Davos Newbies Home

Weblogs and business 

The Guardian has a good summary of various attempts both to make businesses out of weblogs and to encourage businesses to use weblogs.

Browser versions  

If there are any geeky readers of Davos Newbies, I’m trying to figure out why my new design comes out as a blank yellow page in both Mac and Windows versions of Netscape Navigator 4.73. I’ve been checking other browsers and versions and have managed to solve most other problems. Please let me know either through the discussion page or by emailing.

Update Paul Kelly suggested a fix that seems to have worked. Many thanks to him and others who suggested various patches. The network works.

Forever blowing bubbles  

John Irons makes an important distinction:

“The ‘Bubble’ of the late 1990s was in the stock market. Various factors led to stock prices that were ‘too high’ and that rose ‘too fast’. Eventually the stock market bubble burst, leading to large declines, especially in the technology sector. The economic growth of the 1990s, however, was real: unemployment declined to record lows, growth was relatively high, incomes grew, and poverty declined. These were real things — cars, houses, etc — and economic growth had real, tangible, positive consequences for real people.

“Do not confuse the two! It was not a ‘Bubble Economy’, it was a ‘Bubble Stock Market’.”

Party privatisation  

I’ve already written about the dangers of privatising parties in Davos, in the absence of a Forum-run beanfeast. This year’s hot ticket was apparently an invitation-only Super Bowl party, hosted by Bill and Chelsea Clinton. Both The New York Times’s and The Washington Post’s gossip columns have snippets.

Yuck?  

Here’s the problem with not being on the spot. I’ve linked before to Chris Anderson’s entertaining explanation of the yuck factor in science policy decisions. He credits it to David Baltimore of CalTech. But now David Kirkpatrick writes about the same session, and he reckons Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge is the progenitor of the yuck factor. Was it Rees or Baltimore? Establishing precedence is often tricky in scientific discovery.

One thought on “Davos Newbies Home

  1. Paul Kelly

    I’ve solved the NS4 problem with a local version of your html. It’s the result of improper syntax in the css for #links. Put a comma after the font size specification and it should work. There still appears to be a placement problem with the calendar, however. It overlaps in the top left, not top right where it should be.

    I also spotted imporoper nesting after the links table. The table should close before the div does.

    Reply

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