*michael parekh on IT*

ON THE SECRET OF WEIGHT LOSS

JUST DOING IT

Alright, so the secret to losing weight consistently was finally revealed today, and it's a surprise.  Ready? Here's the LA Times teeing it up:

"Two decades after the debate began on which diet is best for weight loss, a conclusion is starting to come into focus. And the winner is . . . not low-carb, not low-fat, not high protein but . . . any diet.
That is, any diet that is low in calories and saturated fats and high in whole grains, fruits and vegetables -- and that an individual can stick with for a lifetime -- is a reasonable choice for people who need to lose weight. That's the conclusion of a study published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, research that represents the longest, largest and most rigorous test of several popular diet strategies."

OK, so maybe not too much of a surprise, but at least it tries to settle it once and for all.  And reveals a couple more tidbits to boot:

"The study refutes the notion that any one nutrient has a special power to accelerate weight loss, said Dr. Frank M. Sacks, lead author of the study and a professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at Harvard. "We used to think there could be a biological effect of certain diets. That is probably not true."
There may be a strong behavioral effect in the success of a diet, however. The people who attended two-thirds or more of the counseling sessions over the two years lost an average of 22 pounds, compared with the average loss of 9 pounds.
The study was highly anticipated because previous research on diets over the last two decades has come to dramatically different conclusions."

As someone who has lost and gained weight so many times over time can attest to, the piece lays out what it takes in a common sense way.  Having worked down this familiar path once again over the last few months, and lost a third of my previous body weight, there's only one other thing I'd add to the article:  don't forget to exercise, even modestly, at least three times a week.  There are no secrets here, just changing one's habits, staying positive and being consistent.

ON SUPERADS AT THE SUPERBOWL

SUPERFUN

Well, the Superbowl is done (what a game!) and the ads have all been shown.  The media tomorrow will be full of which ads won the most favor amongst almost a 100 million viewers. 

From my perspective, the ads this year seemed a little less funny than usual, but that's probably my imagination colored by the extraordinary economic period we've been going through.

Nevertheless, I did have a few favorites, and thought I'd highlight just two here. 

My favorite ad was for Hulu, the new web portal to distribute TV content (free, no less) from NBC and other networks.  Alec Baldwin was in his element with this one, and the ad had a complete Men in Black twist.

My other favorite ad kept you guessing what product it was hawking, and then reveals it with a great twist at the end.

What do you think? Which ads got you to smile the most?

ON HOW GOVERNMENT ALWAYS WORKS

STATUS QUO

One has to scratch one's head at how Washington really works. 

Every cycle a new politician comes to town promising reforms and better government, with more checks on the comings and goings of it's personnel. 

The current Obama transition team is no different, with a sharper vetting process promised for new staffers than before.  The New York Times has a piece on this, noting*:

"Want a top job in the Obama administration? Only pack rats need apply, preferably those not packing controversy.

A seven-page questionnaire being sent by the office of President-elect Barack Obama to those seeking cabinet and other high-ranking posts may be the most extensive — some say invasive — application ever.

The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps.

Only the smallest details are excluded; traffic tickets carrying fines of less than $50 need not be reported, the application says. Applicants are asked whether they or anyone in their family owns a gun. They must include any e-mail that might embarrass the president-elect, along with any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.

The application also asks applicants to “please list all aliases or ‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the Internet.”

The vetting process for executive branch jobs has been onerous for decades, with each incoming administration erecting new barriers in an effort to avoid the mistakes of the past, or the controversies of the present. It is typically updated to reflect technological change (there was no Facebook the last time a new president came to town).

But Mr. Obama has elevated the vetting even beyond what might have been expected, especially when it comes to applicants’ family members, in a reflection of his campaign rhetoric against lobbying and the back-scratching, self-serving ways of Washington.

“President-elect Obama made a commitment to change the way Washington does business, and the vetting process exemplifies that,” said Stephanie Cutter, chief spokeswoman for the Obama transition office."

Here's a link to the questionnaire if you want to take a peek.
It's all very well and good, until you look at the background of folks already deeply ensconced within the new Obama administration.  What would one of these questionnaires look filled out from those already part of the new administration?
This piece from the DC Examiner on Rahm Emanuel, the new Chief of Staff to the President-Elect, is a case in point:

Barack Obama, in the name of ethics, has promised to “close the revolving door between K-Street lobbying shops and the White House.”

He very well might do that, but the man running the show in his White House, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, is among the all-time champions in parlaying work in government into business connections and personal wealth—$16.2 million in two-and-a-half years—and then leveraging those business connections back into political success.

Emanuel, Obama’s pick as White House chief of staff, was never a K Street lobbyist, but in between his stints in government he was a highly-paid deal-maker who enriched himself by using his government connections to enrich big business...

One of Emanuel’s two biggest deals never would have happened without government pressure. When telecom giant SBC bought fellow telecom company Ameritech, SBC executives intended to hold onto Ameritech’s home-security company SecurityLink.

But Bill Clinton’s Federal Communications Commission insisted that federal law required SBC to sell the security company. Clinton’s old right-hand man, Emanuel, happened to be working on behalf of a venture capital firm called GTCR Golder Rauner that wanted to buy SecurityLink from SBC. The government pressure helped Emanuel get his clients a good deal, as the Tribune tells the story:

“Under a regulatory deadline to divest itself of SecurityLink, SBC financed all but $100 million of GTCR’s $479 million purchase of the firm. Less than six months later, GTCR resold the company for $1 billion, earning a quick $500 million on its investment.”

The story is reminiscent of how our current outgoing President made his $15 million from his first major foray into the business world.

There's nothing necessarily wrong in any of this, other than it's just business and politics as usual, for every administration regardless of which Party one's talking about.  Just the faces change.

It's a complicated but similar thicket of relationships being vetted every time regardless of level, as this other New York Times piece explains.

No one is ever clean.  There are always gray areas for everyone.  Despite all efforts to scrub every new administration.  Especially if one hopes to hire anyone good for every cycle of change.

We citizens just all need to be realistic in how we set our aspirations in the honeymoon phase of every administration, either Red or Blue.  And keep hoping for change despite the same old same old.

* Image source.

ON GOLD IN THE NEW CRICKET

IMPORT EXPORT

Looks like the big changes in the world of global cricket marketing I talked about in May, are gathering momentum.  Bloomberg News has a lengthy feature piece on how cricket is being rapidly re-made in it's new form, Twenty20, in arguably it's largest market, India.  An excerpt:

"The Indian league's performance this year is shaking up cricket. With Twenty20, India has turned the tables on England, which invented the sport more than four centuries ago and has controlled the game for much of its history in the former British colonies where it's played.

As India, the world's biggest cricket market, flexes its muscles -- IPL's revenue of about $200 million is an all-time high for a single season in the sport..."

"In India, which has a population of almost 1.2 billion, fans are so smitten with the sport that national Twenty20 team captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni has a detail of five female bodyguards to protect him from the legions of teenage girls who besiege him wherever he goes.     "

The organizers are pulling out all stops to market this new form of cricket, including importing cheerleaders from American football teams to pep up the home games.

Much of this is about money, as the story explains:

"The rapid-fire appeal of a Twenty20 match, which always concludes with a winner, threatens the long-term prospects of traditional Test cricket. This game features men in white sweaters and trousers who take lunch and tea breaks in matches that often end in draws.    

Cricket, which is played professionally in Australia, Bangladesh, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, the U.K., the West Indies and Zimbabwe, remains a niche sport elsewhere. It brought in only about $700 million in revenue from all countries in 2007, according to the sport's ruling bodies, far less than the $6 billion for Major League Baseball.

But Twenty20 -- which started in England in 2003 before migrating to other countries -- may be a game changer.    

``Twenty20 is the product that can take cricket into new markets,'' says Paul Marsh, head of the Australian Cricketers' Association, which represents the country's professional players. ``Baseball and Twenty20 take about the same time, but it's beyond belief to me that someone could find baseball more exciting.''           

Investors and broadcasters can't get enough of Twenty20. In January 2008, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, which runs the IPL, sold its broadcast rights to Sony Corp. and World Sport Group, a Singapore-based marketer, for $1 billion over 10 years. ESPN Inc. and News Corp.'s Star Sports network, which have a joint venture in India, followed in September with a deal worth almost $1 billion to broadcast a new tournament called the Champions League later this year."    

The story goes on to highlight the global list of billionaires who've invested in re-making cricket in India:      

"Billionaires and Bollywood

Modi, a BCCI vice president, auctioned off the league's eight clubs in 2008 to an A-list group of investors. Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd.; Bollywood film star Shah Rukh Khan; and News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch's son Lachlan Murdoch were among the investors who spent about $724 million for the franchises.    

``India is clearly the economic powerhouse in world cricket,'' says Manoj Badale, managing partner of Blenheim Chalcot Ltd., a venture capital firm in London that led a consortium including Murdoch that bought the Rajasthan Royals franchise for $67 million in January.    

Twenty20's potential payoff has also enticed Allen Stanford, chairman of Houston-based investment firm Stanford Financial Group Co. Stanford put up a $20 million purse for a private, winner-takes-all match in Antigua."

Looks like it's game, set, and match.

ON U.S. AND CHINA AT THE OLYMPICS

STUDY IN CONTRASTS

The spectacular Olympics in China closed this weekend, and it's been quite a show.  And like millions of Americans, I've watched the Olympics in China with pride and joy as U.S. athletes competed in a wide variety of sports with the best from across the world, especially from China.  China won the global race with the most gold medals, with the U.S. leading in overall medal count.

But the biggest thrill I got from the games was something captured best by author and columnist Thomas Friedman.  He writes:

"You can’t look at the U.S. Olympic team and not see the strength that comes from diversity, and you can’t look at the Chinese team and not see the strength that comes from intense focus and concentrated power.

Let’s start with us. Walking through the Olympic Village the other day, here’s what struck me most: the Russian team all looks Russian; the African team all looks African; the Chinese team all looks Chinese; and the American team looks like all of them."

Sends a tingle down your spine.

The piece offers a lot more detail in the contrast between the two countries, in how we compete in the Olympics.  Taking a step back, it leads one to reflect on how the compact between citizens and their country differs in the two countries. 

Perfect anecdotal example of this is how the two countries competed for gold in women's gymnastics. 

While China harvests it's best future athletes from kindgartens, and separates them from their families to prepare them for global competition in a decade and a half or more, the U.S. approach relies on the best athletes and coaches from anywhere in America and/or the world, to make their way to America as immigrants and citizens, and find each other in a random, organic manner.  Whether they're under-age or not is another controversy.

A lot more random, yes, but perhaps a lot more fulfilling for both the citizens and their families concerned.  It's a fascinating study in contrasts.

ON A TRIUMPH IN OLYMPIC SWIMMING

GREAT START

What a great kick-off day for the Olympics in China, even with the almost surreal distractions of the John Edwards sorry soap-opera, and the deadly chess-game being played by Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia.

None of it takes away from the record-breaking kick-off achievement by Michael Phelps, as this account from New Zealand summarizes:

"Michael Phelps has set another world record to win his first gold medal of the Beijing Olympics, beating Laszlo Cseh of Hungary in the 400m individual medley with a time of 4min 3.84s.

Phelps, trying to break Mark Spitz's record of seven gold medals at an Olympic Games, crushed his old mark of 4:05.25 in the 400 IM, set in June at the US Olympic trials."

If you want to understand how unique this accomplishment is, and how Phelps does it so well, read this extensive feature on him by the New York Times Sunday magazine from a couple of weeks ago...here's a flavor:

"“People aren’t made to move like that,” says Russell Mark, the biomechanics manager for USA Swimming, the sport’s national governing body. Mark has a background in jet-engine design and a connoisseur’s eye for aquatic technique, but he assures me that the language of fluid dynamics barely describes the specific magic of a swimmer like Phelps.

Human beings, Mark says, are simply not designed to balance themselves horizontally in a moving, unstable medium in which they have only intermittent access to oxygen.

How, then, did Phelps manage so persuasively to make the unnatural seem natural? “The biomechanics of swimming is more theory than science,” Mark admits. “When water is surrounding someone, it’s really hard to measure what’s going on.” The pool, it turns out, is a place of vast ambiguity. The seemingly straightforward question of what transpires when Phelps swims gets very complicated very quickly and speaks to the mysterious nature of athletic achievement at its peak."

The piece goes into the complex physics and biology of what it takes to do what Phelps does, and it's clear that we're just barely beginning to understand the science from all these disciplines involved.

But it's a good start, as we get into what is really being achieved by all these remarkable 8,000 athletes from around the world, giving their all in Beijing over the next couple of weeks.

ON AN OLYMPIAN KICK-OFF

THEY'RE OFF!

Unlike two billion of the planet's 6.8 billion people earlier today (WSJ), I did not catch the live opening of the Beijing Olympics.  As the New York Times piece on this gala event informs us:

"An ecstatic China, an ancient nation so determined to be a modern power, finally got its Olympic moment on Friday night.

With world leaders watching from inside the latticed shell of the National Stadium, the 2008 Beijing Olympics began with an opening ceremony of soaring fireworks, lavish spectacle and a celebration of Chinese culture and international good will.

At 8 p.m. on the eighth day of the eighth month in the year 2008 — eight being a lucky number in China — the world looked toward Beijing and the 91,000 people inside the National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest.

The global television audience was estimated to surpass four billion viewers, though in the United States, the opening ceremonies were not carried live. NBC, which has rights to the Games, will broadcast the footage during prime-time Friday evening, when it expects the most viewers."

I have Tivo'ed the NBC broadcast tonight due to a travel schedule, and hope to watch it later this weekend. 

But going through the pictures both on the NY Times site and the Wall Street Journal's, it looks like the Chinese got a spectacular spectacle for their money.  Looking at pictures like the one above with it's Close Encounters echoes, I can't but help look forward to getting one of the many inevitable coffee table books on the opening ceremonies. 

Not to mention the Blu-Ray DVD disc with extra goodies. 

May the games begin.  Here's a handy interactive calendar from the NY Times, or you can follow along using just plain old Google on your mobile.  Way to go, Google.

ON THE STUDIOS vs. WRITERS CHESS GAME

HARD-BALL

This LA Times article from Dec. 11th, titled "The Big Picture:  In the strike, the studios are playing to win", is one of the best piece I've seen on the Hollywood writer's strike. 

Particularly, because it outlines the longer-term chess game being played by both sides, and explaining why for now, the studios seem to be playing a much better opening game.  Some excerpts on that to highlights the points:

"DESPITE what they say about global warming, it's going to be a long, cold winter for the writers of Hollywood. The studios pretty much made it official Friday, when they walked away from the negotiating table after giving the Writers Guild an abrupt "put up or shut up" ultimatum. Considering that the studios were asking the writers to give up much of their core Internet residuals proposal, there was little left to negotiate.

The studios' message was obvious: They're going to play hardball. Believing they have comparatively little to lose by letting the strike drag on, the studios will try to weaken the guild by letting writers spend Christmas out of work while studio operatives sow seeds of discord among the membership, hoping to persuade some high-profile writers to cross the line and go back to work."

It goes on to highlight the chess moves ahead:

"The studios' behavior appears shortsighted unless you look at the negotiations in a broader light. While attention is focused on the writers strike, a bigger confrontation looms down the road. No one expects that the studios will have much of a problem settling with the Directors Guild of America, whose contract is up June 30, 2008. But the Screen Actors Guild, whose contract is also up that day, is another matter.

The largest union, with 120,000 members, SAG also has a relatively new president, Alan Rosenberg, who came to power after promising a much more aggressive stance about new media revenues. For the first time, SAG also brought in an outsider, former NFL Players Assn. executive Doug Allen, to be its executive director, another sign that the guild is preparing for a hard-nosed negotiation."

The studios are also playing hardball on the PR front, as the article pointedly illustrates:

"...the studios last week hired Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane, former aides and advisors to Bill Clinton and Al Gore with reputations for canny damage control and bare-knuckled attacks on political adversaries.

It is widely believed that the new consultants had a hand in a recent studio proposal designed to portray the studios as willing negotiators. Although it offered precious few concessions, it was labeled a "new economic partnership," which brings to mind the time the Bush administration described a pro-logging proposal as a "healthy forests initiative."

And it offers some advice to the writer's in the face of this strategy:

"For the writers, their best defense now is a good offense. As I've argued before, their future lies in becoming more entrepreneurial. This would also be good strategy for future strike negotiations. With the studios stuck churning out reality sludge, the barriers for entry for an outsider are lower than ever. What's to stop Google, Yahoo or Mark Cuban from striking a deal with a top TV show runner who has a proven ability to create characters and stories that would bring eyeballs to the Internet?"

From where I sit, the internet, though very important in the long-term, is still not robust enough an opportunity to offer meaningful, short-term income to the writer's through deals with various internet outlets.  Although, as the article points out, it would be a good symbolic gesture.

For now the studios seem to have the tactical and strategic advantages in this chess game.

What we're seeing here is a long-term war being fought with many battles to come.  In the meantime, as ordinary television viewers, we may all get a chance to finally make a dent in all the books we've been meaning to read.

ON CRICKET BY BORAT

ALL IN THE WRIST

Well, it was quite a World Cup cricket 2007 weekend in the Caribbean, at least the two day glimpse we got of it (see yesterday's post).  Pretty thrilling stuff.

If some of you are unclear on the basics of how batting works in cricket, here's a YouTube video of Borat trying to figure it out.  It's about 2 1/2 minutes long.

It brings back painful memories of me learning how to play as a kid so many years ago.

ON GOING BATTY FOR WORLD CUP CRICKET

FAN POWER

Thanks to the generosity of a friend, who was agile enough to secure some tickets, I'm down in the Caribbean this weekend, catching a couple of the matches.

Cricket like football (aka soccer in good old US of A), is a sport that drives most of the world pretty crazy.

So the 2007 Cricket World Cup, being played by 16 countries across half a dozen Caribbean countries from March 13 until April 28nd, is occasion for much of the world to shift it's focus to these balmy isles.

If you're curious about what's going on with all this, check out ICC World Cricket club website for the latest coverage.

In the meantime, do check out this 20 second clip from Reuters (via YouTube) exhibiting how crazy some Indian cricket fans are, going as far to design a special car for the occasion.

The full schedule can be found here.