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2009-05A

Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin             Issue # 2009-05a

          Helping the great unwashed get sloshed with news

Lowel Blender LED array for cameras, camcorders
  With HD video shooting & editing now the fastest-growing business
  application for computers, will the portion of the populace
  pursuing that show an interest in the new Lowel Blender ($650)
  variable tungsten to daylight LED-array portable light debuting
  this spring from Tiffen? The answer is maybe, but not because of
  the light. The light itself is a 4"x4"x3" package that can fit a
  camera shoe or an optional handgrip, run an hour & a half from a
  standard camcorder battery, maintain full intensity during that
  whole time & make it easy to adjust its color temperature by
  tweaking one knob for tungsten (warm) white brightness, another
  for daylight (cool) white brightness. Its price is below the
  price of consumer-level HD camcorders, so while it may be a
  considered purchase, it won't be a forbidden purchase (per the
  category's empirical purchasing profiles). The thing that may
  delay any land rush to buy the Blender is that many of the people
  shooting video for their businesses are new at it & haven't yet
  learned how critical good lighting is to getting good results, or
  how simple this breakthrough light makes getting that to happen.
  If you know your way around shooting, ask Hilary to line you up
  with a Lowel Blender light for review. Contact: Hilary Araujo,
  Tiffen Company (Hauppauge, NY) 631-273-2500x1216
  haraujo@tiffen.com http:/.tiffen.com

PNY GTS 250 hits the graphics sweet spot
  Sometimes feature creep creeps up on our graphics cards when
  things like running better monitors at higher resolutions or
  getting pushed hard by games can make an old card cry out for
  help. The new breed of help for mainstream computer users is the
  really sweet PNY XLR8 GeForce GTS 250 (street $110-160). There's
  built-in support for dual monitors & it's SLI-ready for anybody
  who wants to add even more graphics muscle & more monitors to a
  system. While there's a lot of muscle to this card (it's 2 PCIe
  slots wide to accommodate its advanced onboard cooling fan &
  vent), don't mistake it for a gamer tamer; this is for mainstream
  users who need a graphics card that will keep up & maybe stay a
  little ahead of their display capabilities & their software
  requirements. It's shipping & reviewable now, with a step-up
  version with 1GB of DDR3 video RAM coming soon; ask Sue. Contact:
  Susan Bartolucci, PNY (Parsippany, NJ) 973-560-5592
  sbartolucci@pny.com http://PNY.com

New Thermaltake ISGC Fan 12 quietly reinvents case fans
  When it comes to computer case fans, it's cool to be quiet but
  quiet fans tend not to cool very well. Thermaltake just
  reinvented case fans with its new ISGC series; the new 120mm
  (12cm) ISGC Fan 12 (street under $20) debuts at dealers this
  month. Like most modern case cooling fans, it's driven by a
  brushless DC motor; unlike most, it rides on a hydrodynamic
  bearing that reduces noise while bumping life expectancy up to
  50,000 hours. The pitch & curve of its 9 blades helps increase
  air flow by 15% (800-1300rpm spin speeds deliver up to 58.3CFM)
  while its unique notched outer blade edges reduce noise by 3%
  (resulting in a quiet 16dBA rating). It comes with
  vibration-absorbing soft mounts or you can mount it with screws.
  New Thermaltake CPU cooler products based on this ISGC fan design
  will be out this summer. If your workspace gets significantly
  quieter when you turn your computer off, you can understand what
  might compel a lot of users to swap out their current case fan
  for an ISGC Fan 12. Ask Ramsom to put one (or more) in your hands
  & join the ISGC Fan club. Contact: Ramsom Koay, Thermaltake
  Technology USA (City of Industry, CA) 626-968-9189x127
  ramsom.koay@thermaltakeusa.com http://ThermaltakeUSA.com

Twice the giggles with dual GigaLAN
  While the ECS X58B-A Black Series motherboard offers dual GigaLAN
  Ethernet connections & most users will only plug into one, it's
  fun to see what you can do with two. Gamers will often bring in 2
  separate WAN connections so they can dedicate one to work & one
  to play (this reduces their latency when online gaming).
  Businesses will often arrange WAN connections from 2 different
  providers (like cable & DSL) to assure maintaining connections
  even if one or the other should fail. Some users connect to the
  WAN on one port & to their peers through another so the PC
  becomes a firewall & router for everyone. This is absolutely a
  motherboard for people who like to preserve all their options.
  Ask James. Contact: James Lleverino, ECS/Elitegroup Computer
  Systems (Fremont, CA) 510-771-0286 james.lleverino@ecsusa.com
  http://ecsusa.com

Keeping open roads open connections
  The economy is starting to improve, gas prices are a big
  improvement over last year & even the weather is getting better
  but cellular coverage dips are as dippy as ever. There are a lot
  of little fixes that people can apply as they hit the roads again
  for whatever reason & the best way for you to help them know
  about those is to have pros show you the head-to-toes fixes they
  can install; Point To Point, we should add, offers them all. From
  improved antennas to booster amps to in-car harnesses to
  voice-response touch-screen speakerphone car kits to handset
  docks that both deliver more signal & keep phones charged, even
  to custom upholstery extensions so the car doesn't look like the
  work of Frankenstein, they offer it. If there's coverage that can
  come of it, they can also arrange for one of their installers to
  get any or all put into your car. Ask Brett. Contact: Brett
  Haysom, Point To Point Technology USA, Inc. (Viola, DE)
  302-284-4721 brett@ptp-usa.net http://www.ptp-usa.net

Counting calories, carbs, fat & protein on one hand
  Peckish blackberry lovers can devour them by the cupful; it takes
  a while to eat a whole cup & it only amounts to about 75
  calories. Beyond watching their weight with blackberries, healthy
  eaters can now watch what they eat on a BlackBerry: Calorie
  Tracker for BlackBerry, developed for Lance Armstrong's
  LiveStrong.com by BlackBerry Alliance partner Regard Solutions
  (Steve Beauregard sbeau@regard.com 310-883-2205) is available
  through App World ($3.99). A user can monitor both calorie intake
  through food (more than a half million items) & calorie outgo
  through exercise (more than 2,000 activities); it also tallies
  carb, fat & protein intake. There's always healthy coverage ahead
  when you turn to BlackBerry; if you're not using one, ask if Ms.
  Berry can help. Contact: Victoria Berry, Research in Motion
  (Waterloo, ON) 519-888-7465x73663 vberry@rim.com http://rim.com

One TuneBug will stand alone
  TuneBug technology (some licensed from NXT) can make any surface
  that can carry the vibrations into the soundboard ("cone") of a
  speaker. So far, we've only been talking about two versions that
  you plug into audio sources to play them out loud, one of which
  is designed to place on hard hats or helmets, another that you
  tote to place on tabletops & such. Much like that totable model,
  another also includes its own media player, so bottom line, it's
  the smallest geometric volume for the loudest sound volume that
  you don't stick in your ear. All 3 debut this summer; ask Dick.
  Contact: Dick Brown, Silicon Valley Global (San Jose CA)
  408-497-6403 dbrown@sv-global.com http://tunebug.com

Special Report: When 10K, SATA versus SAS & HD
  Sometimes we just have to get geeky. This is about the speed of
  getting data transfers where hard drives are involved. We need to
  begin by excluding solid state drives; so officially, this is
  about where high-density rotating magnetic media are involved. We
  want to consider the difference that spindle speeds make, with a
  focus on 7200 versus 10K RPM, but even before we get into that,
  one possible point of confusion is the path between the drive &
  the system. The most & mostly ubiquitous standard for that
  connection is SATA II, capable of 3Gb/sec transfer speeds; SATA 3
  with 6Gb/sec transfer speeds is en route to availability later in
  the year, but in the meantime, there's a 3Gb/sec alternative
  called SAS, for Serial-Attached SCSI. In the serial realm, since
  each 8-bit byte also needs a start bit & a stop bit, data words
  are 10 bits long, so you may see 3Gb/sec also expressed as
  300MB/sec (capital B for bytes, lower case for bits). You can
  plug a SATA drive into a SAS controller (we'll use that term
  instead of "host adapter"), but you can't plug a SAS drive into a
  SATA controller. In today's Seagate world, where SAS is
  considered an enterprise phenomenon, 10K & 15K Cheetah drives are
  available for SAS but not for SATA. In the WD world, 10K
  Velociraptor drives are available for SATA & have a 16MB buffer,
  which can be significant to the math. (At 300MB/sec, it's a
  53msec pad, which is ten times bigger than the drive seek times).
  The buffer can talk to the wire at the full data rate, but the
  drives aren't fetching the data at anywhere near those speeds. We
  checked Tom's Hardware for some well-charted transfer rates for
  various drives, measured in MB/sec. A 7200RPM Barracuda shows
  average read speeds around 82, write around 81; a 10KRPM
  Velociraptor scores 102 on both read & write (current SSD speeds
  are around 90 for read & 70 for write, though the newest SanDisk,
  OCZ & Patriot Memory SSDs claim 200-240 read & 140-160 write).
  One factor that affects real-world operations but may not affect
  test bench drive scores is latency when seeking; since a 7200RPM
  drive spins 28% slower than a 10K drive, it takes that much
  longer for a given sector to spin into position; in this context,
  SSDs latency is negligible. So, in considering SATA II versus
  SAS, the consideration is really more in the drives than in the
  bus; either one can handle 3-4 of these drives at their maximum
  data rate. Applications may be more of a governing factor.
  Consider HD video: the standard calls for 1080x1920 pixels at a
  29.96Hz frame rate. Color data may take 2-4 bytes per pixel, so
  the total raw data size for uncompressed HD video can run
  125-250MB/sec. OK, the ground just shifted; the choice is now how
  many times faster the video data rate is than the hard drive can
  handle. In the final step of the HD editing process, called
  rendering, when the finished video is recorded to disk, an
  uncompressed 20-minute project can involve 300GB of data, which
  takes a bit over an hour on the 7200RPM drive, but some 10-11
  minutes less on a 10K drive & some 30 minutes less to a spanned
  pair of the fastest available SSDs (their max capacity is 256GB).
  All that said, the preference for 10K drives in video editing
  applications may be less about ratios & more about rationalizing
  the purchase against a simple desire to speed up everything else
  on a system, from booting to application loading. Separating
  video content onto its own drive to keep transfers from being
  interrupted by main-drive housekeeping chores has a huge effect
  on rendering times; larger memory pools in a 64-bit O/S does a
  lot to reduce frame drops when editing; but what's the real
  effect of a 10K drive choice? It shows up most dramatically when
  doing long imports or when rendering & can mean saving more than
  half an hour of transfer time per hour of project length - though
  at current capacities (300GB for the Velociraptor), longer
  projects need to be considered in terms of attached array choices
  rather than simply internal drive choices. One final note: the
  huge files implied by uncompressed HD video data do not
  necessarily represent the only file type in a project. Rendering
  for broadcast or for Blu-Ray, for example, generally involves
  some level of compression for the final format; this reduces the
  file writing burden for the drive but places additional workload
  on the system's CPU & RAM. Also, we absolutely want to make no
  pretense of this applying to cinematic projects, where pixel
  density is 4-64 times greater than HD (based on 2, 4 or 8 times
  as many scan lines in the 2K, 4K or 8K formats).

I7 project: Preparing for the initial software installation
  When we built our little Atom computer, all it took to format its
  one hard disk then install the O/S & applications was one click
  of the menu choice on a CD release of Ubuntu. Our Core-i7 rev-up
  won't be that simple. One reason is that we have to initialize 2
  kinds of RAID arrays, a software-based RAID1 (for the 2-drive
  C:Main volume) driven from the motherboard & a hardware-based
  RAID 5 (for the 4-drive E:Video volume) driven from a controller
  card. We want both the C:Main volume & the D:Backup volume to be
  bootable. So far, assuming we have some way to get the "F6" raid
  drivers installed (via attached floppy or a USB drive pretending
  to be one), this is a straightforward matter of following the
  instructions & letting these few installations move forward. So
  far? Let's see if we can anticipate a few problems. As we noted a
  few issues back, the 64-bit installation of Windows Vista is
  deliberately intolerant of unsigned drivers. We made a project of
  creating a folder for 64-bit versions of the drivers for our
  peripherals, from scanners to printers, graphics cards, handsets,
  etc. New 64-bit releases of our key applications grew into stacks
  of packages as the hardware came together; others continue to
  arrive by download. We created migration file sets for both
  Windows & Office on a separate eSATA drive. Is that enough? It
  should be but it almost never is. We still need to document the
  settings of external things we get into as Administrator, like
  routers. We're moving from a keyboard with an embedded
  fingerprint scanner to using a better keyboard & a separate
  fingerprint scanning pod; while the fingerprint gear is from the
  same company, there's no migration path, so we have to keep a
  spreadsheet of links & logins then enter that stuff manually.
  Even once everything gets loaded, configured anew, personalized
  anew & looks ready, we still have to configure the choreography
  of timing for things like nightly to weekly cloning sessions,
  update checks, malware scans, etc. Despite a significant time
  investment in preparations, software loading chores take just
  short of 2 full days. On the other side of that, we can finally
  road test these systems & report on how close their real-world
  performance comes to our expectations for them.

Special Report Bonus Review: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P
  As we've noted elsewhere, the choice of motherboards that a
  Core-i7 can live on presents a ton of small variations. We asked
  Gigabyte to let us take a look at their GA-EX58-UD4P, a Socket
  1366 board with 6 DDR3 slots, 2 PCIe X16 slots & an X8 for
  graphics (with SLI & CrossFireX support), an Intel X58 Express
  Northbridge, an ICH10R Southbridge, Realtek 7.1-channel HD audio
  & other fairly normal features. It offers 8 rear-panel USB ports
  plus sockets for 4 more, 3 Firewire ports (1 rear panel, 2
  socketed) & PS/2-style keyboard & mouse ports. A rear bracket
  offers 2 eSATA connectors & a 4-pin Molex power connection. There
  are 8 SATA II connections (6 from Southbridge & 2 from a Gigabyte
  chip; a cable connects to the rear bracket) & 1 PATA. Unlike many
  competitors, this board offers only a single Gigabit LAN
  connection (which won't make much difference to most users);
  unlike some competitors, this board has a lot of features that
  can help overclockers, like a second (backup) BIOS, a clear-CMOS
  button, a hardware over-Voltage control IC & visible alerts for
  overvoltage & over-temperature. By policy, we don't overclock &
  don't engage encryption, so we won't address either. The board is
  populated with bangle bands of status LEDs for Voltage,
  temperature, frequency, phase & other overclocking concerns that,
  barring emergencies, we can forever ignore. The documentation
  does a wonderful job of specifically identifying each of the 8
  SATA ports (something we haven't seen done quite so well
  elsewhere). The floppy & IDE connectors (we don't use these) are
  along the edge, which helps route their flat cables out of the
  air flow. The one PCIe X1 slot can only fit a short card (because
  a longer card would bump into the DDR3 modules). This is one of
  the easier motherboards to work with during system assembly, with
  one of the most helpful manuals. Bottom line: the Gigabyte
  GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard offers an intriguing combination of
  installation ease, splendid documentation, a full set of
  well-implemented features & the extra bells & whistles that can
  set many an overclocker's heart atwitter.

Special Report Bonus Review 2: Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda
  Seagate has been an awesome supporter of our Core-i7 project,
  providing a total of 12 of their 500GB drives (4 in each system
  plus 4 to an external array) & at this writing, our first
  hands-on (as a box of 8 arrives, with 4 for each system) of their
  1.5TB SATA II 3.5" Barracuda drives. We'll get to the drive in a
  second, but we want to note that each drive also comes with a
  SATA signal cable, a 4-pin Molex to SATA power cable, 4 mounting
  screws, a well-written installation guide & an "Internal Hard
  Drive Upgrade Kit Software & Manual" CD (also includes diagnostic
  software tools). The spec on this Barracuda 7200.11 drive claims
  a sustained data rate up to 120MB/sec; this is 15-20% higher than
  you might expect from other drives, in part because even with
  perpendicular magnetic recording, this capacity rakes 4 platters
  to happen. At 7200RPM (120/sec), it can take up to 8.3msec before
  the sector you want on a given platter spins into place; with
  random chance on a single platter, that's about 4.2msec, but with
  4 platters, it's about 1msec, meaning a seek time response
  advantage. (Those calculations are for reads; on this drive, read
  seeks are about 15% faster than write seeks). SATA II NCQ (native
  command queuing) essentially gives the drive a to-do list instead
  of waiting for one chore to finish before issuing another, which
  also adds to what gets done during each spin. At 120MB/sec, the
  32MB cache on the 7200.11 drive holds up to 0.26 seconds of data,
  equivalent to 120 complete rotations of the 4 platters. When not
  reading or writing, the drive idles at just 8 Watts,
  significantly less than earlier generations. Its rated MTBF is
  750,000 hours or approximately one human lifetime. There's almost
  no user who will care about any of these specs except 1.5TB SATA
  II 3.5" when they buy this drive, but specs ain't for nothing.
  Boots, application loading & most other operations will be
  noticeably faster & overall system operation a bit snappier.
  These drives may also be a good choice for users who are only
  using on the order of a quarter of their capacity today. One
  reason is reduced head mileage simply because the bits are so
  much more tightly packed. One reason is reduced power consumption
  & case heating since the sooner disk activity can end, the more
  time the drive spends in its idle mode. We should raise a few
  cautions for those, intrigued by the capacity & speed of these
  drives, who may want to assemble a RAID 5 array. If we anticipate
  that actual data rates will average over 100MB/sec, an external
  4-drive RAID 5 array can't communicate over an eSATA cable (it
  would become a bottleneck) & should be an internal array,
  connecting through a battery-backed embedded processor controller
  over at least generation 2 PCIe X4. That array would have a 4.5TB
  capacity, which will create challenges in backing it up
  (requiring at least 3 of these drives, simply spanned). It's
  something like giving your teenager the keys to an XKE or
  Ferrari, but neither algebra nor common sense will prevent an
  excited gamer from going in that direction. For the rest of us,
  it's a lot of speed & capacity at a very real price, providing 5
  times the capacity of today's biggest 10K drives & accomplishing
  comparable speeds. Bottom line: the 7200RPM 1.5TB SATA II 3.5"
  Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drive is a marvelous choice for
  economically taking capacity & delay out of your way in desktop
  computing.

Special Report Bonus Review 3: MXL FR-400 Boundary Mike
  Boundary mikes come closest to hearing the way people hear,
  picking up everything around them, or so it seems; what a
  boundary mike isn't picking up is any sign of echoes & that's
  their special power. A boundary mike is designed to be placed on
  a flat surface, like a floor or a desk or a conference room
  table, with the mike elements very close indeed to that surface;
  they are acoustically too close to that surface to pick up its
  echoes (which mikes on table stands will do all too readily).
  Boundary mikes are great as a mixed element in stage productions
  because they help pick up the sounds of props, slaps, footsteps &
  other stage "business"; they are also a great way to gather all
  the audio from a meeting table all at once, whether that's to
  capture news or police interrogations or to send by wire. They're
  also useful in recording music, even under the lid of a piano.
  The Marshall MXL FR-400 is a 3-capsule horizontal boundary mike
  with a wide 120-degree cardioid pattern (so there is a front &
  back to it, in terms of sensitivity). It needs 48V phantom power
  at its XLR connection. A tiny bottom switch lets you choose to
  cut or boost bass or leave the audio flat (our choice); we tried
  all three & could hear the difference, which may be useful in
  specific circumstances, but few we ever encounter. In our tests,
  we tried turning away from the mike & talking to an opposite
  wall, there was almost no difference in clarity & no perceptible
  "sewer pipe" effect. The kind of sensitivity & clarity that are a
  hallmark of this mike also raise a small caution flag: we could
  hear, in full fidelity, the quiet rear fan on the computer under
  the table the mike was on. As we said, it pretty much hears
  everything a human hears. Bottom line: the MXL FR-400 3-Capsule
  Horizontal Wide-Cardioid Boundary Mike adds important flexibility
  in any mike strategy, performs extremely well & exhibits levels
  of sensitivity & acoustic accuracy at a much higher standard than
  its price would suggest.

Special Report Bonus Review 4: LSI MegaRAID 8704ELP
  Software-based RAID, even when assisted by gate arrays, pays a
  toll in decreased array performance & another toll in CPU
  resource consumption (at times as much as a third of available
  resources). Full performance in an array really requires a
  controller with its own embedded processor, its own cache memory
  pool & its own ability to communicate with the system at full
  speed. One of the major brands in intelligent controller chipsets
  is LSI, so we asked them to let us review the LSI MegaRAID
  8704ELP card. This is one of the few PCIe X4 cards (requiring
  generation 2 PCIe on the motherboard) that can handle the
  necessary data bandwidth with the system; surveying all those X58
  motherboards & observing the preferences of people building on
  them we saw that longer slots tend to get populated by adding
  graphics cards, so we thought it optimal to find an X4 solution.
  The embedded processor runs at 500MHz & addresses 128MB of
  DDR2/667 cache memory. A 4-lane SAS connector on the card lets
  one breakout cable plug into 4 (SAS or SATA) drives. We wanted to
  create a RAID 5 array of 4 Barracuda 500GB drives as a dedicated
  Video works-in-progress volume; since video involves very long
  files, our configuration calls for wide 1MB stripes. Best
  practice with these SATA II drives is to enable their cache; for
  the controller's on-board cache, we select an adaptive read-ahead
  read policy & a write-back write policy. When RAID 5 arrays use a
  write-back cache strategy, they are vulnerable to becoming
  unrecoverable if a power interruption results in the cache not
  being written to the drive; LSI offers a cure for this in the
  BBU05 daughter board, with a battery that can maintain the cache
  contents for up to 3 days, so they can still be written to disk
  when power resumes. The alternative to write-back cache is
  write-through cache, which makes data flow dependent on the
  successful completion of the write-to-drive action, with no
  buffering; for RAID 5, while it removes a vulnerability to sudden
  interruptions it does so at a significant performance cost,
  dropping data flow by a factor of 6:1 to 8:1. For reads, the
  choices are no read-ahead, standard read-ahead (always reading
  the whole stripe) or adaptive read-ahead (read the whole stripe
  only if the previous 2 requests were for sequential sectors; this
  is recommended). The performance of this card is remarkable, but
  it comes at a modest cost, with street prices around $500 for
  both the card & the backup battery daughter board; RAID 5 itself
  bumps prices, since it means buying 4 drives to serve as one
  volume, but these costs result in the best possible speed,
  capacity & safety, so in a work environment, these costs of doing
  business may be, on balance, negligible. Bottom line: with its
  backup battery daughter board, embedded processor & remarkable
  data handling, the LSI PCIe X4 MegaRAID 8704ELP 4-port RAID card
  grants every wish for accomplishing a very high speed,
  high-capacity, high-reliability volume that fits inside an
  otherwise normal desktop computer.

Special Report Bonus Review 5: Master Magnetics Magnetizer
  We had done something stupid & it wasn't the first time. About
  one time in ten when we put together a PC, the rear panel
  grounding strips end up inside one or more of the connectors
  (especially the RJ45) instead of touching its top. This time we
  were dealing with a fully assembled mid-tower system already
  loaded with slotware, drives & everything else before we noticed.
  Stupid! The only "minimally invasive" way to correct this was to
  undo the motherboard mounting screws (with blocked vertical paths
  to about half of them) & the rear brackets on the cards in their
  slots, slide it all forward half an inch, flip the strips to
  where they should have been then refasten everything. In the more
  relaxed, earlier hours of mounting motherboards, we always count
  on some of the screws sliding underneath & briefly turning the
  project into a shake & slide mechanical puzzle game. If only, we
  thought, there was some way for a screwdriver to grip the screw
  in both directions; we then discovered that our veterancy was
  creating an outdated, unnecessary prejudice against bringing
  magnetism inside a computer case. We hit the local hardware store
  looking for a magnetized long-shank #1 Phillips-head screwdriver;
  they didn't have individual magnetized screwdrivers. We went to
  Plan B & left with a new non-magnetized screwdriver with a 6"
  shank & a Master Magnetics "The Magnet Source" 07224
  Magnetizer/Demagnetizer. For a little thing, it's making a major
  difference. The last time we had to remount a motherboard to fix
  a grounding-strip gaffe, doing everything took a little over 3
  hours & cost a couple of knuckles; this time, start to finish,
  took about 6 minutes & with not one piece of hardware getting
  lost or making good its escape & no bodily harm. We now have an
  excellent screw-gripping screwdriver with a nice, long shank
  that's perfect for these in-the-case projects. Bottom line: a
  Master Magnetics "The Magnet Source" 07224
  Magnetizer/Demagnetizer should have been in our tool kit years
  ago.

Minority whip
  One of the effects of being wowed with woe is that people with
  little to fear get scared & start behaving as if a threat down
  the street is meant for them, too. It's news to report that
  unemployment is topping 10% but dwelling on that can make 70-80%
  of the population afraid of it. Statistically, 10% unemployment -
  a relatively small if unfortunate minority - means that 9 out of
  10 people are still working & can still afford to buy things;
  alas, a strong & repeated focus on that statistic whips the
  majority of people into hunker-in-the-bunker responses. Just
  about all of those people are consumers but don't forget, some of
  them are also advertisers; even before declining consumer
  confidence affects sales, advertisers respond to their own fears
  by cutting spending. These days, those people you reach are
  thinking less of us versus them & more in terms of them now, us
  next. You know that as well as anybody because broadcast & print
  journalists are in our third & fifth (respectively) overlapping
  recessions. We're not suggesting that you sugar-coat your
  coverage; we will remind you that depending on the weather
  forecaster's attitude, the same sky can be partly cloudy or
  mostly sunny. Keep your coverage balanced, but keep in mind that
  it can scare people. Contact: Martin Winston, Newstips (Novelty,
  OH) 440-338-8400; marty@Newstips.com http://Newstips.com

                               # # #

Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com

(c) Copyright 2007 Martin Winston and TwandaCorp - all rights reserved.

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