Shirshendu Mandal's Profile

So I undertook this project to educate myself on what happens during lethal encounters. At every opportunity, I sought out others and asked them what happened. I then developed a list of questions and included them in my interview process. I did not try and make this process "scientific" as it was for my own edification. Once I got involved in defensive skills instruction, I began to rely on what I was told to develop my lesson plans and decide what I should teach. Over time, I have found this approach to be quite reliable.

Not too long ago, back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry for exposing America's impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. For America, that was nothing new. Through most of its history, the U.S. government has been at odds with the entertainment giants, treating them as purveyors of filth.

Not anymore. The relationship between the entertainment industry and the U.S. government today is pretty cozy. Entertainment is using America's clout to force Russia to institute police inspections of its CD presses, apparently oblivious to the irony of post-Soviet Russia forgoing its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and Universal. The U.S. attorney general is proposing to expand the array of legal tools at the RIAA's disposal, giving the organization the ability to attack people who simply attempt infringement.

How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority? I blame the "Information Economy."

Based on this study, WRAP calculated that Britain's recycling efforts reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by 10m-15m tonnes per year. That is equivalent to a 10% reduction in Britain's annual carbon-dioxide emissions from transport, or roughly equivalent to taking 3.5m cars off the roads. Similarly, America's Environmental Protection Agency estimates that recycling reduced the country's carbon emissions by 49m tonnes in 2005.

Recycling has many other benefits, too. It conserves natural resources. It also reduces the amount of waste that is buried or burnt, hardly ideal ways to get rid of the stuff. (Landfills take up valuable space and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas; and although incinerators are not as polluting as they once were, they still produce noxious emissions, so people dislike having them around.) But perhaps the most valuable benefit of recycling is the saving in energy and the reduction in greenhouse gases and pollution that result when scrap materials are substituted for virgin feedstock. “If you can use recycled materials, you don't have to mine ores, cut trees and drill for oil as much,” says Jeffrey Morris of Sound Resource Management, a consulting firm based in Olympia, Washington.

GTD embodies an easy, step-by-step and highly efficient method for achieving this relaxed , productive state. It includes:

* Capturing anything and everything that has your attention
* Defining actionable things discretely into outcomes and concrete next steps
* Organizing reminders and information in the most streamlined way, in appropriate categories, based on
how and when you need to access them
* Keeping current and “on your game” with appropriately frequent reviews of the six horizons of your
commitments (purpose, vision, goals, areas of focus, projects, and actions)

I knew who Spicer was. He'd popped up on the C.I.A.'s radar after he retired from the British Army and went to work, in 1996, as the C.E.O. of Sandline International, a private military company offering "operational support" to "legitimate governments." A year later Spicer was in Papua New Guinea, where he fielded a mercenary army for the government in order to protect a multi-national copper-mining company. After Spicer was expelled, he moved on to Sierra Leone, this time helping to ship arms to coup plotters. Spicer's name resurfaced in 2004 in connection with a putsch aimed at Equatorial Guinea, allegedly led by Simon Mann, his friend, former army colleague, and onetime business associate. Though questioned by British officials, Spicer was not implicated in the incident.

In that magical world known only to a few economists, where resources are allocated efficiently and investors and consumers behave rationally, bubbles would always be unambiguously negative. They cause all sorts of distortions and silly, self-defeating behavior (buying Amazon.com at $400). But that's not the world in which we live, especially in the United States. We are not blessed with a population composed entirely of hyper-rational individuals. And the government doesn't control the deployment of revolutionary inventions. As a result, new technologies and ways of doing business are always rolled out in fits and starts. What's more, the excitement of a new technology interacts with some of the more unstable components of America's character—boundless optimism, a tendency toward entrepreneurship, a tolerance of creative destruction, and greed—to produce a kind of mania. So, every time a hot new technology comes along (whether it's the telegraph or the Internet), Americans collectively lose their minds—and then lose their shirts.... But this is only half the story! After all, the process of growth and innovation doesn't end when a bubble bursts. The Internet wasn't unplugged and shut down in 2002. In fact, once you gain a little historical distance from bubbles, it is clear that some bubbles—some, not all—leave behind something that is a little bit boring but extremely useful: infrastructure. The bubbles that have left behind commercial infrastructure have been incredibly important contributors to America's remarkable long-term economic performance.

Even without similarities in ideology or sympathies, the LTTE inadvertently "acts as a 'think tank' for terrorists worldwide; constantly inventing new tactics that are so devastatingly effective, groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Shining Path, and Chechen fighters are eager to integrate them into their organizations."

There are various ways to participate in private-equity wealth. The most direct is as a partner in a fund. But that's the hardest and most exclusive club to get into (most P.E. partners are from A-plus business schools, and stints at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, or A-plus consulting firms). A billion-dollar fund with 10 partners, for instance, can mean an annual take of $2 million each—before the 20 percent the partners get on any gains in the investments the firm has made. An analysis of one fund, with $8 billion under management, found partners making $50 to $100 million each after five years. The biggest funds mint billionaires.

Manufacturing has been defined as the human transformation of materials from one form to another, more valuable form. The transformation can be geometric or compositional, or both. Manufacturing encompasses both the production of man-made materials originating from naturally occurring raw materials and the production of discrete parts, usually from those man-made materials.

So, you've just installed Ubuntu 7.04, otherwise known as the "Feisty Fawn" release of everyone's favorite (for now) flavor of Linux. You booted the installation disc, looked around the test environment to discover that your hardware was working, and double-clicked the Install icon on the desktop. The Ubuntu installer helped you make room for Linux on your hard drive, and even copied over some of your documents and settings from Windows.

Half an hour ago, you had only Windows on your PC, but now you have a choice at boot time, and a whole new world to explore. Congratulations!

But wait--before you dive in too deeply, here are seven steps you can take right away to prevent common headaches and help yourself enjoy your new surroundings.