As First Lady Michelle Obama was announcing the creation of a task force to fight childhood obesity, the American Bevarage Association was announcing that beverage makers will start displaying calorie counts on package fronts, vending machines, and restaurant fountains.

I can’t find anything snarky to say about this. All the big beverage producers will take part, including Coca-Cola (KO), PepsiCo (PEP), Dr. Pepper Snapple (DPS), and Nestle Waters. Calorie counts won’t be “per serving,” but for the entire container, up to 20-ounce bottles and cans. Larger containers like 2-liter bottles will break down calories per 12-ounce serving. 

OK, I can think of one mildly snarky thing to say. I have to assume that this initiative is part of a deal to avoid the passage of a proposed tax on sugary beverages. That doesn’t mean it’s not a laudable move, though. If I had to choose between imposing such a tax and having calorie counts displayed, I’d go with calorie counts. 

The ABA, the industry’s powerful lobbyist, was pretty crafty in how it fought the tax. According to the Los Angeles Times, it convinced groups representing Latinos (including a doctors’ group) that the tax would be regressive—which is true. And those groups signaled their opposition. The ABA also used a blunter, more time-honored method of getting those groups on board: It wrote them big checks.

So my blog turns seven today. On August 20, 2002, while hiding north of San Francisco working on the Eldred appeal, I penned my first (wildly and embarrassingly defensive) missive to Dave. Some 1753 entries later, I’m letting the blog rest. This will be the last post in this frame. Who knows what the future will bring, but in the near term, it won’t bring more in lessig.org/blog.

The reasons are many.

First, as I peer over the abyss of child number 3 (expected in a couple weeks), I can’t begin to imagine how I would be able to allocate the time to give this space the attention it needs. I’ve already fretted about my failure to give this community the time it deserves in REMIX. Things will only get worse.

Second, even if I could, I’m entering a stage of my work when the ratio of speaking to reading/listening/thinking is changing significantly. I’ve just taken up my role as director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. As announced, this means the launch of a 5 year research project on institutional corruption. While I expect that project will have a critical cyber-presence, I don’t want its life to be framed by this blog. The mission, the understanding, the community is different.

Third, even if I could, and even if the work I was doing meant I should, there’s an increasingly technical burden to maintaining a blog that I don’t have the cycles to support. Some very good friends — Theo Armour and M. David Peterson — have been volunteering time to do the mechanics of site maintenance. That has gotten overwhelming. Theo estimates that 1/3 of the 30,000 comments that were posted to the blog over these 7 years were fraudsters. He’s been working endlessly to remove them. At one point late last year, Google kicked me off their index because too many illegal casino sites were linking from the bowels of my server. I know some will respond with the equivalent of “you should have put bars on your windows and double bolted locks on your front door.” Maybe. Or maybe had legislatures devoted 1/10th the energy devoted to the copyright wars to addressing this muck, it might be easier for free speech to be free.

This isn’t an announcement of my disappearance. I’m still trying to understand twitter. My channel at blip.tv will remain. As will the podcast, updated as I speak. I will continue to guest blog at Huffington Post. And as Change-Congress.org enters a new stage, I hope to be doing more there. But this community, this space, this board will now rest.

Thank you to the endless list of people who have helped make this place as it is, or was. Theo and M. David especially. Marc Perkel for his free hosting at ctyme.com for so many years. And thank you especially to the inhabitants of this space, especially the fantastic commentators and loyal backbenchers (Three Blind Mice, you have to reveal yourself now and let me buy you a beer). I have enjoyed this wildly more than I have not (again, I whine in REMIX about the not). And I have been very proud to be responsible for certain bits of content — especially the guest blogging by the interesting and famous (Howard Dean was a favorite, and I will always be proud that I got Judge Posner to experiment with blogging, leading to his wonderful blog with Gary Becker).

Comments on this post will remain open for a week. And then comments on all posts will be locked.

Thank you to everyone, again.

Atlas iron’s high grade iron ore is making it more attractive miner to the  overseas chinese companies

AGO$2.020

Goldman sachs , JB where , Wilson securities , hartleys limited all of them have a strong buy rating on his stock and i dont see why , this stock is a hidden gem among the big miners with its strong grade iron ore resources with port facilities  within its reach.

Go to  ATLAS IRON WEBSITE HERE

Atlas Iron Limited – Iron ore – The Pilbara’s Emerging Powerhouse

Atlas Iron Limited (AGO) is a dynamic iron ore producer, with a number of key projects strategically located within150km of the port of Port Hedland in …
www.atlasiron.com.au/

Company Overview

AGO is an exploration company with four projects in varying stages of exploration at Farrel Well, Pardoo, Abydos, Mt Gould and Weld Range, in Western Australia. These projects are believed to be highly prospective for iron ore and base metal mineralisation. AGO focuses primarily on discovering and developing iron ore projects. AGO’s Pardoo and Abydos projects in the Pilbara region have significant deposits of Direct Shipping Ore (DSO).

AGO Company History

AGO was listed on the ASX in December 2004. Its head office is situated in West Perth.

Differentiating Factor

AGO’s strategy is of rigorous geologically focused exploration with a major drilling component. Also, the company owns 100% of all the project sites, therefore providing shareholders with maximum benefit from any discovery.

Major Customers & Competitors

Major competitors in the gold industry include Oceana Gold, Sino Gold and Newcrest Mining. Customers include banks, governments and international gold brokers.

DSO REOURCE UPGRADE

HIGHLIGHTS
>65% INCREASE IN DSO RESOURCES TO 94.9MT AT 56.5% FE SINCE JAN 2009
>70% INCREASE IN DSO RESERVES TO 25.5MT AT 57.9% FE SINCE JULY 2008
>75% CONVERSION OF WODGINA INDICATED RESOURCES TO RESERVES
INITIAL DSO RESOURCE FOR THE TURNER RIVER PROJECT OF 2.5MT AT 58.5% FE

More here

ATLAS IRON LIMITED (AGO)

Atlas is an iron ore explorer, developer and producer in the Pilbara, Western Australia. Atlas is mining at its Pardoo Iron Ore Project, planning to export 1Mt during its first 12 mths of operations, growing to 3Mtpa in 2010. When combined with its Abydos DSO Project, Atlas is targeting exports at an annualised rate of 6Mtpa by 2010, growing to 12Mtpa by 2012.

Official Listing Date
17 December, 2004

GICS Industry Group
Materials

Exempt Foreign?
No

Internet Address
http://www.atlasiron.com.au/

Registered Office Address
,10 Richardson Street,,,WEST PERTH,WA,AUSTRALIA,6005

Head Office Telephone
              08 9476 7900        

Head Office Fax
08 9476 7988

Share Registry
SECURITY TRANSFER REGISTRARS PTY. LIMITED
,770 CANNING HIGHWAY,,,APPLECROSS,WA,AUSTRALIA,6153

Share Registry Telephone
              (08) 9315 2333   

More atlas IRON NEWS AT  –> http://wotnews.com.au/news/Atlas_Iron/

A Tweet from @Northumbria_RM caught my eye the other day. It was a quote from a contributor to their AC+erm e-Delphi Study along the lines that “RM is something that should be done not something that can be bought and installed.” Nothing too controversial there you might think, after all its what we records managers always say: ‘no quick fixes’, ‘get the processes and standards right first’, ‘try to install a system on a mess and you just have an expensive mess’ etc etc

But what if we are wrong? What if this conventional wisdom is more a reflection of the nature of most records management technologies than representing a universal truism? Sure it’s a certain recipe for failure to attempt to rollout an EDRMS without having prepared every inch of organizational, procedural and cultural groundwork in advance but maybe that’s because of their nature: their size, the (unrealistic) scale of their ambition and their sheer (over?) complexity. But need it be so? After all, most of the technology which is transforming our organizations and our lives seems to be heading in the other direction. We now live in a widget-led world with people designing simple specific apps to solve very specific problems or achieve very specific end results. Take the recent Apple i-phone advertisements extolling the eclectic range of apps available for download, or the simplicity of something like Twitter.

It seems to me that what our users actually want and that we should be finding ways of providing are simple, specific ‘RM apps’ that can be quickly, cheaply and simply ‘bought and installed’ to solve specific problems. Maybe the underlying problem is that we have spent the last decade looking at the problem from the wrong end of the telescope. We’ve been focusing on trying to fix the entire organization whilst hoping that eventually some of the benefits might trickle down and be felt by the ordinary user; where, with hindsight, we might have been better off working out what the problems were that were holding back individual users and building specific solutions to fix them.

When I first started out in records management in 1996 it seemed to me that records management was about finding creative and practical answers to genuine and specific problems in relation to how people managed their records. We needed a means of coordinating retention actions across multiple systems, so we designed one. We needed a way of maximizing the storage space we had available so we designed a location control module that meet our needs. Now of course the talk is of enterprise-wide solutions and international standards. I have no problem per se with either of these but do wonder if together they have unwittingly led us to a situation where all we have to offer is a homogenized, ‘one-size-fits all’ version of records management where we have little choice but to try to shape our problems around the available solutions and where our only route to success lies in trying (and largely failing) to first achieve organizational and cultural change on a scale which is frankly beyond both our reach and our pay-grade.

So it was with rather envious eyes that I read about the forthcoming Repository Fringe Challenge with a bunch of repository developers fired up to come up with genuine, workable solutions to an actual specific problem that is taxing their user community. This isn’t sitting back and hoping that the standards bodies and vendor community eventually acknowledge the problem and build in functionality to their products that are designed to suit everybody. This is a bunch of enthusiastic guys sat round PCs, thinking the unthinkable and finding cool ways of making it happen and then giving it out to the community to use as they see fit.

It’s a way of working and thinking which records management seems to have lost, and I think we are all the poorer for it.

I’ve just been reading the 2009 Horizon Report which explores what emergent technologies are likely to hit the higher education sector over the next few years. It’s a fascinating read for anyone interested in new technologies – and not just those working in HE.

As readers of this blog will know, one of my constant concerns for the records management profession is that we are getting further and further behind ‘the curve’ when it comes to new technology – and thus need to be doing all we can to futurewatch and to consider the implications for our profession.

Here are just a few snippets from the report and a summary of how they might be relevant to records managers…

The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision. Collective intelligence may give rise to multiple answers, all equally correct, to problems. The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are redefining scholarship as we grapple with issues of top-down control and grassroots scholarship

Anyone who has read ‘Managing the Crowd’ will (hopefully) appreciate how this chimes with my own thoughts on how ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ could be used to inform information appraisal.

Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not. Schools are still using materials developed decades ago, but today’s students come to school with very different experiences than those of 20 or 30 years ago, and think and work very differently as well. Institutions need to adapt to current student needs and identify new learning models that are engaging to younger generations.

Today’s students are your workforce in 1-3 years time. So if you think that change will never come to your workplace – think again (a point I made during my keynote at the RMS Conference in 2008)

In countries like Japan, young people equipped with mobiles often see no reason to own personal computers. A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project predicts that by the year 2020, most people across the world will be using a mobile device as their primary means for connecting to the Internet

We need to start ensuring that whatever tools/systems we are designing to manage records are equally at home on a mobile device as they are on a PC or laptop. How many EDRMS work fully and seamlessly on an iPhone I wonder…

And how about the following for examples of technologies which automatically contextualize content (which is, after all, a large part of what records mgt is about). Consider the concepts underpinning these and think what they could mean for information classification in the future…

Applications designed for mobiles can take advantage of built-in features like the microphone and the camera. For instance… Snap-Tell (http://snaptell.com/) use the camera to record a photograph of a CD, video, or book, then identify the artist or author and display that along with reviews of the piece and information on where to buy it…

Devices we commonly carry with us increasingly have the ability to know where they (and, consequently, we) are, and to record our coordinates as we take photographs, talk to friends, or post updates to social networking websites…

Whatever the technology that embeds the capacity for attaching information to an object — and there are many — the result is a connection between a physical object and a rich store of contextual information. Think of doing a web search that reveals not pages of content, but the location, description, and context of actual things in the real world…

Some food for thought for the weekend…