When the FT circulates the list of best-read articles on the internet around the building, the top one or two articles often have a tell-tale word in brackets, after them (Drudge). For, as any web-editor knows, the surest way to get a surge in internet hits is to pearl jewelry  have your article picked up by the Drudge Report - an idiosyncratic mix of high politics, economics, celebrity news and climate-change scepticism - which has a huge following in the US, particularly amongst “conservatives”.

For a journalist being Drudged is a mixed blessing. Initially, you feel terribly popular and successful as you soar up the “most read” table. And then the e-mails start coming in. Here are a few that arrived today, in response to my Tuesday column on Obama. I think they give a fairly alarming insight into the mental state of parts of Middle America.

Somebody called Bob Clymer writes: “From your writings you are clearly in the Marxist/Socialist camp. Keep your stinking European nose out of America.” And here are the musings of one Bill Smith: “when are you idiotic British Marxist ass-kissers ever going to see reality?  Obama is a dead man walking….he’s too stupid to realize it yet….The Mossad will cap his big brown head and make it look like some Muslim hot-head did it….This halfbreed idiot is a ruination not only to the USA but to free men everywhere….something you lazy bastards in Europe gave up like 65 years ago….” What kind of a mental state do you have to be in, that you want your own president to be assassinated by a foreign country?

And here are a couple more for good measure. I’m afraid I find this kind of stuff strangely fascinating:

You know what is really killing off the pearl jewelry wholesale   “hopey, changey” drunkeness under BHO? Common folk, the seemingly lobotomized independents and moderates who voted for the man w/absolutely no accomplishments in his entire life, are figuring out that w/obamacare, “The One” and his obamunists have no intention of improving the healthcare system, they are simply on a quest for power. He’s half a man, and all crypto-marxist, and as more and more folks figure it out, the faster he’ll be out of power. That’s why I have a Palin 2009 bumper sticker on my car.

But, I have to acknowledge, that not every e-mail that has come my way via Drudge has been insane. I liked this one from Andrew Ballard: “In reference to Gideon Rachman’s column today, I think Barack Obama probably has a picture of a different Ali fight on his office wall now.  A friend in the US recently described his presidency as the “rope-a-dope” presidency, a reference to Ali’s contest against the physically stronger – but far less subtle – George Foreman.  Ali had to wholesale pearl jewelry  absorb the blows of his opponent for seven rounds before he came out swinging. 
 What the president needs to remember, however, is that Ali took the fight to Foreman in the eighth round of the fifteen – he knew he couldn’t lose another round or he wouldn’t be able to win on points.  It’s an interesting strategy to let rightwing activists, Iranian generals, Taliban guerrillas and large swathes of American special interests try to punch themselves out on your ribcage, but at some point you’ve got to fight back.  It remains to be seen whether Obama has the punch to finish off his opponents or if he’ll crumple under their blows.”

BRITAIN’S bank regulator is an unlikely candidate to take a tough stand on bank funding. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) was one of the most permissive big supervisors in the world. When the crisis hit, it acted as a cheerleader for Britain’s shaky banks.

On September 17th last year it pearl jewelry said that HBOS was “well capitalised” and funding itself “in a satisfactory way”. One day later HBOS was rescued by Lloyds TSB, and a couple of weeks after that both firms were part-nationalised. It turned out HBOS was actually nearly insolvent (the losses it has announced since are equivalent to three-quarters of its core capital then). What made it really special, though, was that it had loaned out almost twice its deposit base, creating a funding gap of almost £200 billion ($395 billion) that pretty much guaranteed its failure if wholesale borrowing markets ever dried up.

For Britain’s banks overall, loans exceed deposits by about a third, or £800 billion. With credit markets fragile, 39% of this shortfall is being met by state-guaranteed bonds or help from the Bank of England. It is this mess that the FSA is belatedly trying to address with its new regime for banks’ liquidity, the details of which were published on October 5th. Firms will face stress tests and will have to cut their dependence on short-term wholesale funding. They will also have to raise their holdings of liquid assets, mainly government bonds, from the current level of £280 billion (equivalent to about 5% of assets).

How tough will the FSA actually be? Although it makes noises about ringfencing branches of foreign banks, it admits that “in practice” they would be granted waivers and “so would not incur any specific costs”. Not so the big domestic banks, to pearl jewelry wholesale go by the FSA’s simulations. They will need to increase liquid assets, raise equity or replace short-term with longer-term borrowing to the tune of £600 billion-700 billion. In short, they will need to “liquefy” about 10% of their balance-sheets.

That sounds good, but it is a lot to ask. By carrying lower-yielding assets and issuing more expensive long-term debt, banks could lose up to £9 billion of profit, although this shortfall will surely be passed on to customers. More important, it begins to test the capacity of Britain’s capital markets. If banks chose to get this extra liquidity by buying bonds, they would end up owning government debt equivalent to about 60% of British GDP—an unhealthily cosy arrangement. The alternative of banks issuing many hundreds of billions of pounds of long-term bonds also looks fanciful right now. Analysts at Credit Suisse think that Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland have together raised only £40 billion of non-guaranteed long-term debt this year.

As a result the FSA has opted to phase the new rules in gradually, over the course of several years, and has hinted that at the end of this period banks may need to hold only a portion of the extra liquidity required by the stress test. In all wholesale pearl jewelry  likelihood Britain’s banks will be given even more time to expand their deposit bases and shrink the nastiest bits of their balance-sheets, while being weaned very slowly off state guarantees. The probable next government wants to hand the FSA’s powers to the central bank, so by the time things look more shipshape, the FSA may well have been liquidated itself.

The existence of the so-called halo effect has long been recognised. It is the phenomenon whereby we assume that because people are good at doing A they will be good at doing B, C and D (or the reverse—because they are bad at doing A they will be bad at doing B, C and D). The phrase was first coined by Edward Thorndike, a psychologist who used it in pearl jewelry a study published in 1920 to describe the way that commanding officers rated their soldiers. He found that officers usually judged their men as being either good right across the board or bad. There was little mixing of traits; few people were said to be good in one respect but bad in another.

Later work on the halo effect suggested that it was highly influenced by first impressions. If we see a person first in a good light, it is difficult subsequently to darken that light. The old adage that “first impressions count” seems to be true. This is used by advertisers who pay heroic actors and beautiful actresses to promote products about which they have absolutely no expertise. We think positively about the actor because he played a hero, or the actress because she was made up to look incredibly beautiful, and assume that they therefore have deep knowledge about car engines or anti-wrinkle cream.

Recognition that the halo effect has a powerful influence on business has been relatively recent. Two consultants, Melvin Scorcher and James Brant, wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2002:
In our experience, CEOs, presidents, executive VPs and other top-level people often fall into the trap of making decisions about candidates based on lopsided or pearl jewelry wholesale distorted information … Frequently they fall prey to the halo effect: overvaluing certain attributes while undervaluing others.

This is to consider the halo effect in the context of recruitment. But the effect also influences other areas of business. Car companies, for instance, will roll out what they call a halo vehicle, a particular model with special features that helps to sell all the other models in the range.

In his prize-winning book “The Halo Effect”, published in 2007, Phil Rosenzweig, an academic at IMD, a business school near Lausanne in Switzerland, argued:

Much of our thinking about company performance is shaped by the halo effect … when a company is growing and profitable, we tend to infer that it has a brilliant strategy, a visionary CEO, motivated people, and a vibrant culture. When performance falters, we’re quick to say the strategy was misguided, the CEO became arrogant, the people were complacent, and the wholesale pearl jewelry culture stodgy … At first, all of this may seem like harmless journalistic hyperbole, but when researchers gather data that are contaminated by the halo effect – including not only press accounts but interviews with managers – the findings are suspect. That is the principal flaw in the research of Jim Collins’s “Good to Great”, Collins and Porras’s “Built to Last”, and many other studies going back to Peters and Waterman’s “In Search of Excellence”. They claim to have identified the drivers of company performance, but they have mainly shown the way that high performers are described.

A FEW weeks after I visited Fenger Academy, on Chicago’s far south side,

television cameras swarmed the school. The pearl jewelry incident at Fenger was so

alarming that the White House dispatched two cabinet secretaries to quell

anxiety. I came for happier reasons. The Fenger was still in the heady first

days of school, exciting not only because every new year brings new

opportunities, but because this year seemed particularly ripe with them.

Fenger is closer to Indiana’s belching mills than to downtown Chicago. It

has struggled for decades. From 2006 to 2008 less than 3% of students met

Illinois’s pathetic standards of achievement. But this meagre record had

one good outcome: Fenger’s district chose it as a “turnaround” school.
AFP

When I arrive in the main office, students are still milling about, a few

parents with them, looking for registration or wondering where to pick up

their new uniforms—black polo shirts with the school insignia on the

breast. Don Fraynd, the turnaround officer, is waiting for me. He is a

youngish man whose e-mail signature is punctuated by a proud “PhD”. After

a quick tour we sit in the principal’s anteroom. He tells me that reformers

have showered Fenger with programmes, to pearl jewelry wholesale no avail.

He hopes that the turnaround model will succeed where other programmes have

failed. The effort is part of a broader one in Chicago that will soon be

national. Arne Duncan, the American education secretary, came from Chicago’

s school system. He wants to improve the country’s 5,000 worst schools

within five years.

To prepare for Fenger’s turnaround, Mr Fraynd worked closely with community

leaders. Students helped choose new electives and after-school programmes.

He sacked old teachers and hired new ones “Without that you can’t make moves

with teaching and learning,” he explains. But his broader goal—reversing

decades of failure through comprehensive, intense reform—is startlingly

ambitious.

Mr Fraynd leaves and I wait for Elizabeth Dozier, Fenger’s principal, to

emerge from her office. When she does, in wholesale pearl jewelry an energetic burst, she hands me a

T-shirt with “TITANS”, the name of Fenger’s mascot, written vertically on

the chest. Each letter is the beginning of its own line, so that the shirt

reads: “Transformed Individuals Turning Abilities into New Successes”. As

we start our tour she tells me that the students designed the shirts

themselves.

Ms Dozier wears a purple dress, high heels and, most important, a two-way

radio strapped to her waist. An ear piece is nestled beneath her hair,

Secret-Service style. Fenger is huge; this is the only way she can respond

quickly to problems, small and large.

may have been hit hard, but the recession, it turns out, has not done much damage in space. Turnover among operators of satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) grew by 7-8% last year, according to Northern Sky Research (NSR); analysts at Euroconsult, a rival research firm, put the figure even higher, at 11%. The three biggest firms in the business—SES, based in pearl jewelry The Hague, Intelsat, based in Washington, DC, and Eutelsat, based in Paris—brought in combined revenues of over $6 billion. SES and Eutelsat boast profit margins of over 25%. NSR predicts that in the next decade the business of leasing satellite capacity will grow by an average of 4.3% a year.

It was not always this way. In the late 1990s investors piled into satellites on the assumption that hordes of people would rely on them for mobile-phone coverage and broadband internet (mainly delivered using low-earth orbit, or LEO, satellites) and digital television (delivered from GEO ones). But competition from cheaper terrestrial networks undermined mass-market mobile and broadband services via satellite, vapourising tens of billions of dollars of investors’ money in the process and bringing infamy to once celebrated firms such as Globalstar and Iridium.

LEO operators are now doing a bit better: Euroconsult reckons their revenues grew by 6% last year. But the sector is a fraction of the size of GEO, and retains a lot of debt from earlier days. Meanwhile, the GEO business is booming, thanks mostly to the worldwide popularity of satellite television, which seems to be the last thing that anyone wishes to cut back on despite the straitened times. Digital television has expanded phenomenally quickly in emerging markets in particular, with more than 2,900 channels added in 2008 alone.

Many poorer countries also have limited phone networks, so rely on satellites to handle telephone calls in remote areas. There is also a small but profitable market for broadband internet via satellite in places that are not served by terrestrial networks, such as oil rigs, ships and sparsely populated parts of rich countries. Several services, including IPstar in Asia and WildBlue and Hughes in North America, cater to this niche, and more are on the way in America and Europe. Today’s 1.2m subscribers (up by 30% on last year) could reach 10m within the decade. A new generation of high-capacity satellites means that satellite broadband can now compete with the pearl jewelry wholesale terrestrial sort on price, though not on speed.

Financing new satellites costing hundreds of millions of dollars is not easy in the current climate. But operators have resorted to the help of export-credit agencies such as Coface, in France, which guarantees the debts of those wishing to buy French satellites. Pacôme Révillon of Euroconsult says that in the past year more satellite projects were financed in wholesale pearl jewelry  this way than in the nine previous years. One new satellite-broadband firm, O3b, is launching a network of satellites around the equator to provide long-distance capacity to African telecoms firms. It recently secured a $465m credit facility from Coface as part of a $525m debt package. There is no credit crunch in space either, it turns out.