The lakes on Titan have some surprising chemical contents, according to the latest data from the Cassini spacecraft. One of the exotic attractions of Saturn’s moon Titan is the possibility that it has oceans and lakes, with waves and breakers not unlike those on Earth. In the 1990s, astronomers ruled out the possibility of a global ocean using radar measurements taken from Earth but the possibility of lakes remained
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The Surprising Contents of Titan’s Lakes
As reported in today’s The AmLaw Daily some “Law Firms Cautious About ACC Ranking System.” You may recall that the Association of Corporate Counsel announced their Value Index at last month’s annual meeting in Boston; and that it involves ranking outside law firms “based on evaluations from in-house lawyers.” Apparently a number of firms aren’t too happy about that, and the anonymous nature of the evaluations. Is it because they won’t see the evaluations, or because they’re being evaluated in the first place, that their unhappy? Two thoughts come to mind
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ACC Value Index: what’s all the fuss about?
The recent TPI Index from TPI highlighted an interesting trend where ‘a few very large Telco-to-Telco contracts – instances where one telecommunications carrier outsources its network operations requirements to another telecommunications service provider – accounted for more than 30 percent of the Broader Market’s total….. Compare your salary Use the IT salary benchmark wizard and know the average salary differences between different job functions. Join activeTechPros
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Are Telcos the New Drivers of the Outsourcing Industry?
The dark red spot is the first surface detail ever seen on a Kuiper Belt Object Discovered in 2004 in an orbit that ranges between 34 and 51 astronomical units from the Sun, Haumea is one of the largest Kuiper Belt Objects and also one of the oddest. Haumea has two moons, a mass about a third of Pluto’s and a strange elongated shape. It rotates every 3.9 hours making it the most rapidly spinning object of its size in the Solar System, probably as a result of a collision in the distant past.
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Dark Red Spot Found on Kuiper Belt Object Haumae
In case you missed “50 Ways to Market Your Practice” in the October 2007 issue of the ABA Journal’s Law News Now it is certainly worth looking at, especially by solo’s and small firms. Although you might think that some of the ideas are hokey, or would not fit your personal style or your particular practice, it still merits a quick read. So, take 5 minutes to look over the 50 tips, highlight those that strike your fancy, and then go back later to reflect on your selections more thoroughly
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Quick Tips on Marketing Your Solo or Small Firm Practice
The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC)’s Value Index was announced and shared with members at last month’s annual meeting in Boston. As reported in my earlier post , the criteria for measuring outside law firm’s performance is based on a grading system from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) relating to the following service areas: Understands Objectives/Expectations Legal Expertise Efficiency/Process Management Responsiveness/Communication Predictable Cost/Budgeting Skills Results Delivered/Execution Joyce Smiley in her November issue of “Verbatim” relates that a key question is also part of the index; to wit: “Would you use this firm again?;” and the ACC encourages “law firms to adjust their client satisfaction criteria to match the Value Index.” A wise move. Suffice it to say, every firm should ask at least their key clients how they stack up against those six criteria whether their in-house counsel belongs to ACC or not.
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How Does Your Firm Stack Up Against The ACC Value Index?
A new model of the way the THz waves interact with DNA explains how the damage is done and why evidence has been so hard to gather Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation that fills the slot in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes , paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and “frisk” people at distance
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How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA
Since the budget process is underway in many firms for 2010, I thought it was timely to talk about next year’s marketing budgets. Actually, I received a Google Alert last week about a post I did in the very first week I started blogging in January 2005. In re-reading that post, I decided to share it mainly because I wouldn’t change the gist of it, and newer readers may not have seen it: January 12, 2005 Posted By Tom Law Firm Marketing Budgets?
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Base Your Marketing Budget On Plans Not Percentages!
The optimism about the future of earthquake prediction is not justified by the quality of the forecasts Earthquake prediction is a science fraught with difficulty. Humankind has a very real and understandable need to quantify the risks associated with living and working in areas known to be at risk. We want to know when and where the big one will strike.
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The Failing Future For Earthquake Forecasts
Fill a narrow box with beads and set it spinning and the resulting patterns are surprising, beautiful and unexplained. In 1939, the Japanese researcher Yositisi Oyama, showed that a rotating drum half-filled with beads of different sizes causes the beads to demix forming into various patterns of segregation. This is a potentially interesting way to separate such mixtures.
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The Unexpected Behaviour of Beads in a Box
The techniques developed for analyzing the data from particle accelerators could help spot debris impacts during space shuttle launches. When and if the Large Hadron Collider finally rumbles into action, it will produce a firehose of data like nothing physicists have ever seen. Ths data will consists if the tracks from the debris from roughly a billion collisions per second, as measured by particle detectors clustered around the collision sites
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How to Prevent Columbia-like Space Shuttle Disasters
According to the recently released survey by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Serengeti Law, the top priority for CLO’s, for the first time in the survey’s eight years, is “controlling the costs spent on outside counsel,” as reported in today’s issue of The AmLaw Daily . Further, the ACC Value Index will be released today at the ACC annual conference in Boston, and consists of evaluations of a number of factors on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent), including: Understands Objectives/Expectations Legal Expertise Efficiency/Process Management Responsiveness/Communication Predictable Cost/Budgeting Skills Results Delivered/Execution There is a wealth of information about the ACC Value Challenge (of which the Value Index is just a part)
The way air mixes with ocean water as waves break is an important parameter in many climate models. Now computer scientists have modelled the process In recent years, in the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics has run a gallery of fluid motion at its annual meet. This year’s meeting in Minneapolis in November is no different and the wannabe stars of the silver screen are starting to post their entries on the arXiv.
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Breaking Wave Simulation Captures Air Entrapment
In addition to the three mentioned last time there are seven other mistakes that Daniel Barnett covers in his free eBook “Top Ten Marketing Mistakes Lawyers Make…and What You Should Be Doing Instead.” I agree with all of them, but want to particularly call my readers attention to the next three, and leave the remainder for your reading. Mistake #4 – Forgetting to talk to your clients… This should probably be listed as Mistake #1 since talking with your clients and seeking feedback is so important. As Barnett says “feedback is not an optional extra.” Some lawyers false assumptions include: “Clients know all about my services” ‘If they have a question, they’ll call me” “They understand I’m busy” (and don’t mind my not responding quickly) Bullfeathers! Staying in touch with clients is critical and should be done constantly
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Marketing Mistakes Lawyers Make – Part II
Ran across the July/August issue of the ABA’s Law Practice magazine which contains an article by Linda Oligschlaeger with the The Missouri Bar . Although her advice to solos and small firm lawyers covers practice management generally, I was particularly taken by 7 of her 15 tips which relate to marketing in these (or any for that matter) economic times: Develop a marketing and business development plan ASAP, if you don’t have one; Rekindle relationships with other lawyers and business acquaintances (or any of your contacts) who might refer work to you; Work on providing the best client service possible, and that includes every person (lawyer and staff) that has any contact with clients; Consider refocusing your niche(s) to take advantage of new opportunities in the current climate; Drop the billable hour (okay she doesn’t put it that strongly) in favor of alternative fees. As Linda puts it: “Many clients resist what they consider a ‘blank check’ billing method, especially in this economy;” Offer assistance to civic or charitable organizations in your community which may pay off down the road; and Visit your clients in their place of business (which just happens to be my No
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Recession Tips for Solo and Small Firm Lawyers
We’ve witnessed the rapid rise of social networks and Web 2.0 applications in recent years, so it’s inevitable these tools would eventually make their way into the enterprise realm. One Singapore startup, Socialwok.com, decided to tap this market opportunity and offer what it calls, an….. Compare your salary Use the IT salary benchmark wizard and know the average salary differences between different job functions
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Filling missing social layer in Google Apps
A new way to analyze human reaction times shows that the brain processes data no faster than 60 bits per second. For more than a century, psychologists have used reaction time as a window into the brain. The thinking is that information processing takes time, so the average time taken to begin or complete a task reflects the duration of the cognitive processes involved in it.
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New Measure of Human Brain Processing Speed
A formal mathematical analogy between the way metamaterials and spacetime effect light could allow scientists to recreate Big Bang-type events in the lab. The analogy between the physics of superfluid helium and general relativity is well known. The mathematics that describe these systems are essentially identical so measuring the properties of one automatically tells you how the other behaves
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Recreating the Big Bang Inside Metamaterials
A decent-sized solar sail could accelerate out of the solar system in no time, which raises new challenges for navigators If we’re ever to travel a decent distance from Earth, we’re going to have to break our dependence on chemical propulsion systems: it’s just not possible to carry enough chemical propellant to get up to a decent trot. One interesting alternative is a solar sail, which uses the force of solar radiation pressure to accelerate
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Relativistic Navigation Needed for Solar Sails
It was on a plane trip back home from Singapore that I was able to grab a copy of a magazine (I cant remember if it was Newsweek or The Economist) which featured a guy named Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize laureate for economics in….. Compare your salary Use the IT salary benchmark wizard and know the average salary differences between different job functions. Join activeTechPros
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Regulating the unregulated telecoms market