Data-gathering firms and technology companies are aggressively matching people's TV-viewing behavior with other personal data—in some cases, prescription-drug records obtained from insurers—and using it to help advertisers buy ads targeted to shows watched by certain kinds of people. At the same time, cable and satellite companies are testing and deploying new systems designed to show households highly targeted ads. In an early test of Cablevision's technology, the U.S. Army used it to target four different recruitment ads to different categories of viewers. In one method, TV providers such as Cablevision can beam different ads to different set-top boxes, even when they're tuned to the same channel. A second method for targeting ads works differently. Companies including TRA Inc., Rentrak Corp. and WPP PLC's Kantar Media, along with tech titan Microsoft Corp., are taking data on TV-viewing behavior harvested from set-top boxes and matching it with a broad array of household data. Then they, and other tech firms including Google Inc., help advertisers buy ads targeted to shows watched by certain types of people. by Suzanne Vranica
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tvs-next-wave-tuning-in-to-you-2011-03-06

We're drawing ever-closer to the Philip K. Dickian dystopia paradise in which all advertising is personalized according to the purchasing power of each individual consumer. (That means YOU, Kevin Spacey fan and likely Casino Jack ticket-buyer!) In a report on the booming taxi ad biz, the Times notes that people riding cabs through the East Village can now expect to see backseat TV ads for Blue Man Group, which performs on Lafayette Street. The theater troupe is just one of the advertisers "using the GPS devices in cabs to pinpoint when and where its commercials should play." They know where you are, and they're coming for you. The Times also finds that VeriFone Media Solutions, which handles advertising sales for 12,000 yellow cabs, is reporting revenue up 60 percent in the past year. http://gothamist.com/2010/12/13/taxi_tv_ads_now_using_gps_to_target.php

Quotes
Laughter has no foreign accent. Paul Lowney
With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die. Abraham Lincoln
You grow up the day you have your first real laugh — at yourself. Ethel Barrymore http://www.laughteryogaamerica.com/4fun/grow/118-quotes-laughter-joy-happiness-729.php

gamut (GAM-uht) noun The complete range of something. [From Medieval Latin, contraction of gamma ut, from gamma (third letter of the Greek alphabet), used to represent the lowest tone + ut, from the names of the notes ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si (ut and si later changed to do and ti). Gamma + ut contracted to gamut and the meaning expanded to denote all notes.]
http://gtotd.blogspot.com/2007/09/gamut-word-with-its-roots-in-do-re-mi_07.html

Answer to Who Am I Joyce Carol Oates has written fiction, essays, poetry, memoirs under her own name and novels under the pseudonyms of Lauren Kelly and Rosamond Smith. The search longhand awards 1968 2006 brings up the correct answer. A Tampa muse reader got it first, followed quickly by a Savannah reader. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Carol_Oates

Richard Wilbur was born on March 1, 1921 in New York City. Wilbur has also published numerous translations of French plays—specifically those of the 17th century French dramatists Molière and Jean Racine—as well as poetry by Valéry, Villon, Baudelaire, Akhmatova, Brodsky, and others. Wilbur is also the author of several books for children and a few collections of prose pieces, and has edited such books as Poems of Shakespeare (1966) and The Complete Poems of Poe (1959). Among his honors are the Wallace Stevens Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Bollingen Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Award, a Ford Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, two PEN translation awards, the Prix de Rome Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He was elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and is a former Poet Laureate of the United States. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/202

Almost all of Richard Wilbur's poems are metered, more than half are strictly rhymed, and most are less than a page. Mr. Wilbur, U.S. Poet Laureate in 1987-88, matured in the late 1940s, during the reign of New Criticism, an academic movement that favored poems capable of yielding multiple ambiguities after a rigorous analysis, and he has always written in its approved neoclassical style. The springy elegance of his mind, which serves to clarify the problems of life, not to muddle them with vatic obscurities, has brought him triple glory—as a poet, a translator (no one has captured Molière in English better than he) and a lyricist. Stephen Sondheim, not a critic easy to please, has declared Mr. Wilbur's words for "Candide," done in tandem with Leonard Bernstein's score, "the most scintillating set of songs yet written for the musical theater." His productivity, never high to begin with, has slowed with age. He finishes poems at the rate that Antonio Stradivari constructed a violin. "I often don't write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let's say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper," he told the Paris Review in 1977. "Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia." by Richard B. Woordward http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704150604576166452338502880.html

Poems of Richard Wilbur http://www.poemhunter.com/richard-wilbur/poems/

In the context of web archiving and digital preservation, one often hears that the average lifespan of a web page is forty-four days. This statistic has been repeated among those in the digital preservation community for years, but it never seems to be accompanied by a citation . In a 2002 article by Peter Lyman a footnote briefly explains why the source of this figure is so elusive: "These data sources were originally published on the Web, but are no longer available, illustrating the problem of Web archiving." Ironically, the very source of a statistic often used to support the cause of web preservation has itself become a victim of "link rot." Link rot refers to the loss or removal of content at a particular Uniform Resource Locator (URL) over time. In other words, when an attempt is made to open a documented link, either different or irrelevant information has replaced the expected content, or else the link is found to be broken, typically expressed by a 404 or "not found" error message. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Web-based materials often disappear as URLs change and web sites are changed, updated, or deleted. In 2007, the Georgetown Law Library and the state law libraries of Maryland and Virginia formed the Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive to begin preserving these important web-published law- and policy-related materials. In the three years since the archive was launched, this law library collaborative has built a collection comprising more than 2300 titles and 5700 digital items and, all of which were originally posted to the web. by Sarah Rhodes Much more at: http://www.llrx.com/features/linkrot.htm

For the next 10 weeks, prosecutors will battle Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam in courtroom 17B in lower Manhattan. But they will win or lose the insider-trading case in a nearby "war room." That is a nondescript conference room in the Manhattan federal courthouse, lined with boxes of evidence and a snack-strewn table, where three prosecutors will strategize, likely long into the night, preparing for the next day's hearing. Seventeen months after bringing charges in the largest insider-trading case in decades, the pressure is on the U.S. to prove its case against Mr. Rajaratnam. The trial of Mr. Rajaratnam got under way March 8 with the beginning of jury selection. Over the next day or so, the government and a defense team from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP will assemble a 12-member jury to decide the fate of Mr. Rajaratnam, who could face more than 20 years in prison if he is convicted on all 14 charges of criminal securities fraud and conspiracy. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703662804576188960685479264.html

"We dedicate this page to short people, deceased and living, who overcame the obstacles society placed before them and became persons of distinction." A sortable list with biographies includes General Tom Thumb (1838-1883) at 2'9", Alexander Pope (1688-1744) at 4'6", Edith Piaf (1915-1963) at 4'8", Linda Hunt (b. 1945) at 4'9", Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) and Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) at 4'10" each, Kristin Chenoweth (b. 1970) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) at 4'11" each. http://www.shortsupport.org/cgi-bin/whowho_list.cgi

Sunday, March 13, 2011 At 2:00 AM local time, the clock is moved forward to 3:00 AM in the United States. In some locations, local time is moved back, and the date varies. See more at: http://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/events.html