The German artist Gregor Schneider is planning the ultimate performance piece: showing a person dying as part of an exhibition.

“I want to display a person dying naturally in the piece or somebody who has just died,” he told The Art Newspaper. “My aim is to show the beauty of death.”


The artist says that Dr Roswitha Franziska Vandieken, who runs her own private clinic in Düsseldorf, has agreed to help find volunteers who are willing to die in public in the name of art. Dr Vandieken was unavailable for comment. “I am confident that we’ll find people to take part,” says Schneider.

He says he would like to stage the performance at the Haus Lange museum in Krefeld, Germany. The museum declined to comment.

{ The Art Newspaper | Continue reading }

related { The dog died the next day for lack of food }

{ To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. | audio, video and documents | article }

Sony BMG is no stranger to piracy. As one of the most vocal supporters of the RIAA and IFPI antipiracy efforts, the company has some experience hunting down and punishing consumers who don’t pay for its products. The company is getting some experience on the other side of the table, however, now that it’s being sued for software piracy.

PointDev, a French software company that makes Windows administration tools, received a call from a Sony BMG IT employee for support. After Sony BMG supplied a pirated license code for Ideal Migration, one of PointDev’s products, the software maker was able to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG’s assets. The subsequent raid revealed that software was illegally installed on four of Sony BMG’s servers. The Business Software Alliance believes that up to 47 percent of the software installed on Sony BMG’s computers could be pirated.

{ Ars Technica | Continue reading }

Weight Watchers wants us to know they’re on our side. “Diets are mean,” say the ads in their new “Stop Dieting. Start Living” campaign. But isn’t WW a diet plan? Meanwhile Tylenol has also gotten altruistic, with print advertisements offering friendly advice on how to avoid aches and pains that might prompt people to perhaps buy their product. “Sit up straight. Slouching can cause headaches,” one slogan advises.

We’ve entered the age of the really counterintuitive ad. Companies like Unilever and Johnson & Johnson have been sprinkling their Web sites and print ads with tidbits of health advice and self-esteem affirmations, but not so much about why you need their product. Have they forgotten the bottom line? No. What they’re doing is banking on the idea that they can win customers with flattery and lots of helpful information.

“No one doubts the fact that they are doing whatever they do to make a profit for themselves,” says C. B. Bhattacharya, a marketing professor at Boston University. “But if the consumer is able to say that they also have what’s good for me in their mind, then that’s a big, big plus. Of course they want to make money, but they also care about my own well-being.” These campaigns are not a sign of ad execs going soft. Rather, it’s savvy marketers trying to get playing nice to pay off big.

Campaigns like these are certainly a departure from the norm. Beauty and health advertising typically operates under two basic models: show the customer the bombshell they could be with the help of a certain makeup or diet, or show the fearful consequences of declining: the horrible frizzy hair or monstrous pimples that will develop if you dare pass up a certain shampoo or face wash. Yet these companies are going out of their way to tell you why you don’t need their product or, in the case of Tylenol, to tell you how not to get a headache in the first place.

It’s an odd tactic, but one that has worked for at least one company. Dove began telling consumers that “real women have curves,” and sales went up. The company’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”, which began in 2004, urges women to love their bodies as-is while subtly pushing new lines of anticellulite lotion and self-tanner.

{ Newsweek | Continue reading }

Sales of existing homes in the U.S. unexpectedly rose in February as prices fell by the most in four decades. Purchases increased 2.9 percent, the first gain in seven months, to an annual rate of 5.03 million, the National Association of Realtors said today. The median home value dropped 8.2 percent from a year earlier, the most since the organization began keeping records in 1968.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Today’s fictional headline, via The Onion, National Association of Realtors: “Sales of existing homes increased in February and remain within a fairly stable range.”

Why is this fictional? Changes from January to February are measuring seasonal differences, not actual improvements. Year over year changes showed that single family home sales were 23.8% below February 2007 levels.

{ Barry Ritholz | Continue reading }

related { What started in subprime is likely to continue cascading into the markets and keep the economy down until 2010, economist Paul Krugman forecasts. Bottom line for homeowners: An average drop of 25%. }

photo { Union Square, NYC }

Is “bullshit,” then, a synonym for “lie”? Not exactly. Frankfurt asks us to consider an anecdote told about Ludwig Wittgenstein wherein the great philosopher phones a friend named Fania Pascal who’s just had her tonsils removed. How are you, Wittgenstein asks. Like a dog that’s been run over, Pascal answers. Wittgenstein then replies testily, “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.” In effect, Frankfurt argues, Wittgenstein is suggesting that Pascal is spouting bullshit. (A more reasonable person, Frankfurt concedes, would reach the charitable conclusion that Wittgenstein’s friend is merely expressing herself through the use of allusive or at worst hyperbolic language.) (…)

Is Pascal lying? No. She isn’t trying to deceive Wittgenstein about how she really feels, and she isn’t trying to deceive Wittgenstein about how a dog would feel if run over. Her error, Frankfurt concludes, isn’t that she conducted a faulty inquiry into how a dog would feel if run over, but that she conducted no inquiry at all (in this case, because none is possible).”It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.”

{ Slate | Continue reading }

With 90% of earnings reported by the S&P500 firms, we now have enough data to see how the full calendar year was for profits.

S&P500 Earnings for 2007: Down -4.2%

Here’s the amusing part: The same group of S&P equity analysts who foolishly were looking for a 10% advance in 2007, are now expecting a profits recovery in the second half of 2008. There favorite sectors are (drum roll) Consumer Discretionary and Financials.

The thinking must be that the credit crunch will just go away, energy and food prices will drop, and the consumer will begin another wanton spending spree.

{ Barry Ritholz | Continue reading }

photo { Herbert Gehr, Beauty treatment, 1930 }

related { U.S. stocks dive | Dollar falls again }

Distributors in the US film industry have certain pre-conceived ideas about what films will be a success at the box office – for instance, the number of stars in the film, the actors’ prior successes, previous experience of the production team, etc.

When Sorenson and Waguespack analysed data on over 5000 movies, they discovered that these distributors seemed correct in their beliefs; films that corresponded to their prior beliefs indeed reaped more revenues at the box office.

Then Sorenson and Waguespack analysed the scarce resources that these distributors assigned to their films, such as budget, promotion efforts, number of screens on opening day, favourable timing in the year (e.g. around Christmas many more people go to the cinema). What they found was striking: The reason why those films that the executives had high hopes for beforehand indeed did become successes could 100 percent be explained by the fact that the distributors in their subsequent allocation of resources very significantly favoured them. (…)

The only reason why the films that they beforehand had thought would become successes indeed did reap “profits” is because they assigned more resources to them. Yet, they would have been better off assigning the scarce resources to the other movies. The executives’ prior beliefs were false; they just seemed correct afterwards due to their own, self-confirming actions.

{ Freek Vermulen | Continue reading }

image { fliegender }

In the last few years, a handful of intrepid scholars have decided it’s time to try to understand why kids lie. For a study to assess the extent of teenage dissembling, Dr. Nancy Darling, then at Penn State University, recruited a special research team of a dozen undergraduate students, all under the age of 21. Using gift certificates for free CDs as bait, Darling’s Mod Squad persuaded high-school students to spend a few hours with them in the local pizzeria.

Each student was handed a deck of 36 cards, and each card in this deck listed a topic teens sometimes lie about to their parents. Over a slice and a Coke, the teen and two researchers worked through the deck, learning what things the kid was lying to his parents about, and why.

“They began the interviews saying that parents give you everything and yes, you should tell them everything,” Darling observes. By the end of the interview, the kids saw for the first time how much they were lying and how many of the family’s rules they had broken. Darling says 98 percent of the teens reported lying to their parents. (…) Being an honors student didn’t change these numbers by much; nor did being an overscheduled kid. (…)

It starts very young. Indeed, bright kids—those who do better on other academic indicators—are able to start lying at 2 or 3. “Lying is related to intelligence,” explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University and a leading expert on children’s lying behavior.

Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded. (…)

Most parents hear their child lie and assume he’s too young to understand what lies are or that lying’s wrong. They presume their child will stop when he gets older and learns those distinctions. Talwar has found the opposite to be true—kids who grasp early the nuances between lies and truth use this knowledge to their advantage, making them more prone to lie when given the chance. (…)

The most disturbing reason children lie is that parents teach them to. According to Talwar, they learn it from us. “We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships.”

Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesn’t like. We instruct him to swallow all his honest reactions and put on a polite smile.

{ NY mag | Continue reading }

photo { Square America }

Can a woman’s period save her life years later?

A company called Cryo-Cell International says that it can — that menstrual fluid contains stem cells that might one day be used for medical treatments.

The company has not published research verifying the claim. But using the slogan “Your monthly miracle,” it has begun offering, for a fee, to collect and store cells from the fluid for a woman’s future use.

Cryo-Cell, in Oldsmar, Fla., is one of several companies trying to make a business out of banking stem cells. (…) These companies offer to extract and store stem cells from adult blood, from fat removed by liposuction, from children’s baby teeth after they fall out and from leftover embryos at fertility clinics.

But some experts say consumers should think twice before spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on such services, because it is not clear how useful such cells will be.

“In the stem cell area, we have a problem with truth in advertising,” said Christopher Scott, director of the Program on Stem Cells in Society at Stanford. “Some of these companies are skirting right on the edge of what’s truthful and what’s vaporware.” (…)

The fee for collection and processing the cells ranges from $499 to $7,500, depending on the company. There is also a yearly fee of $89 to $699 for storing the cells in liquid nitrogen.

The services urge people not to wait. (…) Scientists say it is quite unlikely a person will ever need such cells.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { Should a murderer ever be allowed to practice medicine? }

Ten years ago, several executives at McKinsey & Company, America’s largest and most prestigious management-consulting firm, launched what they called the War for Talent. Thousands of questionnaires were sent to managers across the country. Eighteen companies were singled out for special attention, and the consultants spent up to three days at each firm, interviewing everyone from the C.E.O. down to the human-resources staff. McKinsey wanted to document how the top-performing companies in America differed from other firms in the way they handle matters like hiring and promotion. But, as the consultants sifted through the piles of reports and questionnaires and interview transcripts, they grew convinced that the difference between winners and losers was more profound than they had realized.

“We looked at one another and suddenly the light bulb blinked on,” the three consultants who headed the project–Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod–write in their book, also called “The War for Talent.” The very best companies, they concluded, had leaders who were obsessed with the talent issue. They recruited ceaselessly, finding and hiring as many top performers as possible. They singled out and segregated their stars, rewarding them disproportionately, and pushing them into ever more senior positions. “Bet on the natural athletes, the ones with the strongest intrinsic skills,” the authors approvingly quote one senior General Electric executive as saying. “Don’t be afraid to promote stars without specifically relevant experience, seemingly over their heads.” Success in the modern economy, according the three consultants, requires “the talent mind-set”: the “deep-seated belief that having better talent at all levels is how you outperform your competitors.”

This “talent mind-set” is the new orthodoxy of American management. It is the intellectual justification for why such a high premium is placed on degrees from first-tier business schools, and why the compensation packages for top executives have become so lavish. In the modern corporation, the system is considered only as strong as its stars, and, in the past few years, this message has been preached by consultants and management gurus all over the world. None, however, have spread the word quite so ardently as McKinsey, and, of all its clients, one firm took the talent mind-set closest to heart. It was a company where McKinsey conducted twenty separate projects, where McKinsey’s billings topped ten million dollars a year, where a McKinsey director regularly attended board meetings, and where the C.E.O. himself was a former McKinsey partner. The company, of course, was Enron. (…)

The management of Enron did exactly what the consultants at McKinsey said that companies ought to do in order to succeed in the modern economy. It hired and rewarded the very best and the very brightest–and it is now in bankruptcy. (…) What if smart people are overrated?

{ Malcom Gladwell | Continue reading }

Five Simple Steps to Becoming a Billionaire: The Greenspan Method

1. Become Fed Chairman.

2. Lower interest rates until you create an asset bubble. Hold them low until stagflation is in the air and a real estate bubble is floating.

3. Stop being Fed Chairman and release a book on how you didn’t do anything wrong and have no regrets. If possible, time it perfectly with the worst real estate market in generations.

4. Join the hedge fund which has profited more in % and dollar terms than anyone else has from your mess (which you didn’t create).

5. Build a platinum statue of your muse, Ayn Rand, and sleep with it every night.

It also helps if you are mostly unethical.

{ Long or Short Capital via The Big Picture }

videos { Greenspan on the incapacity of the Central Bank, Ayn Rand… | Greenspan on adjustable rate mortgages }