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Why isn't congress asking the right questions? The Mexico/U.S. border will continue to be breeched by thousands of illegal aliens because they are fleeing poverty and getting hired in the U.S. If we perpetuate this behavior how can we find them guilty or expect illegals to stop flooding the borders. If it's working why stop? U.S. business owners have got to put a stop to their underhanded hiring techniques.

Money has been noted a lot of things in the world, and it's malicious manipulation will stop at nothing. People are miserable when they have lots of it and miserable when they have none. I recently switched hair salons and, thus have a new stylist; she is 60 plus years old and is from Russia. She interestingly hasn't been in the U.S. for more than a couple of years.

When I asked her about communism she said it's nice to be free, but things were much better for everyone before. She said yes, you can go into any shop you want now, but the common people (majority of the population) can't afford to buy anything. She said they are a starving people. What more can America do to alleviate the problem of poverty? We can start by facing it. If we begin to look at the root of the immigration issue we will see that the true need is right in front of our faces; these people are working to feed their families. This can become an ethical question as well as moral; should these people be forced to leave or allowed to work?

Text-messaging is driving teens to distraction and horrific accidents on the road. But a 73-year-old law prevents Americans from installing a solution in their vehicles.
An epidemic of teens text-messaging while driving is causing a rash of accidents and deaths nationwide.

Yet while cellphone jamming technology would be a simple and available remedy, an arcane law from the 1930s is preventing any business in the United States from selling or even advertising the solution.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is the government agency in charge of regulating the airwaves, has established severe penalties for cellphone jamming – a law written in 1934 to primarily protect radio and television broadcasters from the pirating of their airwaves.

If anyone is caught with a cellphone jammer in their car today, they could face an $11,000 fine and a one-year jail term. Although no one has been fined or jailed, the law still deters cellphone jammers from being sold -- and developed -- openly in the U.S.
The FCC argument is that the 1934 law exists because commercial enterprises have purchased the rights to the spectrum that they broadcast or transmit signals over; jamming those signals is a akin to property theft.

"The law protects the carriers right to protect their interests -- obviously text messaging is a rising profit center. But it fails to protect the innocent drivers on the road who are at risk because of this widespread activity," says Ed Smith, senior crime analyst for the Delray Beach Police Department, in Delray Beach, Florida, in an interview October 14, 2007.

Cell phones operate by sending signals along a range of the electromagnetic spectrum reserved for their use. In the United States, that part typically is measured as either 800 or 1,900 megahertz.

If lawmakers could see past the 1934 law, the physics of jamming a cell phone is actually quite simple, experts says. All a cell-phone jamming device needs to do is broadcast a signal on those same frequencies – 800 or 1,900 megahertz -- and it will interfere with any devices trying to transmit in that range.

The net effect for a cell-phone user? The phone's screen will simply indicate that no signal is available.

One company in the United Kingdom, Iceberg Systems, is already beta-testing a new technology that will remotely turn off the cameras in cellphones – a technology that could be easily applied to text-messaging as well, according to company officials.

Called Safe Haven, the product combines hardware transmitters with a small piece of control software loaded into a camera phone handset. When the handset is taken into a room or building containing the Safe Haven hardware, the phone is instructed to deactivate the imaging systems. The systems are reactivated when the handset is out of range.

"Once you're in a wireless privacy zone, there is the opportunity to look at other functionality that may be disabled or controlled," said Patrick Snow, managing director of Iceberg Systems.
In other words, in an automobile, the technology could deactivate the text-messaging functionality in the cellphone -- in the same way it's capable of deactivating the camera.

Some states are attempting to outlaw text-messaging in automobiles. But bans may not be enough. As everyone knows, the laws don't prevent people from driving and drinking with a blood-alcohol level over .08 either.

“Besides, there's an enormous enforcement issue too," says Smith. "It's important that the states begin the process of banning text messaging in cars. But we need a technology to actually prevent text messages from flowing in and out of a vehicle. That would be the most effective solution.”

Today nearly 50 percent of teens surveyed in a 2007 AAA and Seventeen magazine study indicated they text-message while driving. "It's already a huge problem, and it's only going to get worse," Smith says.

Blowing the dust off your computer's vents is just the beginning of what should be regular computer cleaning and maintenance. Cleaning your computer is simple and easy.

There are many ways that computers can get "dirty." Many people are aware of the ways computers get dirty on the inside, by becoming infected with spyware, viruses, and other malware. But computers can get physically dirty on the outside as well, and many people never even notice it because the computer is tucked away under their desks. Dust, pet hair, and other airborne particles can clog your computer's ventilation system and cause the entire computer to run hotter than normal, thus shortening the life expectancy of your processor and other electronic parts. With a little basic computer maintenance you can take care of both problems and keep your computer running in top shape.

Cleaning A Dusty, Dirty Computer:

Dirty computers build up heat and operate at higher temperatures than a clean computer does. Every so often every computer user should consider opening up their computer case and doing some basic computer cleaning. The only store bought material you will require is a can of compressed air, available at almost any retailer that sells computer equipment or accessories. It also helps to have a vacuum cleaner nearby with a removable hose. Use the compressed air to dislodge all of the built-up dust on the CPU, memory chips, hard drives, and accessory cards. Use the vacuum cleaner to suck the dust up and get it out of the computer's interior. Always make sure to ground yourself by touching the computer's metal case to prevent any static electricity from damaging the fragile electronic circuitry. Once you have dusted off the interior of the case, be sure to suck the dust out of all of the air vents on the outside of the case as well.

The same compressed air that you used to blow dirt out off of your CPU and interior computer components can also be used to clean your keyboard. Take the tube and stick it under the keys of the keyboard and blow out as much of the debris as possible. You will likely be able to remove a lot of food particles, dead skin cells, and pet hair by this method alone. If you are adventurous you can also remove the keys from the keyboard and clean more thoroughly using a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol. Just make sure you remember where the keys go when you snap them back into place. If you are worried about it, take a digital photo and print it off before you start. The tops and sides of the keys can also be cleaned with swabs and rubbing alcohol. You can also find commercial cleaning agents as well.

Do not use commercial cleaners on your LCD monitor unless the solution is labeled specifically for LCD flat panel monitors. Even without a commercial cleaner you can still gently wipe fingerprints and other smudges off of the screen with a soft, lint-free cloth moistened with a small amount of water. Never spray water directly on the screen, and always make sure the monitor is off and unplugged before cleaning it.

First came the horror. Private banker Thomas Graf stayed up half the night of Sept. 11, switching channels from CNN to BBC to CNBC as hijacked-jets-turned-human-missiles slammed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

The chief representative in Asia of Lugano-based Banca del Gottardo knew many financial professionals there. Still stunned, Graf began working the phones in the morning. "It's important to talk to clients and do some hand-holding," he says somberly, "even though the private banker may not really know what to say and what to do." In this case, he knew exactly what to say: "Stay calm. Wait and see. There's no need to rush to any decision right now." Good advice, but one that's more and more difficult to follow as stock markets everywhere melt by the day. A week after the terrorist attack, Morgan Stanley Capital International's All Country Asia Pacific ex-Japan index had fallen to 134 points, just 14 points above its nadir during the worst of the Asian crisis.

Already at an 18-year low, Japan's Nikkei fell another 6.6% to 9,610 points on Sept. 12, before rebounding 3.4% to 9,939 points by Sept. 19. Despite a half-a-percentage point interest-rate cut, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged a record 684 points when U.S. markets reopened Sept. 17. The technology-laden Nasdaq slid by 6.8% to a three-year low. It may seem callous to worry about investment portfolios as the world stands on the brink of more horrific attacks and retaliation. But the responsible investor has to consider the risks to a child's college fund and his own retirement nest egg. Times like these also remind us of the need to take stock of our overall financial picture, from insurance to record-keeping to wills. Life must go on, but the destruction of America's cathedrals of finance clearly shows that the world has become a much riskier place.

First came the horror. Private banker Thomas Graf stayed up half the night of Sept. 11, switching channels from CNN to BBC to CNBC as hijacked-jets-turned-human-missiles slammed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. The chief representative in Asia of Lugano-based Banca del Gottardo knew many financial professionals there. Still stunned, Graf began working the phones in the morning. "It's important to talk to clients and do some hand-holding," he says somberly, "even though the private banker may not really know what to say and what to do." In this case, he knew exactly what to say: "Stay calm. Wait and see. There's no need to rush to any decision right now."

Good advice, but one that's more and more difficult to follow as stock markets everywhere melt by the day. A week after the terrorist attack, Morgan Stanley Capital International's All Country Asia Pacific ex-Japan index had fallen to 134 points, just 14 points above its nadir during the worst of the Asian crisis. Already at an 18-year low, Japan's Nikkei fell another 6.6% to 9,610 points on Sept. 12, before rebounding 3.4% to 9,939 points by Sept. 19. Despite a half-a-percentage point interest-rate cut, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged a record 684 points when U.S. markets reopened Sept. 17.

The technology-laden Nasdaq slid by 6.8% to a three-year low. It may seem callous to worry about investment portfolios as the world stands on the brink of more horrific attacks and retaliation. But the responsible investor has to consider the risks to a child's college fund and his own retirement nest egg. Times like these also remind us of the need to take stock of our overall financial picture, from insurance to record-keeping to wills. Life must go on, but the destruction of America's cathedrals of finance clearly shows that the world has become a much riskier place.

A session at the 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meetings in San Francisco in February reported on research concerning cohort effects for scientific literacy in the United States and Europe, and their relation to beliefs in pseudoscience. The session was organized by Raymond Eve, professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He also participated in a press briefing on the session at the meeting.

For the first time, Eve and his fellow researchers have begun to examine how science literacy scores on standardized tests may be partially due to generational or cohort effects. In other words, most of our grandparents didn’t even attend college, so it would be surprising if today’s generation didn’t outscore previous ones. Such research is beginning to make it possible to separate out the effects of innovations in the teaching of science from improvements that might have occurred due to generational effects. The researchers found that in spite of the mass media’s regular litany of doom and gloom about science education in the U.S. recent innovations in teaching science seem to be paying off in somewhat better scores for students, scores that can be attributed to better science teaching—not just cohort effects. The same also applies to the recently reduced belief in pseudoscience, particularly for topics unrelated to religiously influenced pseudoscientific beliefs.

One finding by the panel was that U.S. high school students are leaving high school dramatically unprepared for scientific literacy, but that both at the high school and college levels the situation is improving somewhat. In fact, the percentage of Americans with basic scientific literacy has almost tripled in the last two decades.

As a somewhat surprising result, brand new research presented at the meetings by panel participant Jon D. Miller of Michigan State University shows U.S. adults to now be second in the world in terms of science literacy (behind only Sweden), although this still represents only 28 percent of the total U.S. population. Interestingly, since this is apparently not attributable to high-school preparation per se, Miller said it appears that taking even one course in science in college leads students to become self-educators in science throughout life. (Meaning, for example, that if one gets cancer it doesn’t take long for them to use secondary sources from the Internet and elsewhere to soon know a lot about medicine.) Hence, we now need much better understanding of how a college education can lead to lifelong learning in science and how best to integrate collegiate science learning with informal science learning once out of the academic environment.

A new trial, claiming he had been found guilty of insider trading based on insufficient evidence.
In April jurors convicted Mr. Nacchio, 58, of selling $52 million in shares of Qwest, based on private warnings that the telephone company would miss revenue targets in 2001.

Mr. Nacchio, who was sentenced to six years in prison, claimed prosecutors had failed to prove he had important information, or that he knew Qwest’s stock would collapse.
“There is insufficient evidence that Nacchio knew he had any material information that had to be disclosed prior to trading,” Mr. Nacchio’s lawyers wrote in a motion filed Tuesday. “All of the direct evidence (including his own trading decisions) shows that Nacchio was bullish and believed Qwest stock was undervalued.”

The federal appeals court in Denver, where Qwest is based, has allowed Mr. Nacchio to remain free on $2 million bail and will hear his lawyers’ oral arguments Dec. 18.

The New York hedge fund adviser Sandell Asset Management has agreed to pay more than $8 million to settle charges that it engaged in improper short sales in connection with the merger of Hibernia and Capital One Financial, securities regulators said on Wednesday.
Thomas Sandell, chief executive of Sandell Asset Management, or SAM, also agreed to pay a $100,000 civil penalty to settle related charges, the Securities and Exchange Commission said.
The defendants settled with the S.E.C. without admitting or denying the charges.
The S.E.C. said that Sandell Asset, its chief executive and two other employees engaged in the short sales, believing that Capital One would lower its offering price for shares of Hibernia, a bank holding company based in New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The S.E.C. said Sandell Asset held a long position in Hibernia as part of its merger arbitrage investment strategy, and began to sell short as many Hibernia shares as possible to offset an anticipated loss to a client.
Short sellers borrow shares of stock they see as overvalued, sell them and wait for the price to fall. If it does, they buy back the shares, return them and pocket as profit the spread between the sale price and the buyback price.
The S.E.C. said that Sandell Asset’s senior managing director, Patrick Burke, and its head trader, Richard Ecklord, also settled in the case, agreeing to pay $50,000 and $40,000 civil penalties, respectively.

Public international law establishes the framework and the criteria for identifying states as the principal actors in the international legal system. As the existence of a state presupposes control and jurisdiction over territory, international law deals with the acquisition of territory, state immunity and the legal responsibility of states in their conduct with each other. International law is similarly concerned with the treatment of individuals within state boundaries. There is thus a comprehensive regime dealing with group rights, the treatment of aliens, the rights of refugees, international crimes, nationality problems, and human rights generally. It further includes the important functions of the maintenance of international peace and security, arms control, the pacific settlement of disputes and the regulation of the use of force in international relations. Even when the law is not able to stop the outbreak of war, it has developed principles to govern the conduct of hostilities and the treatment of prisoners. International law is also used to govern issues relating to the global environment, the global commons such as international waters and outer space, global communications, and world trade.
Whilst municipal law is hierarchical or vertical in its structure (meaning that a legislature enacts binding legislation), international law is horizontal in nature. This means that all states are sovereign and theoretically equal. As a result of the notion of sovereignty, the value and authority of international law is dependent upon the voluntary participation of states in its formulation, observance, and enforcement. Although there may be exceptions, it is thought by many international academics that most states enter into legal commitments with other states out of enlightened self-interest rather than adherence to a body of law that is higher than their own. As D. W. Greig notes, "international law cannot exist in isolation from the political factors operating in the sphere of international relations".[2]
Breaches of international law raise difficult questions for lawyers. Since international law has no established compulsory judicial system for the settlement of disputes or a coercive penal system, it is not as straightforward as managing breaches within a domestic legal system. However, there are means by which breaches are brought to the attention of the international community and some means for resolution. For example, there are judicial or quasi-judicial tribunals in international law in certain areas such as trade and human rights. The formation of the United Nations, for example, created a means for the world community to enforce international law upon members that violate its charter through the Security Council.
Traditionally, states and the Holy See were the sole subjects of international law. With the proliferation of international organizations over the last century, they have in some cases been recognized as relevant parties as well. Recent interpretations of international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and international trade law (e.g., North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Chapter 11 actions) have been inclusive of corporations, and even of certain individuals.

An open casting call for America's Next Top Model will be held at Park Central New York on 870 Seventh Avenue at 56th Street on Saturday, August 26, from 10:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m. Casting is looking for females, ages 18 to 27, of diverse backgrounds, shapes, sizes and with a minimum height requirement of 5'7" tall.

"America's Next Top Model" follows a group of young women of various backgrounds, shapes and sizes who live together and vie for a grand prize which will include a modeling contract. The dramality exposes the transformation of everyday young women into potentially fierce top models, as they face weekly tests that determine who can make the cut.

The finalists compete in a highly accelerated modeling boot camp, a crash course to modeling fame that includes mentoring by supermodel Tyra Banks and exposure to high- profile fashion industry gurus, all under 24-hour-a-day surveillance of the "America's Next Top Model" cameras, which chronicle every move.

The good news is that the percentage of Internet-based hotel reservations is expected to triple to 15.4 percent by 2004 from the current 4.9 percent, according to Andersen LLP, and total volume is expected to reach $5.7 billion in 2004, according to Forrester Research.
It would appear that many leisure and business travelers have discovered that all of the very good travel deals are to be found not through a travel agent, or calling a supplier directly, but on the Web. And according to Nielsen/NetRatings over 37 million out of 162 million active Americans Internet users have already purchased travel online.
The bad news is that many smaller hospitality companies, except for the major brands, have not taken full advantage of the Internet as the cheapest and most efficient distribution medium for their inventory. Unfortunately many have suffered due to insufficient expertise in understanding how the Internet works. This has allowed a number of major online discount companies to increase their market share at the expense of many hotels' direct and GDS distribution.
In fact, many independent properties have been left out of GDS (Global Distribution Systems) such as Sabre and Galileo due to high booking fees and the need for dedicated telecommunications. Also many new booking networks require a property to maintain rates and inventory in a web-based system that can be difficult to manage.
This can make it impossible to list independent property inventory on the GDS’ or popular travel website such as AOL Travel, Yahoo!, Travelocity, etc.
Although using online hotel consolidators to sell your accommodation online is not an issue, it becomes a serious problem when these online services are your primary or only Web distribution channel.
Simply put. If your hotel only appears on the Web through your discounted rates offered by the online consolidators, Internet users would always find your discounted rates and nothing else.
Therefore, as far as the Internet consumer is concerned, these discounted rates are de facto your published hotel rates. In effect they become your published rate. The resulting brand erosion and price dilution can seriously effect your future financial health. How do you ever convince travelers to pay your full room rate?
The answer is very simple. As an Hotelier you must adopt a distribution model which focuses on two major areas, Direct and Indirect Web Distribution.
When an Internet user is searching for accommodations at your destination, they should be able to find your hotel website directly through the search engines, your website affiliates and destination portals.
The Indirect component of marketing your hotel web site on-line is to search and use channels other than your website and is probably already familiar to most hotel owners. Such as, establishing relationships with online leisure travel services, corporate services, meeting and event planner services, wholesalers and discount companies, Internet reservation systems, local portals, hotel directories, etc.
Direct Web Distribution involves energetically marketing your hotel website by turning your hotel website into a 24 hour by 7 day sales force, complete with booking engine, website optimization, website functionality, customer e-mail capture and a strong customer service component.
Your hotel website is not just an online brochure. Yes, it should be simple, nice, informative, useful and efficient. But, do you have a real-time booking engine? The booking engine should be prominently displayed on the Home Page and become the centerpiece of your hotel website. All web pages within the website should prominently feature the "Online Reservations" or a "Book Now" buttons.

It is innovation's biggest paradox: We demand more and more from the stuff in our lives--more features, more function, more power--and yet we also increasingly demand that it be easy to use. And, in an Escher-like twist, the technology that's simplest to use is also, often, the most difficult to create.
Marissa Mayer lives with that conundrum every day. As Google's director of consumer Web products, she's responsible for the search site's look and feel. Mayer is a tall, blond 30-year-old with two Stanford degrees in computer science and an infectious laugh. She's also Google's high priestess of simplicity, defending the home page against all who would clutter it up. "I'm the gatekeeper," she says cheerfully. "I have to say no to a lot of people."
The technology that powers Google's search engine is, of course, anything but simple. In a fraction of a second, the software solves an equation of more than 500 million variables to rank 8 billion Web pages by importance. But the actual experience of those fancy algorithms is something that would satisfy a Shaker: a clean, white home page, typically featuring no more than 30 lean words; a cheery, six-character, primary-colored logo; and a capacious search box. It couldn't be friendlier or easier to use.
Here is how Mayer thinks about the tension between complexity of function and simplicity of design: "Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It's simple, it's elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it's got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open--and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful."
It would be lovely if Google's corporate mythology included an enchanting tale to account for the birth of this pristine marvel. But the original home-page design was dumb luck. In 1998, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were consumed with writing code for their engine. Brin just wanted to hack together something to send queries to the back end, where the cool technology resided. Google didn't have a Web master, and Brin didn't do HTML. So he designed as little as he could get away with.
The accident became an icon, of course, and a key reason the company enjoys a commanding lead. Google's design has been mimicked on the search pages of MSN and Yahoo, whose portals are messy throwbacks to the "everything but the kitchen sink" school of Web design. But they're poor imitations; according to Hitwise, Google controls 59.2% of the search market, up from 45% a year ago; MSN's share is down to 5.5% and Yahoo's is 28.8%.
No surprise that a site easy enough for a technophobe to use has caught the public imagination. Like desperate Gullivers, we're pinned down by too much information and too much stuff. By one estimate, the world produced five exabytes (one quintillion bytes) of content in 2002--the same amount churned out between 25,000 b.c. and a.d. 2000. Little wonder that Real Simple has been the most successful magazine launch in a decade, and the blogosphere is abuzz over the season's hottest tech innovation--the Hipster PDA: 15 index cards held together by a binder clip.
With Google's extraordinary trajectory and the stratospheric success of Apple's iPod--itself a marvel of simplicity and, with 20 million units sold, a staggering hit--we seem to be nearing a seminal moment. Whereas endless Sunday Styles stories may have failed to get its attention, the tech industry's interest is invariably galvanized by cash. If the equation T (technology) + E (ease of use) = $ can be proven, the time may be right for the voice of the technologically challenged who can't operate their remotes to be heard.
In a 2002 poll, the Consumer Electronics Association discovered that 87% of people said ease of use is the most important thing when it comes to new technologies. "Engineers say, 'Do you know how much complexity we've managed to build in here?' But consumers say, 'I don't care. It's just supposed to work!' " says Daryl Plummer, group vice president at Gartner Group.
It's often that tension--between the desire to cram in cool new features and the desire to make a product easy to use--that makes delivering on the simplicity promise so hard, particularly in companies where engineers hold sway. At Google, it's an ongoing battle. As developers come up with ever sexier services--maps! news alerts! scholarly papers!--the pressure to lard on links is fierce. Mayer holds them at bay with a smile and strict standards.
To make it to the home page, a new service needs to be so compelling that it will garner millions of page views per day. Contenders audition on the advanced-search page; if they prove their mettle--as image search did, growing from 700,000 page views daily to 2 million in two weeks--they may earn a permanent link. Few make the cut, and that's fine. Google's research shows that users remember just 7 to 10 services on rival sites. So Google offers a miserly six services on its home page. By contrast, MSN promotes more than 50, and Yahoo, over 60. And both sell advertising off their home pages; Google's is a commercial-free zone.
So why don't those sites simply hit the delete button and make their home pages more Googlesque? Hewing to the simplicity principle, it turns out, is tougher than connecting with tech support, particularly if you try it retrospectively. "Once you have a home page like our competitors'," Mayer says, "paring it back to look like Google's is impossible. You have too many stakeholders who feel they should be promoted on the home page." (MSN says more than half its customers are happy with its home page--but it's experimenting with a sleeker version called "start.com.")
Google understands that simplicity is both sacred and central to its competitive advantage. Mayer is a specialist in artificial intelligence, not design, but she hits on the secret to her home page's success: "It gives you what you want, when you want it, rather than everything you could ever want, even when you don't."
That, says Joe Duffy, founder of the award-winning Minneapolis design firm Duffy & Partners and author of Brand Apart, is a pretty good definition of good design. He quotes a famous line from the eminent designer Milton Glaser: "Less isn't more; just enough is more." Just enough, says Duffy, contains an aesthetic component that differentiates one experience from another.
It's just that holding the line on what constitutes "just enough" is harder than it looks.
It's early September, and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are teeming with young technorati in flip-flops and shorts. But there is calm at the MIT Media Lab, just upstairs from the List Visual Arts Center, the university's preeminent gallery. It's a fitting juxtaposition, a place where art and technology seek common ground.
"I want to figure out how you could combine simplicity, which is basic human life, with this thing--technology--that's out of control."
John Maeda runs the Media Lab's Simplicity Consortium. His goal is to find ways to break free from the intimidating complexity of today's technology and the frustration of information overload. He is a gentle, soft-spoken man, dressed elegantly in a crisp, white collarless shirt and black pants. And he is an unusual amalgam: having the mathematical wizardry of a computer geek with the soul of an artist. Indeed, in 1990, he left MIT for four years to study art. "My whole life changed," he says. "I thought, This is a great way to live." But rather than throwing over his digital life entirely, he conceived a mission. "I came back to MIT to figure out how you could combine simplicity, which is basic human life, with this thing--technology--that's out of control."
Maeda's ability to toggle back and forth between right brain and left affords him unusual insight into how we got stuck in this technological quagmire. On one level, he says, the problem is simply one of scale. Before computer technology, small things were simple; big things were more likely complex. But the microchip changed that. Now small things can be complex, too. But small objects have less room for instruction--so we get cell phones with tip calculators buried deep in submenus and user manuals the size of the Oxford English Dictionary to help us figure it all out.
Blame the closed feedback loop among engineers and industrial designers, who simply can't conceive of someone so lame that she can't figure out how to download a ringtone; blame a competitive landscape in which piling on new features is the easiest way to differentiate products, even if it makes them harder to use; blame marketers who haven't figured out a way to make "ease of use" sound hip. "It's easier," says Charles Golvin, principal analyst with Forrester Research, "to market technology than ease of use."
Across the river from MIT, in the Boston suburb of West Newton, Aaron Oppenheimer runs the product behavior group of Design Continuum, one of the country's preeminent design firms. He is the sympathetic counselor who gently points out that for each feature clients want to include--"Hey, if we've got a microprocessor in there, let's add an alarm clock!"--they're trading off a degree of ease of use. It's a never-ending battle. "I spend a lot of time talking clients out of adding features," he says with a sigh. "Every new feature makes things more complicated , even if you never use them."
In the past, he says, adding features usually meant adding costs. Put a sound system or power windows into a car, and you've upped the price, so you better make sure consumers really want what you're peddling. But in the digital world, that cost-benefit calculus has gone awry. "The incremental cost to add 10 features instead of one feature is just nothing," says Oppenheimer. "Technology is this huge blessing because we can do anything with it, and this huge curse because we can do anything with it."
"The market for simplicity is complex. If I offer you a VCR with only one button, it's not all that exciting, even if when you use it, it's likely to be easier."
But the issue is also our conflicted relationship with technology. We want the veneer of simplicity but with all the bells and whistles modern technology can provide. "The market for simplicity is complex," says Dan Ariely, a business-school professor who is spending a year off from MIT figuring out how to quantify the value of simplicity at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. "If I offer you a VCR with only one button, it's not all that exciting, even if when you use it, it's likely to be easier."
We also want our devices to talk to each other--cell phone to the Web, digital camera to printer. That requires a level of interoperability that would be difficult to attain in a perfect world, but is well nigh impossible in one where incompatibility is a competitive strategy. "In business, it's all about war," says Maeda. "I hate to sound like a hippie, but if there were just some sense of peace and love, products would be much better."
In his quiet way, Maeda hopes to right the balance between man and machine. He and his students are working on software, code-named OPENSTUDIO, that would create an "ecosystem of design"--connecting designers with customers on a broad scale. That could lead to bespoke products--a cell phone, for example, with 30 features for Junior, 3 for Gran. "You can't make the world simpler unless you can get in touch with design," he says, "and the only way you can do that is to get in touch with designers."
How do you make your company's products simpler? You can start by simplifying your company.
In the late 1990s, Royal Philips Electronics was a slow-footed behemoth whose products, from medical diagnostic imaging systems to electric shavers, were losing traction in the marketplace. By 2002, a new CEO, Gerard Kleisterlee, determined that the company urgently needed to address the dynamic global marketplace and become more responsive to consumers' changing needs.
Philips deployed researchers in seven countries, asking nearly 2,000 consumers to identify the biggest societal issue that the company should address. The response was loud and urgent. "Almost immediately, we hit on the notion of complexity and its relationship to human beings," says Andrea Ragnetti, Philips's chief marketing officer. Consumers told the researchers that they felt overwhelmed by the complexity of technology. Some 30% of home-networking products were returned because people couldn't get them to work. Nearly 48% of people had put off buying a digital camera because they thought it would be too complicated.
Strategists recognized a huge opportunity: to be the company that delivered on the promise of sophisticated technology without the hassles. Philips, they said, should position itself as a simple company. Ragnetti was dumbstruck. "I said, 'You must be joking. This is an organization built on complexity, sophistication, brainpower.' " But he and Kleisterlee responded with an even more audacious plan. Rather than merely retooling products, Philips would also transform itself into a simpler, more market-driven organization.
That initiative has been felt from the highest rungs of the organization to the lowest. Instead of 500 different businesses, Philips is now in 70; instead of 30 divisions, there are 5. Even things as prosaic as business meetings have been nudged in the direction of simplicity: The company now forbids more than 10 slides in any PowerPoint presentation. Just enough, they decided, was more.
The campaign, christened "Sense and Simplicity," required that everything Philips did going forward be technologically advanced--but it also had to be designed with the end user in mind and be easy to experience. That ideal has influenced product development from conception--each new product, like the ShoqBox, an MP3 mini-boom box, must be based on a user need that's tested and validated--to packaging. Philips invited 15 customers to its Consumer Experience Research Centre in Bruges, Belgium, to see how they unpacked and set up a Flat TV. After watching people struggle to lift the heavy set from an upright box, designers altered the packaging so the TV could be removed from a carton lying flat on the ground.
While many of the new products have yet to hit the market, early results of the business reorganization, particularly in North America, have been dramatic. Sales growth for the first half of 2005 was up 35%, and the company was named Supplier of the Year by Best Buy and Sam's Club. Philips's Ambilight Flat TV and GoGear Digital Camcorder won European iF awards for integrating advanced technologies into a consumer-friendly design, and the Consumer Electronics Association handed the company 12 Innovation Awards for products ranging from a remote control to a wearable sport audio player.
Maeda, who, as a member of Philips's Simplicity Advisory Board has had a front-row seat for this transformation, is impressed. "The best indication of their sincerity is that they're embracing the concept at a management level," says Maeda. "It isn't just marketing to them. That's quite a radical thing."
Designing products that are easy to use is nothing new for Intuit, the big tax- and business-software company. Indeed, it's been the mantra since founder Scott Cook developed Intuit's first product, Quicken, back in 1983 after listening to his wife complain about writing checks and managing bills.
But even by Intuit's standards, Simple Start, a basic accounting package that debuted in September 2004, was a leap. For one thing, the target market was tiny businesses that used no software at all. "These were people who said, 'I have a simple business, and I don't want the complexity of having to learn this. I don't want to use the jargon, I don't want the learning curve, and besides, I'm afraid of it,' " says project manager Terry Hicks.
But the potential was huge: some 9 million microbusiness owners that Intuit wasn't reaching with its current line. So Hicks's team first tried a knockoff of Intuit's QuickBooks Basic, with a bunch of features turned off. Then they confidently took the product out for a test-drive with 100 potential customers.
And it bombed. It was still too hard to use, still riddled with accounting jargon, still too expensive. They realized they had to start from scratch. "We had to free ourselves and say, 'Okay, from an engineering point of view, we're going to use this code base, but we need to design it from a customer's point of view,' " says Lisa Holzhauser, who was in charge of the product's user interface.
The designers followed more customers home. They heard more complaints about complexity, but also anxiety that things in their business might be falling through the cracks. So the team distilled two themes that would guide their development: The product had to be simple, and it had to inspire confidence. Terms such as "aging reports" and "invoicing" were edited out, and the designers drew on the experience of the SnapTax division, which had hired an editor from People magazine to help translate accountant-speak into real-world language. Accounts receivable became "Money In," accounts payable, "Money Out." They pared back 125 setup screens to three, and 20 major tasks to six essentials. They spent days worrying about the packaging, knowing that to this audience, something labeled "Simple Accounting" was an oxymoron.
Above all, they subjected their work to the demanding standards of Intuit's usability lab, run by Kaaren Hanson. To get a product by her, users must be able, 90% of the time, to accomplish the tasks deemed most critical. It's a draconian standard. But "if our goal was to make it 'as easy as we can,' " Hanson says, "we wouldn't be as successful as if we had set a concrete number."
The Simple Start team thought they had nailed the user-interface problem after their third iteration of the product got rave reviews for its look and feel. But task completion results from the lab were dismal. The launch was delayed for months while the team reengineered the tools until they measured up.
The additional time was worth it. Simple Start--a product with 15 years of sophisticated QuickBooks code lurking behind an interface even a Luddite could love--sold 100,000 units in its first year on the market. Even better, reviews from target customers indicate that Intuit hit the mark.

Mike Richards, host of Beauty and the Geek, shares behind-the-scenes scoop on the hottest topic this season: the girl geek and guy beauty. Why is she so dorky? What are his vainest habits (hint: one involves excessive hair removal)? And how does their presence shake up the house dynamics?
Plus, Mike talks more about tonight's episode, where Oscar-winning rappers Three Six Mafia ("It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp") judge the geeks' performances of an autobiographical rap. Ouch. We're nervous for them already, but apparently some of the geeks' inner MCs surface, and a few of them rock the challenge. Check out Jason C.'s chat with Mike for more Beauty and the Geek gossip!