Innovate, Yes, but Make It Practical

By STEVE LOHR

Published: August 14, 2010

BUSINESS is a field not of theory but of practice. The central intellectual inquiry of the science of management is simply this: What works?

Kevin P. Casey for The New York Times

John Tao, with Kristi Hudson at a Weyerhaeuser lab in Federal Way, Wash., has led a search for new markets for lignin, a byproduct of pulp.

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Kevin P. Casey for The New York Times

Lignin, shown in fiber form on spools, is typically recycled as a fuel for pulp plants.

That, it seems, is the best way to examine the steady rise in the practice of innovation management. A search of the database of the professional networking site LinkedIn found that more than 700 people listed their current job title as “chief innovation officer” and that nearly 25,000 had the word “innovation” in their job title. Many others may not have the word in their titles, but their job is to pursue opportunities that result in new products, services and more efficient ways of doing things.

So what does work in the innovation game? No single formula, to be sure. But some recent interviews with executives, consultants and academics can be distilled into three recommendations: think broadly, borrow from the entrepreneurial Silicon Valley model, and pay close attention to customers and to emerging user needs.

Here, then, are three innovation works in progress that include those ingredients, whether or not the efforts will ultimately prove to be winners:

Marching Into New Markets

John Tao joined Weyerhaeuser, the wood and pulp producer, two years ago as its vice president for open innovation, coming from Air Products and Chemicals. At Weyerhaeuser, Mr. Tao has led an initiative to find new markets for lignin, a chemical compound that binds cellulose fibers together in trees. Lignin is extracted during pulp-making as a black liquor, and is typically recycled as a fuel for pulp plants.

Yet lignin can also be converted to a solid and serve as a chemical feedstock for making a range of products. Mr. Tao, a Ph.D. chemical engineer, and his staff studied the market, including the curbs on carbon emissions that chemical producers will likely face in the future.

Lignin can be a nonpolluting alternative for producing goods as different as seat cushions and carbon fiber. Automakers, for example, are beginning to use carbon fiber as a lightweight but strong substitute for metal to improve fuel efficiency.

As a chemical feedstock, lignin is worth 10 to 20 times its value as a pulp-plant fuel, Mr. Tao said. Weyerhaeuser has a pilot plant in North Carolina to produce specialized lignin chemicals. Mr. Tao has met with chemical companies, carbon fiber makers and the Department of Energy to try to nurture new lignin markets. “You have to have some technical background,” he said, “but a lot of this work is market analysis, communications and networking with industry partners.”

Customized Discounts

For innovation champions, titles matter far less than their independence, breadth of knowledge and corporate clout, experts say. “Whatever you call it, there is a real need for a senior-level executive to be able to reach across a company and beyond to tap ideas, skills and resources,” said Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is this systems integration aspect that is central to innovation as a field and a discipline.”

Money helps too. Rick Rommel, a senior vice president of the new-business group at Best Buy, says his unit has “an internal venture capital mind-set.” Best Buy gave his group additional financing this year to sharply increase investments in experimental ventures that, he said, “explore what customers think and what technologies are ready for widespread adoption.”

The new-business group has been working with a start-up, Shopkick, which is introducing an application for iPhones, and later for other smartphones, that retailers can use to track when shoppers have entered a store and reward them with discounts.

When linked to other online browsing and buying data, the discount offers can be not only immediate, when a person is in the store, but also tailored to individual interests. A person who has browsed computer Web sites, for example, might be offered a 10 percent discount on a notebook computer.

“This really moves toward one-to-one marketing,” Mr. Rommel said.

Banks of the Future

At Citigroup, Deborah Hopkins, chief innovation officer, is also in charge of the bank’s venture investing arm. This year, she decided to move from New York to Silicon Valley to be close to its entrepreneurial networks. “It’s a small community out there,” she explained.

One Citigroup investment is in Bundle.com, a social media start-up where users can compare their spending and saving habits with those of others. The idea came from the Citigroup innovation unit, and Bundle’s C.E.O., Jaidev Shergill, came from Citigroup. The other investors in Bundle are Microsoft and Morningstar. “The whole social networking phenomenon is moving so fast, and we need to be invested in some way,” said Don Callahan, Citigroup’s chief administrative officer, who oversees the innovation unit. “Whatever the outcome, we’re going to learn a lot.”

Ms. Hopkins sees her role as “being a catalyst, to challenge people to think differently, but also pursue new ideas with a lot of rigor.” An example of that systematic approach to innovation is Citigroup’s “bank of the future” project. The first two redesigned bank branches opened in April in Japan, but the concepts will eventually be transplanted to America, tailored to local markets.

The overhaul began with a shift in mind-set, from one oriented around banking products to one focused on customers. Months of extensive customer and demographic research resulted in personality profiles of four customer types, from up-and-comers in their 30s to retiring baby boomers. Customer service and marketing were geared toward those four affluent groups.

The branches have been remade as digital banks, with touch-screen work stations and videoconferencing links to financial experts. Traditional banks have up to 100 paper forms, while the redesigned branches are almost paperless, says Darren Buckley, president of Citibank Japan. The design imprint of Eight Inc., a firm that worked on Apple’s stores, is evident in the open, minimalist interiors of the new branches.

“We’re incubating ideas, but what we’re doing in Japan is absolutely something that can be scaled out elsewhere,” said Chris Kay, a managing director of Citigroup’s innovation arm.

Redbox Steps up Offerings By Adding Blu-Ray Choices

Redbox, the popular DVD rental kiosk provider, announced it has started rolling out Blu-ray titles with availability at approximately 13,300 kiosks nationwide. Redbox will rent Blu-ray Discs at $1.50 per night plus tax and the company expects to have availability across its network of approximately 23,000 kiosk locations by the fall.

“Offering Blu-ray rentals is an exciting opportunity for Redbox to expand our product offerings and build on the relationships that we’ve established with millions of consumers nationwide,” said Mitch Lowe, president, Redbox. “Redbox is a convenient, affordable home entertainment provider and we’re delighted to offer consumers their favorite movies on the increasingly popular Blu-ray Disc format.”

According to a recent report by the Digital Entertainment Group, sales of Blu-ray players increased 103 percent in the first half of this year. The sale of almost two million set-top players during this time has increased the total number of Blu-ray players sold to an estimated 19.4 million, resulting in more consumers entering the Blu-ray rental market.

“The Book of Eli,” “Bounty Hunter,” “Brooklyn’s Finest” and “Green Zone” are among the Blu-ray titles currently available at Redbox kiosks. The number of Blu-ray titles and copies will vary by kiosk and location with new titles being added each week. Consumers can visit www.redbox.com/bluray to find a nearby Redbox location and to check Blu-ray availability in their area. Consumers can return their Blu-ray rentals to any Redbox location as part of the company’s rent-and-return anywhere policy.

Each fully automated Redbox kiosk holds 630 discs, representing up to 200 titles, including standard definition DVDs and Blu-ray Discs at select locations. Consumers simply use a touch screen to select their favorite movies, swipe a valid credit or debit card and go.

Read more: http://technorati.com/business/article/redbox-steps-up-offerings-by-adding/#ixzz0vArICyf1

The Happiness Effect

The next time you get the flu, there will almost certainly be someone you can blame for your pain. There’s the inconsiderate co-worker who decided to drag himself to the office and spent the day sniffling, sneezing and shivering in the cubicle next to yours. Or your child’s best friend, the one who showed up for a playdate with a runny nose and a short supply of tissues. Then there’s the guy at the gym who spent more time sneezing than sweating on the treadmill before you used it.

You’re right to pass the blame. Pathogens like the influenza virus pass like a holiday fruitcake from person to person, but you probably don’t think much past the one who gave it directly to you. An infectious-disease expert, on the other hand, would not be satisfied to stop there. What about the person who passed the virus on to your colleague, the one before him and others earlier still? Contagious diseases operate like a giant infectious network, spreading like the latest YouTube clip among friends of friends online. We’re social animals; we share. (See the Year in Health, from A to Z.)

So public-health experts are beginning to wonder whether certain health-related behaviors are just as contagious as microbes. If you’re struggling with your weight, did you in effect catch a case of fat by learning poor eating and exercise habits from a friend or family member who was similarly infected by someone else? If you smoke, do you light up because you were behaviorally contaminated by smokers who convinced you of the coolness of the habit? Even more important, if such unhealthy behaviors are contagious, are healthy ones–like quitting smoking or exercising–equally so? And what if not only behaviors but also moods and mental states work the same way? Can you catch a case of happy?

Increasingly, the answer seems to be yes. That’s the intriguing conclusion from a body of work by Harvard social scientist Dr. Nicholas Christakis and his political-science colleague James Fowler at the University of California at San Diego. The pair created a sensation with their announcement earlier this month of a 20-year study showing that emotions can pass among a network of people up to three degrees of separation away, so your joy may, to a larger extent than you realize, be determined by how cheerful your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if some of the people in this chain are total strangers to you.

If that’s so, it creates a whole new paradigm for the way people get sick and, more important, how to get them healthy. It may mean that an individual’s well-being is the product not just of his behaviors and emotions but more of the way they feed into a larger social network. Think of it as health Facebook-style. “We have a collective identity as a population that transcends individual identity,” says Christakis. “This superorganism has an anatomy, physiology, structure and function that we are trying to understand.”

Read “Is Our Happiness Preordained?”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1865960,00.html#ixzz0vAobQxG2

Feeling Alone Together: How Loneliness Spreads

Despite the way it feels, loneliness often has nothing to do with being alone. For some people, feelings of isolation are sharpest during times that are in fact defined by togetherness — celebrations or the holidays, for instance. Walk into a bustling shopping mall or a buzzing holiday party this time of year, and even within a crowd — or perhaps especially in a crowd — it’s possible to feel unbearably alone.

New research from experts in neuroscience and social science may give us a clue as to why. Although we tend to think of it as a self-contained emotional state — a condition that affects people individually, either by circumstance or by dint of an antisocial personality — researchers now say that loneliness is more far-reaching than that. John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, believes it is a social phenomenon that exists within a society and can spread through it, from person to person, like a disease. And while everyone feels lonely once in a while, for some it becomes a persistent condition, one that has been associated with more serious psychological ills like depression, sleep dysfunction, high blood pressure and even an increased risk of dementia in older age.

For Cacioppo’s latest study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he partnered with leading social-network scientists Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, who make up the team best known for its series of studies showing that emotional states and behaviors — including happiness, obesity and quitting smoking — can propagate like a wave throughout a network of people. To examine whether the contagion effect existed with loneliness, the researchers used the same data set that Christakis and Fowler had mined for their earlier studies — the Framingham Heart Study, an ongoing trial originally begun in 1948 to identify risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Thanks to the meticulous way the trial was initially set up, with investigators noting the close family members and friends of each participant to ensure follow-up over the years, Cacioppo, Christakis and Fowler now had access to a rich social network for each volunteer in their study — from family members and friends to colleagues and neighbors.

Cacioppo and his team focused on the children of the original Framingham cohort, which included more than 5,200 middle-aged men and women. Starting in 1983, more than 4,500 volunteers were asked to fill out three questionnaires, spaced two years apart, about how many days in the previous week they had felt lonely. Because most of the participants’ friends and family members were also part of the Framingham study, the scientists could track, over time, whether one person’s report of loneliness had any impact on the feelings of isolation in other members in his or her social network. Researchers were thus able to rule out the possibility that lonely people simply congregated with other lonely people, or that a shared environmental event, such as a fatal fire in the neighborhood, could have triggered mass feelings of loneliness.

The results were illuminating: If one person reported feeling lonely at one evaluation, his closest connections (either family or close friends) were 52% more likely to also report feeling lonely two years later. The effect was strongest among those in close relationships, waning as the connections became more distant, but remained significant up to three degrees of separation — in other words, one lonely person could influence whether his friend’s friend’s friend felt lonely. “Loneliness has been conceived in the past as depression, introversion, shyness or poor social skills,” says Cacioppo. “Those turn out not to be right. Research we and others have done suggests that it really is a fundamental human motivational state very much like hunger, thirst or pain.”

In other words, loneliness is not so much a symptom of being companionless as it is a driving force behind social isolation. Rather than simply reflecting the emotional state of one person, Cacioppo says, loneliness is more like an indicator of the social health of our species on the whole — a temperature reading, if you will, of how well- or not so well-integrated we are as a population.

That’s an important measure, he says, because we are, by nature, a social species; we feed off our interactions with one another and thrive when we are inspired, challenged and supported by one another. While occasional feelings of isolation are perfectly natural and normal, the new study suggests that loneliness can begin to fester in a society like a cancer if it is allowed to transmit unchecked from one person to another.

But how does a person “catch” loneliness? Based on the new data, Cacioppo theorizes that it is passed on through feelings of mistrust and negativity. “People who feel lonely view the social world as more threatening,” he says. “They may not be aware they are doing it, but lonely individuals think negatively about other people. So if you are my friend, and I started to treat you negatively, then over time, we would stop being friends. But in the meantime, our interactions caused you to treat other people less positively, so you’re likely to lose friends, and they in turn are likely to lose friends. That appears to be the means of transmission for loneliness.” People may be spreading their negative feelings simply by frowning or making other unpleasant facial expressions, making hurtful remarks or even adopting uninviting body postures.

Over time, lonely people find themselves banished to the periphery of their social networks; as they lose friends and connections, they are pushed to the fringes, where they are only marginally connected to the community. Viewed that way, say experts, the loneliness factor in a neighborhood or an apartment complex or a workplace may be an indication of how cohesive, and therefore mentally healthy, that population is. “Loneliness can be a signal for when that social connection is fraying,” says Cacioppo.

If these results hold up, treating loneliness should involve more than individual therapy for patients. It requires addressing larger, society-based issues. “People are not going to realize that there is almost a wave of loneliness that is being propagated by people two or three connections removed from them,” says Dr. Richard Suzman, director of the division of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, which funded the study. “This does suggest that one has got to look at both the network and individual simultaneously when you try to repair what seems to be a cascading, spiraling descent in which loneliness gets increasingly paired with isolation.”

That strategy may mean looking at things such as community design or social-support networks that allow some populations to keep all their members hovering near the center of their networks, rather than drifting to the edges. It’s not necessarily the number of connections people have that matters but the quality of them. Communities that encourage regular interaction among its members, either through regular gatherings or mutually beneficial projects that require everyone’s input, for example, are more likely to foster stronger, more meaningful connections than those that don’t encourage social investment. “Ultimately, what we hope to do is not only intervene at the individual level, but also at the city planner and development level as well,” says Cacioppo.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1943748,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar#ixzz0vAi3FYQf

Smoked Out

Alan CrowhurstA man smokes a cigar at the racecourse in Ascot, England.

They are called COSAS—an acronym for Comfortable Outdoor Smoking Area. And according to Jemma Freeman, the sixth-generation owner of the London-based Havana cigar importer Hunters & Frankau, “They are opening up in London at the rate of one a week.”

Havana may be the cradle of cigar making, but London is, arguably, the city where these golden-brown tubes of Cuban tobacco achieved their apotheosis as the gentleman’s postprandial pursuit. The bon vivant Edward VII ushered in a new era of pleasure after the death of his austere mother, Queen Victoria, with the memorable words, “Gentlemen, you may smoke.” A cigar was of course the constant companion of the greatest Englishman of the 20th century, Winston Churchill. And now it is Sir Terence Conran, the celebrated British designer, author, and restaurateur—seldom seen without a Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2—who wears the mantle of most famous living British cigar smoker.

Yet in 2007, Britain’s cigar heritage seemed in danger of suffocating under some of the most draconian antismoking laws yet enacted. Smoking was outlawed in the workplace, in enclosed public areas, and in restaurants, bars, public houses, and private clubs. In fact, outside a Briton’s home, cigars could only be ignited legally in a specialist cigar shop—and then only for tasting and testing purposes—or, curiously enough, in lunatic asylums and prisons. Even hotel rooms now need to be designated as smoking rooms and equipped with a separate ventilation system.

But barely three years on, London has reemerged as a cigar-friendly destination par excellence. In 2009, sales were up 18 percent in value terms over the preceding year. This is all the more impressive in the context of an overall decline in Cuban-cigar production and export. Exact figures are hard to come by, but from a peak of around 120 million handmade cigars in 2006, last year Cuba produced as few as 73 million.

To be sure, the rise of the COSA is not the only reason for the boost. A weaker pound has made the U.K. a much more attractive destination for cigar tourists than at any time this decade. And of course London is home to some of the world’s most famous cigar stores, including the British luxury brand Alfred Dunhill, which still keeps a humidor at its new Mayfair store, and Davidoff on the corner of Jermyn and St. James’s Streets. Now, thanks in considerable part to the outdoor lounges, summer has become cigar season in London. “It used to be that winter was the busy time for cigar sales, but now as the weather warms up, so do sales,” says Davidoff proprietor Edward Sahakian.

Recent COSA openings include a Martell-partnered cigar-and-cognac zone at Dukes Hotel in St. James’s and a pop-up COSA in partnership with Laurent-Perrier at the Langham Hotel. “There is a strong distinction between cigarette smokers and cigar smokers,” says Freeman. “What we hear from bars and restaurants is that cigar smokers are civilized people who spend money and spend time.”

Certainly that has been Geoffrey Gelardi’s experience. Gelardi is the urbane managing director of London’s Lanesborough Hotel, which used to do a brisk cigar business in its library bar, where visiting plutocrats would drop thousands of pounds on pricey cognacs and rare Havanas. When the antismoking legislation passed, Gelardi became worried that a very handy revenue stream was about to dry up. Then he remembered a small paved area off one of his private dining rooms, “which due to our English weather had virtually never been used,” he recalls.

After 18 months of negotiating not just the strict smoking laws but also the historic hotel’s protected status, Gelardi opened a sleek outdoor smoking lounge complete with a working fireplace. It proved a wise investment: the £15,000 he used to earn on his indoor cigar bar each month has doubled. On one memorable occasion, a single table of four people spent £40,000, which, even considering that the most expensive cigar offered was a limited-edition Cohiba Behike at £1,500 a stick, bears out the observation that cigar smokers like to linger, and when they linger, they spend.

It is a similar story over at Mark’s Club, the Mayfair institution founded by the late Mark Birley, a noted cigar lover. Now it is owned by Richard Caring, who two summers ago converted a small, seldom-used terrace into an al fresco canopied drawing room with Persian rugs, upholstered chairs, and sofas, expressly for cigar smokers. It enables diners to complete their lunch or dinner at the leisurely pace Mark’s Club dictates, enjoying cigars, coffees, brandies, and petits fours, as well as sustaining snacks like wild-boar sausages and charcuterie.

Caring has also been careful to incorporate arrangements for smokers at the Ivy Club, another private members’ joint he owns, favored by publishing and media types. Here the emphasis is on a contemporary approach: while the cigar terrace at Mark’s is plush, the one at the Ivy Club is minimalist, though comfortable, with such clever touches as heated marble seating to compensate for the notoriously fickle British climate.

Indeed, given that a COSA needs to be largely open to the elements, much thought goes into keeping customers warm and comfortable. Sir Terence Conran’s Boundary Hotel and restaurant in fashionable Shoreditch features a splendid rooftop cigar garden, where guests can enjoy a good Havana and stunning views over the city while snuggling under Welsh wool blankets around an open fire.

Conran, who remains attuned to the needs of cigar smokers, has designed a special armchair for the garden, with an accompanying low table at just the right height for the large slipware ashtrays that are one of the signatures of this temple to tobacco. These rustic earthenware receptacles were made in South Africa, and it is therefore fitting that the garden’s centerpiece is a humidor in the form of a monstrous wheeled pachyderm, from which cigars emerge when a handle is cranked.

However, if Conran has his way, this rooftop Eden for Havanaphiles is but a foretaste of what he describes as a vast “market” over several stories in central London. Although he does not specify the location, he describes his dream project as a reimagined department store that sells everything from food and fashion to, of course, cigars. And while he is reluctant to go into detail about his plans for the inside of the building, there is at least one part of the project that falls into focus with crystal clarity: large terraces that wrap themselves around the building, destined for a future as COSAs. Work has yet to begin on this grand project, but Sir Terence can already smell the fragrant blue smoke of his favorite Hoyo Epicure No. 2.

Today in Sex: Men Suffer More in Crappy Relationships Than Women Do

When me or one of my girlfriends are having a hard time with our special naked friend, we talk, we cry, and we go out for cocktails and bitch. Maybe we schedule an emergency therapy visit, and probably eat an ill-advised candy bar or wedge of stinky cheese. In short, we deal. And while the waterworks and chocolate-smeared faces may make us look like we’re suffering more, apparently our strong, silent, menfolk are having a much harder time of it.

A study of over 1600 Miamians, aged 18 to 23, surveyed by The Journal of Health and Social Behavior (and translated out of academese by the New York Times), reported, “It appears that young men benefit more than women from support [that they get from their girlfriends], and that they are more harmed than women by strain in ongoing romantic relationships.”

The authors hypothesize this to be because young men get most of their emotional support and intimacy from their romantic partners, whereas women are more likely to confide in friends and family.

But what about us ladies? Surely we feel pain too. Well, yes, according to the study, we do suffer, but not over rocky relationships–our suffering comes when we’re not in one. Robin W. Simon, a sociology professor at Wake Forest University and one of the authors of the report conceded, “It’s a little bit pathetic . . . Even though there’s been so much social change in this area, women’s self-worth is still so much tied up with having a boyfriend. It’s unfortunate.”

Not only unfortunate, it’s depressing and so grotesquely clichéed. We’d rather be in a shitty relationship than none at all? Ouch. How Scary Sadshaw. Happily, the gender-specific misery disparity lessens with age, though it’s unclear whether this is because guys wise up and realize they need more friends than the woman they’re schtupping, or because women finally realize that being single is better than being with a jackass.

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Grandma among 1st Women to Row around Britain

• From left, Angela Madsen, Belinda Kirk, Beverley Ashton and Laura Thommason, celebrate completing their rowing challenge around Great Britain – becoming the first female crew to complete the feat – on the River Thames in London, Friday July 23, 2010. (AP Photo/Gareth Fuller)

• Fast Facts United KingdomLearn about the people, economy and history.

// (AP)

A 50-year-old wheelchair-bound former U.S. marine and three teammates have become the first women to row nonstop around mainland Britain after completing the 2,000-mile journey.

Amateur rowers Belinda Kirk, Laura Thomasson, Beverley Ashton and Angela Madsen reached London’s Tower Bridge on Friday to finish the trip in 51 days, 16 hours, 42 minutes.

Madsen is a wheelchair-bound former U.S. marine from Long Beach, Calif. She has rowed the Atlantic and Indian oceans but says Britain “presented the most challenging and unpredictable weather patterns.”

The 50-year-old grandmother broke her finger setting off a flare but carried on with a strapped hand.

The quartet started the race against a men’s team June 1, but the men gave up after less than two weeks.

Five People Who Turned Awful Disabilities Into Superpowers



The next time you’re ready to call in sick because you got a paper cut on that really painful place between your thumb and pointer finger, you might want to consider the following stories. These folks not only didn’t let horrific injuries and life destroying disabilities get them down, they actually turned them into superpowers.
#5.
Douglas Bader, Alexey Maresyev, Colin “Hoppy” Hodgkinson

Who?

Three of the Allied Forces best fighter pilots in WWII.
The Condition:

We’ve mentioned Bader and Maresyev before; Bader for his uncanny ability to flirt his way out of multiple Nazi prison camps and Maresyev for his awesome inability to die. But here’s the thing: neither of them had legs.

That’s right. Both were decorated WWII pilots who racked up impressive records after crash landing their legs right the hell off. It’s not just a bizarre coincidence.

Maresyev could probably have frowned an enemy pilot to death.

The explanation lies with Hodgkinson, our third Ace of WWII, who lost his legs while practicing an aerial exercise blindfolded. Or more specifically, the answer lies with the follow-up question that story is likely to elicit: WHY WOULD THEY ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO FLY A MILLION DOLLAR PIECE OF EQUIPMENT WHILE FREAKING BLINDFOLDED?

THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA

How It’s An Advantage:

Unlike the Cracked Summer Intern Post-It Eating Contest, pilots didn’t fly “blind” because their superiors needed something hilarious to gamble on. Being able to fly without actually seeing anything was a part of a fighter pilots job thanks to a little something called G-force. As pilots and roller coaster enthusiasts will tell you, G-force is fine in moderation. But ramp up the G’s and that delightful tingle you get in your man pouch at the top of the first hill of a roller coaster can drain all the blood from your head, leaving you temporarily blind or, less temporarily, dead.

The fighter planes of the Second World War were capable of all kinds of airborne acrobatics that found pilots’ bodies moving in the opposite direction of their blood. Dogfights were a constant balance between out-maneuvering the guy trying to turn you into confetti, and trying not to steer the sight out of your eyes. One hairpin turn and you’d find yourself with all the blood your brain needs for seeing down in your feet. Or at least, that was a problem for people who had legs for their blood to drain into.

Bader, sitting on his awesome secret weapons: Nothing.

Having no legs, the blood is thought to have had less room to drain inside of legless pilots, allowing them to pull tighter turns inside their fighters and thereby kick more ass than your average, full-bodied pilot.

And ass they did kick. Throughout his legless career, Bader took out more than 22 German planes in less than two years. Maresyev completed over 86 combat missions, shot down 11 enemy aircraft (three in a single dogfight) and won the Golden Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. While Hodgkinson had less time in the air without legs, he managed two kills during the war, the second of which saved the life of Percy “Laddie” Lucas’s life, who went on to be the hero of the Siege of Malta, one of the most strategically important battles in all of WWII.

Cracked ranks it as the fourth best battle to watch while totally baked.

When taken in its entirety, it’s pretty clear that Marvel could be minting money if they’d latched onto Hodgkinson’s story: After losing his legs to an accident that is meant to prepare him for the effects of G-force in battle, he wakes up with an uncanny immunity to the effects of G-force, goes on to take out an F-14 with the oddly ironic superpower his origin story gave him, indirectly allowing the Allies to win one of the most important battles of the most important war in modern history.
#4.
Erika “Aya” Eiffel

Who?

The greatest archer in the world for a spell, Eiffel won all three National Cup events in 2003 breaking records left and right but mostly in the center because… you know.

Archery puns are always on target.
The Condition:

Love is a crazy thing. You never know when it’s going to sneak up on you or who you might fall for. One minute you’re enjoying the single life and WHAM! You’re standing on top of the Eiffel Tower, one of the most romantic locations in the world, ass over tea kettle in love! Also… you’re completely alone.

You see Erika has objectum sexuality (OS) a rare disorder in which women are attracted to objects. She “married” the Eiffel Tower in 2007 and changed her name to reflect the bond. Her other love affairs include the Golden Gate Bridge and the Berlin Wall. While we should all be so lucky to find a partner so solid, grounded and extremely well endowed…

…Mrs. Eiffel’s affliction is both medically recognized, and the 20th century equivalent of being gay in the Old West. You’re unlikely to win many friends in high school after explaining that, no, you like reeeeally love that bridge two towns over (Erika’s first crush). Erika spent her first 30 years hiding her true feelings from the world “for the sake of self preservation,” settling for easy to hide and transport inanimate objects such as the piece of fence she keeps in her room.
How It’s An Advantage:

One of the first inanimate objects Erika slummed it with was a bow she named “Lance.” While holding inanimate objects close enough to smell is raises a few eyebrows in most settings, Erika found solace in the world of archery.

In fact, she believes that if she hadn’t been in love with Lance, she may never have become a world-class archer. Her feelings for objects didn’t stop with Lance. Another one of her obsessions is with a katana (samurai sword) which lead her to win a world title in Japanese sword fighting. Still not badass enough? Well you’re in luck because she has also fallen for an F-15 fighter jet! Her flying skills improved so greatly during the course of that relationship that she won a $250,000 scholarship to the United States Air Force Academy.

Erika, on her way to the home of that kid who spread the rumor about her and a bed post in high school.
#3.
Dustin Carter

Who?

Dustin Carter is a wrestler. Now 20-years old, he became news worthy two years ago, after he had a 41-2 season at Hillsboro High School near Cincinnati, Ohio. While you may assume this is what passes as “newsworthy” in Ohio…

BREAKING NEWS: Still growing…
The Condition:

…Dustin’s story has also been told all over the country and the world as proof that anything is possible with a little hard work. Why is some high school wrestler getting all of this attention?

When he was five-years old, he contracted a rare blood disease that claimed all four of his limbs. As the homeless Vets rolling through New York City’s subway system will be glad to tell you, life without legs is hard enough. Losing both his legs, and half of each arm was no less challenging for Dustin, who grew up depressed and a straight “F” student.
How It’s An Advantage:

All of that changed in the eighth grade when he discovered wrestling. The sport allowed him to put his disability behind him, and in his first head to head match-up with his opponent… well, he got his ass kicked. What did you expect?

But with extensive training, lots of practice and a patient coach Dustin learned to make his disability work for him, and eventually made it all the way to the Division II state finals.

Concentrated awesomeness.

One of the most important skills a wrestler can have is the ability to “drop weight.” For most wrestlers, this involves doing unhealthy things to your body to sweat off pounds before weigh-in and then doing even more unhealthy things to your body to regain your natural weight before the actual match. But it’s all worth it when you step on the mat against a lighter opponent, and get to toss him around like a rag doll.

Or so we’re told.

Having dropped all the weight he needed to when he lost his arms and legs, Dustin’s 103 pounds put him easily into the smallest weight category for his sport. However, compared to his opponents, who had to jog around in trash bags before lugging their pain in the ass arms and legs with them, Dustin was proportionally much stronger.

Speaking of arms and legs, the part of wrestling that doesn’t involve weighing yourself like you’re being exchanged in a drug deal revolves around getting people’s limbs in various, uncomfortable holds. Dustin was a tough matchup for the same reason that lefty pitchers are coveted in baseball: They’re not what people are used to. How good you are as a wrestler is all about how good you are at getting someone in an arm bar, or bending their leg behind their head. For Dustin’s opponent’s it was just unorthodox, it must have been like stepping into the batter’s box against a pitcher who could throw an 80 MPH knuckler with his toes.

This made him unorthodox enough to get by people, even though his lack of limbs made the whole tossing them around like a rag doll thing pretty much impossi-

Will Smith says: “Oh HELLLL, naw.”

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18624_5-people-who-turned-disabilities-into-superpowers.html#ixzz0uXOozqEM

Wisconsin candidate can’t use controversial description

Ieshuh Griffin, an independent candidate for the Wisconsin state Assembly, holds up her nomination papers Wednesday, July 21, 2010, at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., after an election oversight board said the Milwaukee woman can not describe herself on the ballot as “NOT the ‘whiteman’s b—-.’”

A legislative candidate from Wisconsin can’t use a profane, racially charged phrase to describe herself on the ballot, an election oversight board decided Wednesday.

Ieshuh Griffin, an independent running for a downtown Milwaukee seat in the state Assembly, wants to use the phrase, “NOT the ‘whiteman’s b—-.’”

But the state’s Government Accountability Board voted to bar that wording, agreeing with a staff recommendation that it is pejorative and therefore not allowed.

State law allows independent candidates to have five words describing themselves placed after their names on the ballot as long as it’s not pejorative, profane, discriminatory or includes an obscene word or phrase.

Griffin, who is black, argued her case to the five white, retired judges on the board that regulates elections. She said the phrase was protected free speech.

“It’s a freedom of expression,” she said. “It’s not racial. It’s not a slur.”

She convinced three of the judges that the wording should be allowed, but two said it should not. One judge was absent, and Griffin needed four votes to succeed. Griffin said she intends to seek an injunction in federal court.

Board member Thomas Cane, a retired state appeals court judge, said he didn’t find the wording to be “particularly offensive.”

Fellow board member Thomas Barland, who spent 33 years as a circuit court judge in Eau Claire, agreed.

“She says a lot in five words,” he said. “It wasn’t pornographic, it wasn’t obscene and I didn’t interpret it as racial.”

Judge Gordon Myse, the board chairman, cast the third vote in favor of Griffin.

“Isn’t she saying, ‘I’m not under the white man’s direction? I’m independent of that.’ Isn’t that what she’s saying?” Myse said.

Roxanne Dunlap, a white woman from Sussex, felt compelled to speak up in the middle of the meeting, saying she was offended by the statement. She said if a white candidate wanted to have the statement “not the black man’s b—-” put on the ballot, it would be soundly rejected.

Griffin said her statement wasn’t directed at any one individual but the government as a whole. The b-word was referring to a female dog that rolls over, she said.

“I’m not making a derogatory statement to a group of people or an ethnic group,” she told the board. “I’m saying what I am not. Everyone I spoke with, elderly and young, understand my point of view.”

The phrase was included on nomination papers Griffin circulated to get the 200 signatures needed to be on the Nov. 2 ballot. Griffin, who described herself as a “30ish” community activist, will still appear as an independent candidate.

The Assembly district she hopes to represent covers the east side of Milwaukee and parts of Glendale. It’s currently represented by Democrat Annette Polly Williams, who is retiring. Three Democrats and Griffin are seeking to replace her.

Bulger killer Venables jailed over child abuse images



Jon Venables was given a new identity upon his release from prison in 2001

One of the killers of James Bulger has been jailed for two years after admitting downloading and distributing indecent images of children.

Now 27, Jon Venables was 10 when he and friend Robert Thompson murdered the toddler in Bootle, Merseyside, in 1993.

Venables was living in Cheshire when the images were found on his computer by a probation officer he had invited to his home, it has emerged.

James’s mother Denise Fergus said “justice had not been done”.

Her spokesman, Chris Johnson, said the two-year sentence “was simply not enough to meet the gravity of what this person did”.

‘Inadequate supervision’

Related stories

• Profile: Jon Venables
• Venables ‘thinks of Bulger daily’
• Statement in full: Jon Venables

Sentencing Venables, Mr Justice Bean said he had “colluded in the harm of children”.

The judge said it would be “wrong” for his sentence to be increased because of his previous crime.

But he said Venables would not be automatically freed after serving half of his jail term like any other prisoner and it would be for the Parole Board to determine when or if he would be released.

The judge partially lifted reporting restrictions to reveal Venables was living in Cheshire at the time of the offences and that the case was dealt with by Cheshire police and Cheshire probation service.

At the scene

Continue reading the main story

Dominic Casciani BBC News home affairs correspondent

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Court 14 was packed for this extraordinary moment of justice as Jon Venables spoke clearly and strongly to declare he was guilty of the three offences.

But this was no ordinary plea thanks to the unprecedented steps taken to protect Venables’ identity.

The screen in front of presiding judge Mr Justice Bean was set at such an angle that he alone could see the convicted murderer’s face – and any flicker of emotion that may have been apparent.

All that those in court, including James Bulger’s mother Denise Fergus, could hear was a disembodied voice.

She sat impassively, but her partner shook his head as he heard the details of the offences.

Lawyers for the media asked if the rest of the court could see the screen. They argued it was “a very serious departure” from the principle of open justice and the first time such steps had ever been taken for an adult criminal defendant.

But the judge refused their request, saying the risk of Venables being identified and later attacked justified the decision.

Robin Makin, the solicitor for James’s father Ralph Bulger, said giving somebody a false identity was a “liberal experiment” that was never really going to work.

Speaking outside the Old Bailey, he said: “What appears to have happened today, come out today, is that there must have been totally inadequate supervision and support from the probation service.”

He also said Mr Bulger was unhappy the judge had not taken into account James’s murder when sentencing.

Venables was banned from using a computer or the internet for five years and will be placed on the Sex Offenders Register for 10 years upon any eventual release.

He pleaded guilty to three offences under the 1978 Protection of Children Act. The first involved downloading 57 indecent pictures of children between February 2009 and February 2010.

The second involved distributing three indecent photographs of children in February 2010, while a third involved distributing 42 images in February 2008.

It has also been revealed that Cheshire police produced a “threat assessment” to try to establish what could happen to Venables were his assumed identity revealed.

That assessment concluded that Venables would face the highest possible risk of being attacked if his name was either published in the media or known elsewhere in society.

The threat assessment document said “someone could find Venables with the intention of killing him”.

Venables and Thompson were released in 2001 with new identities and it was the fear that his had been discovered that led Venables to contact his probation officer.

When the officer arrived, Venables was trying to delete files from his computer and remove the hard drive, prosecutors said.

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// Chris Johnson, spokesman for Denise Fergus: “Justice has not been done”

He was subsequently taken to a police station with the machine where it was examined by officers, they added.

Louis Mably, prosecuting, said eight of the images were at level four, the second most serious category of child pornography. Two were level three, three were level two, and 44 were level one, the least serious, he added. The images involved children as young as two and some showed the rape of young girls.

Edward Fitzgerald QC, representing Venables, said his murder conviction had cast a long shadow over his life, and he had been living a “wholly abnormal” existence, punctuated by “vilification, demonisation, and threats to his life”.

He said his client had held down a job ever since his release, but it had been difficult for him to form a relationship with a woman because it was a condition of his licence that he had to tell anyone he was in a close relationship with his true identity.

Venables was arrested for affray in September 2008 but the charge was dropped. He claimed he had acted in self-defence, but was given a formal warning that his actions had breached the terms of his release.

Mr Fitzgerald said Venables had also become addicted to drugs, including cocaine, and was cautioned for possession in December 2008.

James’s mother said after the hearing that she was “surprised and concerned” that Venables had not been recalled to prison following those incidents and called for Justice Secretary Ken Clarke to investigate the actions of the probation service.

The Ministry of Justice said a review would be carried out, but “the direct responsibility for these offences must lie with Jon Venables”.

James Bulger was killed a month before his third birthday

Mr Mably said Venables’ computer “indicated the defendant had an extensive history of searching for and downloading indecent images of children using the internet”.

In a statement made to police in March, Venables said he considered it “breaking the last taboo”, but insisted he had “no intention” of having sex with a young girl.

The court also heard that in online communications Venables claimed to be a 35-year-old married woman called Dawn Smith who abused her eight-year-old daughter, and offered to sell access to the child.

In a statement read to the court, Venables said he was “genuinely ashamed” of the offences.

Venables and Thompson abducted two-year-old James while he was shopping with his mother at the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle on 12 February 1993.

The toddler was beaten with bricks and iron bars and his body left on a railway line.

His killers were detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the usual substitute for life imprisonment for juvenile offenders.

In 2001, when they turned 18, both were freed, despite public outcry.

More on This Story

Related stories

• Profile: Jon Venables 23 JULY 2010, UK
• Venables ‘thinks of Bulger daily’ 23 JULY 2010, UK
• Statement in full: Jon Venables 23 JULY 2010, UK
• Denise Fergus: ‘Justice not done’ 23 JULY 2010, UK