested
French movie star Marion Cotillard can breathe a little easier now that her accused stalker has been charged.


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Dissection Lab for Pathological/Anatomical and Forensic Autopsies
This photograph is from Imperatorskii Tomskii universitet, 1880‒1892 (The Imperial Tomsk University, 1880‒1892), an album that documents the formative years of the Imperial Tomsk University (the predecessor of present-day Tomsk State University), the oldest institution of higher learning in Siberia. Tsar Alexander II signed a decree on the establishment of the university on May 28, 1878, and construction began a little over two years later. The first classes, in the medical faculty, began in 1888. The album contains 83 photographs with interior and exterior views of the university's buildings, including the main administrative building, lecture halls, dormitories and dining halls, the library, botanical museum, university church, as well as the greenhouse and the university farm. The album ends with two photographs showing the ceremony at which the cornerstone of the first university building was laid on August 26, 1880. The photographs are preceded by 12 pages of text providing detailed explanations of all the images, as well as several tables. One table contains a list of all the buildings, their dimensions, dates of construction, cost of construction, and other information. The album is preserved in the National Library of Russia and was digitized for the Meeting of Frontiers digital library project in the early 2000s.
Date Created
Subject Date
Publication Information
Title in Original Language
Секционный зал для патолого-анатомических и судебно-медицинских вскрытий
Additional Subjects
Type of Item
Physical Description
1 photograph
IIIF Manifest Help
Last updated: February 6, 2018


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Sorry! This item is unavailable.
Silver and gold flower pendant
A lovely contemporary flower shaped necklace with a golden yellow patterned backing and silver leaf detail. The silver parts are made from sterling silver square wire which is riveted to the aluminium backing. The pattern on the aluminium is created digitally and applied as a resist. The metal is then dyed and sealed and the resist removed leaving the pattern in the silver colour of the aluminium.
I can make the necklace with different colours or patterns on the backing, feel free to contact me if you would like a different version but please allow extra making time.
The pendant is hung from an 18 inch ball chain (please let me know if you prefer a different length chain).
Pendant measures approx. 4.2cm long.
Presented in a recycled Kraft gift box embossed with my logo.
I will post 1st class within 3 days.
Shapes from my seeds and pods range combined with my geometric nature range...
Shipping & delivery
This item will be posted to you by Claire Gent within 3 days of receiving payment.
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Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Germany, France, Spain, Finland, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Austria, Latvia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Gibraltar
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Returns Policy
You have 14 days, from receipt, to notify the seller if you wish to cancel your order or exchange an item.
Unless faulty, the following types of items are non-refundable: items that are personalised, bespoke or made-to-order to your specific requirements; items which deteriorate quickly (e.g. food), personal items sold with a hygiene seal (cosmetics, underwear) in instances where the seal is broken.


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It appears highly unlikely that the reopened investigation into the death of Natalie Wood 30 years ago – announced Friday by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department – will lead to any new prosecution in the case, say legal analysts.
The case is being reopened because yacht captain Dennis Davern – one of only four people on board the boat with Ms. Wood the night she drowned – went on NBC's Today Show this morning to say that he lied to investigators about the actress's mysterious death 30 years ago. He alleged that Wood's husband, Robert Wagner, had something to do with her death, which had been classified as an accident.
"I made some terrible decisions and mistakes," Davern said in the interview with NBC News' David Gregory. "I did lie on a report several years ago. I made mistakes by not telling the honest truth in a police report."
Later in the day, the L.A. Sheriff's Department called a press conference and asked all who might know anything or have additional evidence to please come forward. But based on Friday's two events, legal analysts caution against jumping to conclusions.
"The press conference raised more questions than it answered," says Robert Pugsley, professor of law at Southwestern Law School in Los angeles. "I am very skeptical and advise others to be skeptical as well. I didn't sense they had done any groundwork leading to this and in my opinion it was very premature."
He and others say that cold cases solved in recent years are typically reopened because of DNA or other hard, forensic evidence – not a change in testimony.
"It's too easy for attorneys to undermine the credibility of a witness that has changed his testimony after such a long time," says Laurie Levenson, professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "Memory doesn't typically get better over time, and it's too easy to sabotage credibility by simply asking, 'Why did you not come forward before?' or 'What is your motivation for coming forward now?' "
Wood was found drowned near Santa Catalina Island off the southern California coast in 1981. That night, she was with Mr. Wagner and Christopher Walken, who all shared drinks onshore and then continued drinking aboard the boat, where Wagner and Mr. Walken began arguing. Wood went to bed during the argument, and when Wagner came down to say goodnight, she was gone, according to previous accounts.
Speculation was that she accidentally slipped and fell overboard. But Mr. Davern's new comments support speculation that Wood and Wagner were involved in a lover's quarrel about Walken before the accident.
"Was the fight between Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner what ultimately led to her death?" NBC host Mr. Gregory asked during the interview on Friday.
"Yes," Davern replied.
Some observers say it's possible that Davern might indeed want to clear his conscience after so many years of carrying guilt.
"Often, many years after an incident, people are in different situations – find religion, are no longer frightened – and come ahead with new information," says Tony Celano, CEO of Full Security Inc. and former a New York Police Department detective squad commander. "Time can make people more cooperative."
But many legal analysts speculate that Davern's motive in contradicting his own testimony could be that he was recently interviewed for a collaboration between Vanity Fair magazine and the television series "48 Hours Mystery," which will run Saturday and commemorate the 30th anniversary of Wood's death. He might be seeking publicity for himself or for the book he co-authored, called "Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour," which was published in September 2009.
"There's essentially zero chance of a prosecution arising out of this, unless something very, very sensational arises, and I think there's essentially zero chance of that," says Joel Jacobsen, assistant attorney general, criminal appeals division for New Mexico.
He posits that that the sheriff's department might be proceeding cautiously to avoid being accused of a coverup in a high-profile case.
"Cops are used to tracking down bum information and leads that go nowhere, so it's really not a big deal for them, and it seems reasonable to process the information on the 'Why not?' principle," says Mr. Jacobsen.
Such old cases usually are pursued by police and taken to court by prosecutors only after the painstaking, long-term efforts of a cold case squad – "not under this type of circumstance," adds Elisabeth Cawthon, a historian at the University of Texas, Arlington, in an e-mail. "Is there a possibility that the case could be genuinely (as opposed to technically) re-opened and an indictment handed down? I would say only a minuscule chance, particularly given the strong opinions from Natalie Wood's family that her death was a genuine accident."
At the news conference today, Lt. John Corina said that Wagner is not a suspect, without revealing why. Wagner spokesman Alan Nierob released a statement:
"Although no one in the Wagner family has heard from the L.A. County Sheriff's department about this matter, they fully support the efforts of the L.A. County Sheriff's Dept. and trust they will evaluate whether any new information relating to the death of Natalie Wood Wagner is valid, and that it comes from a credible source or sources other than those simply trying to profit from the 30-year anniversary of her tragic death."


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The Daily Word in ruin porn, Lead/Coal construction, a toothpick heist, and Happy Days
Joanie Cunningham lives in a trailer park.
"Ladies man puts on gun show at Sonic."
Texas may increase the state speed limit to 85mph.
Scientists in Oregon are really trying hard to kill the Japanese sea creatures.
Sad story from Penasco, NM.
Remember the kaiboshed donkey-
First manned Chinese space flight.
Here is a CBC interview with the guy who turned his dead cat into a helicopter.
City says the Lead/Coal project will be completely finished in three weeks.
Like another island off the coast of New York City, Hart Island features the ruins of a shuttered institution and an interesting history.
It's the anniversary of the escape from Alcatraz.
For the millionth time, scientists warn that the planet is approaching the point of no return, calamity-wise.
Did the dismembering-
This hysterical bank customer stole the bank-robber's getaway car.
eldiabolik.com has a great psychotronic podcast composed largely of sixties/seventies soundtrack music.
Dumb pictures from online dating sites.
Someone stole 400,000 toothpicks.
New Mexico's Lightning Field is in need of restoration.
Yesterday was Nancy Sinatra's birthday and today is Johnny Depp's birthday.


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(Pocket-lint) - Casio used the Photokina 2012 camera trade show to launch another addition to its Exilim range, this time in the shape of the 24x optical zoom EX-H50.
Given the large zoom, this superzoom is more on the slender size. It's not a patch on the likes of the bulkier Canon SX50 HS, for example.
Many will find this small size an attractive part of the H50's design, but in the hand we were a little less impressed. It's just a bit plasticky, which, although not unexpected, lacks the finesse of some competitors.
That wouldn't be a big problem but this Exilim's autofocus isn't nearly as fast as some of its sister models, including the newly announced Exilim ZR1000 (which we thought was rather impressive).
The Casio EX-H50 is designed for those who just want to point, zoom and shoot by the look of things. The mode dial comes equipped with a number of basic modes, rather than offering full manual control, but this is fitting to its target audience.
The lens is a decent wide-angle, starting up at a 25mm equivalent and extending through to a significant 600mm equivalent. However the f/3.7-8.0 aperture means it'll be tough to shoot in low light at the full extent of the zoom. Fortunately there's sensor-shift stabilisation to help things out to some degree.
We don't think other superzoom makers are going to be quaking in their boots over this one, but if the price is held to a favourable level then we see no reason why the H50 won't do well. If the autofocus system was further improved then we'd feel a little more kind about this model, as it is it's just, well, a bit average.