Radiohead

New Business Models: It was a real surprise when Radiohead, the British rock band, announced that it would release its latest album online, without a record label, and let fans pay whatever they wanted to for it, including nothing at all. No one knows for sure the long-term implications, but it's a real eye-opener + the question is whether the concept could be tested in other businesses + expert's reaction (s) to Radiohead's new concept @ http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1821.cfm

Teaching The New Carbon Math

Energy: (via WRI Digest) Earth Council Geneva (ECG) + GHG Experts Network (GEN) + ClimateCHECK have combined to form GHG Management Institute + the network will use WRI's Greenhouse Gas Protocol to train pros on measuring and managing GHG emissions, blending e-learning and interaction with expert instructors.

Useful links:
GHG Management Institute
GHG Protocol

A Technique For Producing Ideas

Good Books: James Young's "A Technique for Producing Ideas" is an interesting book. It was written in the 1940s by an advertiser. It was all about generating ideas for advertising + I think with some modification (s) the concept should work wonders in other businesses. To really make it work you have got to be a specialist + lucky.

What Are They Teaching Art Students These Days?

Gail Gregg writes about new forms of learning art with technology + the encroachment of market forces into academia + developing conceptual skills + intellectual experimentation + other viewpoints @ http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=1293

Wind Energy On Demand

Energy: Jean Thilmany writes about a utility-sponsored project and an ambitious company's aim to store wind energy underground for sale + other viewpoints @ http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/oct/tech/jt_wind.html

Useful links:
Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities
Iowa Stored Energy Park
General Compression

Ammonite

Chet Raymo writes about ammonite, a unique jewel box that tells evolutionary stories about drifting continents, asteroid collisions, mountains thrust upwards, wasting erosion and more + a species of fossil ammonite, Hildoceras, named for the holy scholar -- abbess of Whitby + other viewpoints @ http://www.sciencemusings.com/2007/10/wise-saints-and-drifting-continents.html

Diamond Grading

International Diamond Laboratories writes:
The biggest issue with diamond grading as we know it today is inconsistency. A diamond that is awarded an E color grade might receive a D tomorrow and an F the day after. Our research has shown that inconsistency easily reaches up to 25% on average. It’s merely a simple fact related to the imperfections of the human eye as a measuring instrument. Experienced graders will acknowledge that these differences exist. A machine can overcome this subjectivity. IDL commits to offering a level of consistency the diamond market has not yet seen. Diamond grading is to be brought from an art to a science. IDL will offer the much needed consistency through technology. (http://www.diamondlab.org)


Useful link:
Hughes, R.W. (1987) Diamond grading: Does it work? Gemological Digest, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 1–3

In my view diamond grading will always be controversial. A friend of mine who is in the business tells me that diamond grading is a faith-based concept. We have got used to it for so long it's going to be with us forever. So now comes the International Diamond Laboratories' statement (s) that their version is more scientific, fool-proof, sort of a god-like statement. Only time will tell. In the end it's the consumers who will have to raise their standard (s) by gaining appropriate skills to distinguish (which I doubt) diamond grades and believe it. When experts /technology go wrong (they usually do), consumers are always the losers.

Magic Of Music

I love classical music + the experience + the different musical tastes + the art form + the reinvention of classical music. Knight Foundation's research, among the largest discipline-specific studies of arts consumers report is an interesting study. The full report is available @ www.knightfdn.org

Useful link:
- Classical Music Consumer Segmentation Study

Colombian Emerald

Here is an educational clip from Ron Ringsrud about a 1400 carat (+) Colombian emerald crystal + six carat emerald @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQAn_n75Dzc

I liked this one.

Naked Truths

Sarah Valdez writes about a new generation of women trying to reflect their own sensibilities + contradictory concepts, identities and desires + humor and self-stereotyping + other viewpoints @ http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=1276

Rough Ruby From Mong Hsu, Burma: The Route To Market

(via Kammerling, 1994) Rough ruby from Mong Hsu, Burma:

1. The initial journey is from the mine site to the town of Mong Hsu. The ruby is then taken by road to the city of Taunggyi, 275 km away. Here there is a government-sanctioned market where dealers can trade their stones legally for a fee.

2. From Taunggyi the vast majority of the rough ruby the travels east to the town of Keng Tung rather than traveling down to Rangoon.

3. The next stage is the Burmese town of Tachiliek, just across the border from Thailand.

4. From Tachiliek the rough is taken across the small Moei Kok River into Thailand.

5. Trading is intense in the small Thai town of Mae Sai, just a few hundred meters across the border. Rough untreated rubies are openly traded in shops and sidestreet tables. The center of the ruby trade is the street that has become known locally as Soi Tab Teem (Ruby Lane). Most business goes on between Thai dealers from Chantaburi and Burmese traders who make the daily trip across the bridge from Tachiliek. The cost of setting up a shop in Ruby Lane is reportedly only some US$400 +/-. A table on the main Soi costs around US$80 +/-, while on a side-Soi can cost as little as US$40 +/-. Parcels range from one to two pieces up to 1kg (5000 carats). If a sale is made, the goods are passed over and payment is in Thai baht.

6. The rough is then taken to Chantaburi where the stones are heat treated to remove the distinctive blue cores that typify this material. They are then cut and polished.

7. The fashioned and treated stones may then be sold onto larger dealers in Bangkok, to be sold on the local market to manufacturers, and to foreign buyers from all over the world.

The Logic Of Failure

Good Books: Dietrich Doerner's The Logic of Failure is a must-read book. We all know that people who are in power make stupid mistakes + Dietrich Dorner explains why they do so from psychological experiments + computer simulations with role-playing volunteers. Dorner, director of the Cognitive Anthropology Project at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, believes that guided role-playing can help people understand what they're doing wrong and get better at making decisions. Writes Dorner: 'Anyone who thinks play is nothing but play and dead earnest nothing but dead earnest hasn't understood either one.'

The Lebanese Role

(via The Diamond World, 1981) David E Koskoff writes:

Here is an excerpt from The Diamond World:
The De Beers and Selection Trust crowd resent Jamil’s advantages, and especially the government’s unofficial but well-established policy of suffering te Koidu dealers to remain and, worse, permitting them to deal in dollars—for ‘Guinean’ stones only (but who is to say what stones come from where?). This makes Koidu a Monrovia outpost plumb in the heart of te Diminco lease. It also facilitates the laundering of black market currency transactions of whatever origin. But, says a De Beers person, “We’ve learned to live with that kind of thing.”

Notwithstanding Jamil’s overriding interests, diamond dealing among Koidu’s buyers is a highly competitive matter. Koidu dealers buy principally from Kono diggers, from the more sophisticated Maracca illicits, and from the Mandingo, many of whom are carrying in the Guinean stones. Something over 90 pecent of the black sellers are Muslim and come to the offices wearing gowns and either fezzes or the black Muslim equivalent of the yarmulke. There is also considerable trading between Lebanese themselves, and many stones have been traded several times within Sierra Leone before they are actually exported.

The Koidu dealers are a refreshingly honest lot of rogues, tremendously likable. They are quite open about the fact that all of their Guinean customers are smugglers; that many of the Sierra Leone stones in which they deal are illicitly mined, and that some of those stones may even have been stolen from Diminco; that they themselves have been knowingly if indirectly involved in illicit dealings in the past—and quite possibly, even right now. Nobody seriously maintains that the success of their operations depends principally on legitimate trade, and many of them are involved exclusively in illicit operations. Some are second-generation diamantaires and have been in the business all their lives. “Said” (as I will call him) is one of these.

Said is a solid and personable young man. He studied for two years in London but says that he did not approve of the dissolute life of hash smoking and wenching that typified te English college crowd, so left without taking a degree. He prefers life in Koidu to the sleazy sophistication of student London.

Said is only about twenty-four years old, but he represents twenty four centuries of Phoenician tradition. I asked him, “Is it better for a digger to sell his diamonds in Koidu or to the Diamond Corporation in Kenema? and in response he gave me most of what understanding I have of Lebanese trading techniques:

“That depends on whether you want to deal with me. I make you laugh, I make you cry, and I help you out in times of need. You have a bad time? Paid too much for a stone? Your old lady’s sick? You can tell me about it. I will listen. I will help. We never forget a person who is in need. The Diamond Corporation doesn’t want to know.

I give respect, dignity, I talk to them fine, and they appreciate that. In the bad times I couldn’t give good prices, but people came anyway. They said,” He’s a good boy, he gives good prices.” Maybe they knew it wasn’t so, but they came anyway because when I didn’t give good prices I still gave respect and dignity. It’s feelings you work with, not only money; you touch his feelings—he’ll never forget that.”

Said works out of an office where he greets the sellers in thier tribal gowns in his own informal western clothes. He deals with them good-naturedly, joshes, and has an easy and friendly rapport with them. They have obviously come to like him and to trust him. The trust element is all important in Koidu, as it is throughout the diamond world. Occasionally stones are left with him for safekeeping by potential sellers who must return to Guinea to discuss an offer with a partner; they may not return for their goods for over a month.

All of the Lebanese dealers have tremendous expenses for charity, handouts, and uncollectable ‘loans’. I watched while Said dispensed a stream of leaones to needy people who came in for help. To a great extent such kindness is a rather cynical casting of bread upon waters: Small courtesies today may give the opportunity for big killings tomorrow.

Said works all the time. When things slow down at his office, around six thirty at night, he closes up and goes home, but any seller can come to his house and he will return to his office at any time to close any transaction. “Work!” he said out of nowhere. And then he added, “....Money.”

For Sierra Leone, diamonds have been a curse of riches. It was once an exporter of its people’s basic staple, rice, but the diamonds and their lure drained off the agricultural workers to the diamond diggings. Now it must import rice and leave most of the potentially rich paddies idle.

The illicit dealings to which diamonds no nicely lend themselves have promoted a general spirit of lawlessness within the country and have corrupted the nation’s officials. At every turn, laws and practices have been changed to accomodate the illegal conduct of the diamond community, each time at a greater cost to the country and its citizens at large, theoretically as an effort to entice the illicit element into more nearly legitimate avenues, but at least partly as a bid by the politicians to win the goodwill of te criminal element.

By opening the diamond lands to the diggers in 1956, the country gave up the significant tax income that would otherwise have come to it from the much more heavily taxed SLST and reduced the country’s total mineral wealth potential by giving lands over to less efficient producers. About all that was gained for the country was the legitimizing of the diggers, and the dubious possibility that the diggers might henceforth pay some export duties. There was no point to asking them to pay income taxes. If required to to so, the newly legitimate diggers and dealers would retaliate by smuggling their stones across the border to Liberia, and the country would lose the export duty as well. On De Beer’s advice, the diggers and dealers were exempted from the income tax. Everyone else must pick up the share of taxes that the diamantaires, some of the country’s wealthiest men, might otherwise have evaded anyway. The exemptions lures laborers to socially unproductive pursuits, and encourages the channeling of Lebanese capital into tax-exempt diamond investments, rather than into investments that would be both taxable and otherwise more desirable from soceity’s viewpoint.

All this was done ostensibly in the hopes that the diamond people would at least pay the export duty. But they didn’t. Smuggling went right on. So on the Diamond Corporation’s urgings the export duty was reduced from 7.5 percent to 2.5 percent, about the same as Liberia, where a 3 percent duty is computed somewhat more leniently. Would the diamond men at least give the state that much? The answer has been yes and no. With the drop in duty early in 1978, smuggling declined to very little. Then, a 5 percent devaluation of the leone in the fall of 1978 badly affected confidence in the leone and was an impetus to increased smuggling to Monronvia, where the stones could be sold for dollars. The hosting of the OAU conference and other government improvidences is likely to lead to further devaluation of the leone, and increased smuggling.

The country received real tax moneys from SLST, and both taxes and dividends from Diminco, but these moneys have largely been squandered, rather than invested in capital improvements r job-creating enterprises of lasting benefit to Sierra Leone. The country has gotten nothing out of the alluvial diamond mining scheme other than the increased popularity of its ‘statesmen’.

It can’t last longer. Diminco will almost certainly cease to be profitable in the next few years, and the alluvial-scheme patches are already being worked over for the second and third times. Grave economic adjustments are ahead for the country when Diminco ceases contributing, and for the diggers when they have to hang up their sieves. When it’s all over, all that Sierra Leone will have to show for it will be an emotional and fiscal letdown, and the remembrances of good days gone by.

I hope the new government will utilize the natural resources in a constructive manner with good management + compassion. The people of Sierra Leone have suffered enough.

What You Can Learn From The Office

(via Fastcompany) Liz Webber writes about America's favorite fictional boss @ What You Can Learn from The Office

I really enjoyed it + the biggest mistakes:
- Don't Tell Everyone the Boat is Sinking When It's Not
- Don't Blackmail Employees into Doing Your Laundry
- Don't Try to Steal the Show at an Employee's Wedding
- Don't Rip Up Students' Textbooks at a College Lecture
- Try to Avoid Accidentally Dressing in Drag
- Don't Call a Client a "Beeyotch"
- Don't Buy Lingerie for Employees
- Don't Make Employees Compete Survivor-style for Your Job
- Don't Sell Your Condo on eBay Before You Land a Job Promotion
- Try Not to Hit Employees With Your Car

I've seen many bosses who are like the fictional boss in the movie, but my favorite movie is One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. It's amazing to see someone act so well.

Chocolate vs. Colored gemstone consumers

The image of dark chocolate + the publicity about its health benefits has made it a popular chocolate choice among the consumers because many manufacturers have started to introduce product labels with percentage of cocoa content.

The U.S based Chocolate Manufactured Association (CMA) have taken the initiative by releasing a guide to cacao content labels (defining cacao percentages as the total percentage of ingredients (by weight) which come from the cacao bean + possible inclusion of chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, cocoa powder + explanation on how this percentage relates to flavor, sweetness and health) to educate chocolate consumers.

Why can’t the colored gemstone industry + gem testing/grading laboratories + trade associations do the same?

By the way I like chocolates, dark chocolates. I also like colored gemstones.

The Lebanese Role

(via The Diamond World, 1981) David E Koskoff writes:
I have read the book several times. What interests me is the characters, traditions and cultures + the way diamonds are described and traded by locals and international markets + the role of immigrants in diamond producing countries. I was really touched by the violence and sufferings of Sierra Leoneans + the movie Blood Diamond added a bit more luster (I think) to the character (s) of the trade. It's educational.

Here is an excerpt from The Diamond World:
The Lebanese community, and principally the Koidu Lebanese, represent the alternate market in which the diggers and small dealers can sell their stones. The Lebanese are the dominant economic factor in Sierra Leone, and in much of the rest of West Africa. They first began to arrive in Sierra Leone in the mid-1890s. They arrived very poor, lacking skills or useful experience, ignorant of the country and of the native languages. They took to trading and shortly became established participants in the life of the country. Until the diamond rush of the 1950s, however, they remained a largely impoverished community, many of whom lived in the style of the black Africans, some of them marrying Sierre Leonean women.

At the time of the illicit diamond rush, the Lebanese were in a position to take a big chunk of the traffic, but the Mandingo were ahead of them. Until the late 1950s the Mandingo held their own against the Lebanese for control of the non-Diminco production, but gradually the Lebanese became the dominant factor. ‘They are firm and controlling people and they know the black,’ an Antwerp rough dealer explained to me. H.L. van der Laan, author of The Lebanese Traders in Sierra Leone, believes that it has more to do with historical and economic circumstances: The Lebanese had greater access to finance; they could make bigger deals and could finance mining operations that were beyond the Mandingo traders. They also had greater rapport with the officials of the British colony of Sierra Leone, and after 1961 with the officials of the independent nation of Sierra Leone. Mandingos found it increasingly difficult to get or to renew buyer’s licences.

Today virtually all of the Lebanese are wealthy by Sierra Leone standards, and many of them are wealthy by American or European standards, living as well as is possible in an underdeveloped country, and refueling with regular vacations abroad. Though their wealth orginates in the diamonds, they have used their diamond money to gather control of every other aspect of the country’s economy, with the predictable result that most black Sierra Leoneans resent them. Where has the country’s diamond wealth gone? Any black man in Sierra Leone can tell you in a word: ‘Beirut’, a convenient oversimplication.

The diamond diggers and smaller African dealers are largely very tribal people, and though they may have ill will toward the Lebanese, still, they feel more comfortable dealing with Lebanese whom they have known for years than with a European. They are more likely to trust a Lebanese-especially those diggers who either began or are now operating illicitly. Every digger knows that he can bring his stones directly to the Diamond Corporation in Kenema for sale or for an offer, but few do, even though they know that their Lebanese buyer may sell their stones to the Diamond Corporation at a profit. Many of them are financially tied to a particular Lebanese, and most of the rest are tied to one by a sense of trust.

In the days when the Diamond Corporation was the only exporter, a Lebanese could tell the buyer if he didn’t get his price, he would take the stone away. The buyer understood what that meant: that the stone would be smuggled across to Monrovia and sold on the outside market to a competing buyer—the stone would be traded outside De Beers’ control. But that kind of talk did not make much sense coming from a native Kono digger. The result was that the Diamond Corporation did pay the Lebanese a better price than the African—and may still.

Koidu, the commercial center for the Kono district and the Yengema lease area, and center of the Lebanese diamond traffic, is a busy, out-of-repair backwater city of tin shacks and shanties and scattered masonry structures that house the Lebanese-owned stores. In Koidu everything turns on bribery, from electricity and telephone service to the more conventional corruptions of police. Diamond dealing has always been illegal in Koidu.

The Koidu trade is much less active today than it was in the raucous fifties and sixties, but is still very far from dead. Much of the trade is ‘licit’ from Sierra Leone’s point of view—except for the fact that its mere existence is illicit. It involves buying the diamonds illicitly mined in neighboring Guinea, which are smuggled from Guinea into Sierra Leone. Koidu is on a convenient road link to the diamondifeous area of Guinea; it is closer to Guinea than Monrovia, where the Guineans would otherwise to; there are more buyers—and thus more competition—in Koidu than in Monrovia; and the Koidu Lebanese are officially unofficially (or unofficially officially) permitted to pay for Guinean stones in US dollars (also the official unit of currency in Liberia). Many of the Koidu dealers end up smuggling stones to Monrovia principally to get dollars with which to purchase more Guinean stones. The Guineans are fond of Liberian currency, more than of leones, let alone of sylis (the Guinean unit of currency).

Jamil, charming and colorful, shrewd and hardworking, has risen to the top of the heap. He is an Afro-Lebanese (his mother is from the politically important Temme tribe) and an ostensible Muslim, though not one thta would pass any mullah’s muster. He drinks liquor and works on Friday.

Jamil started, so it goes, as a lorry driver involved in small scale diamond smuggling, then became bigger and with the aid of a ‘handyman’ was able to rope lesser illicit dealers into his arena. Out of it came an empire that extends to most aspects of the Sierra Leone economy, and to all of the seamier aspects of it. President Stevens is generally believed to have interests in many of Jamil’s ventures, and Jamil is reputed to enjoy a second-to-none influence with the head of state. This is the kind of legend that revolves around one or more people in every African country; in the case of Sierra Leone’s Jamil, it may have some truth to it.

In 1959 Jamil was arrested, sentenced to six months in jail, and banished from the Kono diamond district for unlawful possession of diamonds—no disgrace in Sierra Leone, where diamond offenses have always been viewed ad tut-tut matters. In 1965 he was rehabilitated, issued a diamond dealer’s license, and permitted to return to Kono. There he quickly rose to the top as the partisan of the prime minister, Sir Albert Margai. When Margai used the threat of expulsion from Kono to raise campaign contributions from the Lebanese, Jamil was one of the bag men, assessing contributions on an ability to pay basis. Meanwhile, Henneh Shamel, Jamil’s main rival, cast his lot with Stevens and the opposition party, and with Steven’s success, Jamil faded rapidly into obscurity, while Shamel rode high and ostentatiously to the front as the king of the diamond dealers.

In November of 1969 an SLST shipment of one month’s diamond production was waylaid at the small Hastings Airport south of Freetown by armed thieves who made off with $3.4 million worth of stones. People high up in company security had to have been involved. Shamel was arrested and charged with having masterminded the theft, but at trial he was acquitted. The presiding judge criticized the prosecution for having presented its case badly. Two days later Shamel left the country.

Shamel was declared a prohibited immigrant and barred from returning to Sierra Leone. Thereafter, Jamil began working his way into Steven’s good graces, and has continually improved his position since. Insofar as the country’s diamond policy is concerned, he probably has more input than anyone else in Sierra Leone. His allocation of the Dominco production is likely to increase—at least so long as President Stevens remains in office—to the extent that it is advantageous for Jamil to have it increase. He was almost certainly responsible for the government decision in 1974 to make export licenses available to others than the Diamond Corporation. He became a licensed exporter, but so long as the export duty remained pegged at 7.5 percent he exported almost nothing through official channels. Within ten days after the duty was reduced to 2.5 percent in 1978, Jamil surged past the Diamond Corporation to become the number one alluvial-scheme exporter.

Jamil’s considerable experience has made him a thoroughly competent rough evaluator, and he now has a network of trading and diamond cutting contacts in Antwerp, but at this point he is more of a financier than a diamantaire himself. He is the godfather of the Lebanese diamond traders, most of whom conduct their diamond businesses to greater or lesser degrees as his agent. Any Lebanese who becomes big enough works for Jamil or gets out. One of his Koidu operatives explained why: ‘He’s got the cash, the guts, and the power. He gets people to cooperate with him.’ Jamil doesn’t have to use threats of violence to secure cooperation (though many claim that he will); he influences people through matters such as who gets a renewal of his diamond dealer’s license or a permit to reside within Kono. Most of the Lebanese export under Jamil’s license, sending their goods either to Jamil’s Antwerp man, Sulaimen, or to other buyers. Sulaimen get the biggest chunk. He too is an Afro-Lebanese and brother to one of Jamil’s high-ranking lieutanants.

The Lebanese Role (continued)

Duel In The Sun

Greatest Opening Film Lines (Duel in the Sun -1946):
Deep among the lonely sun-baked hills of Texas, the great and weatherbeaten stone still stands. The Comanches called it Squaw's Head Rock. Time cannot change its impassive face, nor dim the legend of the wild young lovers who found Heaven and Hell in the shadows of the rock...

I liked this one.

Who Are The Great Women Artists?

Ann Landi writes about art historian Linda Nochlin + her provocative and soul-searching examination of women’s status, past and present + the social structures surrounding the production of art + other viewpoints @ http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=1275

Doing Business 2008

Doing Business Report 2008 is out now. The World Bank has released its annual ranking of the ease of doing business in 178 economies. For complete listings visit the Doing Business site.

Identification Of Rough Ruby And Sapphire

There are a number of features to look out for:

- The first might a six-sided or triangular cross-section or, if present, the appearance of raised triangular growth surfaces on flat terminating faces.

- There may be a series of intersecting fine lines meeting at 120/60º visible on top surfaces.

- The hexagonal bipyramid form typical of sapphire is very distinctive.

- And the presence of horizontal striations on pyramid or prism faces is a useful confirmation (quartz is the only other mineral to show this feature and can be distinguished by its much lighter feel or heft in the hand).