Eideard

Last week, Sam Zell, CEO of Tribune, and COO Randy Michaels announced a set of deep cuts, saying that shrinking revenue left them no choice.

They said they would trim 500 pages of news each week from the company’s dozen papers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times. Their aim is a paper with pages – excluding classified advertising and special ad sections – split 50-50 between news content and ads.

Zell’s plan is an accelerated version of what many newspaper companies are already undertaking in the hope of staving off the kind of huge dislocation that occurred in other industries, like the steel business in the 1980s or the domestic automobile business today. In those cases, the pressure came from legacy costs, labor and foreign competition. In the newspaper business, which struggles with those costs as well, the biggest threat is the migration of advertisers and readers to the Internet.

I think Zell is condemning his empire to the same mediocrity and failure as GM. What do you think?

When forming attitudes about embryonic stem cell research, people are influenced by a number of things. But understanding science plays a negligible role for many people.

“More knowledge is good – everybody is on the same page about that. But will that knowledge necessarily help build support for the science?” says Dietram Scheufele. “The data show that no, it doesn’t. It does for some groups, but definitely not for others.”

Along with Dominique Brossard and Shirley Ho, Scheufele used national public opinion research to analyze how public attitudes are formed about controversial scientific issues such as nanotechnology and stem cells. What they have found again and again is that knowledge is much less important than other factors, such as religious values or deference to scientific authority.

“Highly religious audiences are different from less religious audiences. They are looking for different things, bringing different things to the table,” explains Scheufele. “It is not about providing religious audiences with more scientific information. In fact, many of them are already highly informed about stem cell research, so more information makes little difference in terms of influencing public support. And that’s not good or bad. That’s just what the data show.”

On the other hand, a value system held by a much smaller portion of the American public works in just the opposite direction. The attitudes of individuals who are deferential to science – who tend to trust scientists and their work – are influenced by their level of scientific understanding.

I’m only surprised by how polite the authors managed to be.

Some people wake up each morning before the alarm rings, glad to see the glowing sun and excited to start the day.

They arrive to work whistling and are hard at work before most people even arrive. These rare creatures, also known as “morning people,” are incomprehensible to those of you whose morning routines are exercises in panic and frustration.

A lot more people belong in that latter group than you might have guessed. Fifteen percent of workers admit to arriving late at least once a week…

For example:

1. While rowing across the river to work, I got lost in the fog.

2. Someone stole all my daffodils.

3. I had to go audition for American Idol.

4. My ex-husband stole my car so I couldn’t drive to work.

5. My route to work was shut down by a Presidential motorcade.

6. I have transient amnesia and couldn’t remember my job.

7. I was indicted for securities fraud this morning.

8. The line was too long at Starbucks.

9. I was trying to get my gun back from the police.

10. I didn’t have money for gas because all of the pawn shops were closed.

Uh-huh.

With apparently every ESPN and ABC employee assigned to Saturday’s Belmont Stakes broadcast, with the exception of the guy who runs the coffee wagon, maybe the network lost track of who was doing what. Like, say, exploring the fact that Big Brown’s trainer regularly injected the favourite with steroids or that there were other horses in the race.

Or maybe the network was so thrilled at the prospect of covering the first Triple Crown winner in 30 years it kind of lost sight of what it was supposed to do.

Even though it’s no secret that Big Brown has been on the juice for some time and even though injecting horses with steroids is legal in three states, the issue is controversial enough that it should have played a bigger role leading up to the race.

In fact, the word was raised only once in the 90-minute lead-up to the race. That came when commentator Randy Moss said much had been made of the issue but that Big Brown didn’t get his June injection.

The message appeared to be no injection this month, no issue.

No steroids – no victory, either…

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and Iran’s First Vice President Parviz Davoudi agreed on Sunday to expand bilateral relation in various areas.

The “all-friendly ties” between Iran and Iraq will be expanded “without paying attention to the enemies’ efforts,” Davoudi was quoted by the IRNA as saying.

Davoudi said oil production, construction of power plants and establishment of border markets, as well as education, transportation and customs are among areas of valuable cooperation.

Earlier on Sunday after his late-night talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iraqi premier also said that his government “will not allow Iraq to become a platform for harming the security of Iran and other neighbors.”

Perfectly normal statement from neighboring countries – absent the presence of an imperial power.

I had to chuckle looking at coverage from other sources. Most of the non-American media was similar to this Chinese article – noting Iran’s obvious concerns about long-range U.S. plans to occupy Iraq – and expressing little or no surprise that al-Maliki didn’t press White House strategies more strongly.

What does your tame local newspaper say about the meeting, this morning?

The same GPS technology used to track vehicles is now being used to track cows.

But Agricultural Research Service animal scientist Dean M. Anderson has taken tracking several steps further with a Walkman-like headset that enables him to “whisper” wireless commands to cows to control their movements across a landscape—and even remotely gather them into a corral…

The commands vary from familiar “gathering songs” sung by cowboys during manual round-ups, to irritating sounds such as sirens and even mild electric stimulation if necessary to get cows to move or avoid penetrating forbidden boundaries.

The concern should be obvious. Will we ever have a government that uses this technology – on us?

It’s not a tinfoil hat question. For all we know, experiments may already be in progress at Gitmo or even more secure and secluded stashes for kidnap targets. Who’s going to complain? Who’s going to listen?