What if you could get, for free, a miracle substance to alleviate symptoms of pain, depression, chronic fatigue, attention deficit disorder, stress, hypertension, back pain, peptic ulcer disease, migraines, arthritis pain, colitis, chronic constipation, kidney stones, heartburn, high cholesterol, morning sickness, and obesity?

You can. This wonder elixir is something we often overlook, yet it is available in unlimited quantities in almost every household.

It is almost too simple to believe that even the water we get from our taps has the power to reduce and eliminate severe medical conditions. Yet in the next few pages you will see how water should be the treatment of choice for pain, inflammation, and autoimmune diseases. Instead of reaching for more drugs, that are increasingly expensive and often have negative side effects, we should drink more water instead. The water you use to treat your ailments doesn’t have to be spring water or distilled; purified water from your household tap will do just as well.

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According to the National Association of Realtors, median existing home prices are down 7.1% from last July — and aren’t expected to recover until well into 2009.

One way to buck the trend and boost the value of your home is to make some basic renovations. There’s no need to embark on big-ticket projects — you probably won’t recoup all of the costs anyway. Instead, seek out some inexpensive projects that will not only brighten up the place, but put a little extra cash in your pocket should you decide to sell your home. Here are five worth considering:

1) Paint

Cost: $60 for two gallons of Benjamin Moore interior paint — enough to paint the walls and ceiling of a 12-by-15 room.

A little paint or varnish can go a long way toward improving your home’s value. One fresh coat (along with a little sanding and caulking) wipes out the scuffs, chips, cracks and other damage that clearly convey wear and tear. Make your first priority the front door, where everyone from visitors to potential buyers lingers. “You’re standing on the front porch and you have a good 15, 20 seconds just to look,” says David Lupberger, home improvement expert with ServiceMagic.com, a Golden, Colo.-based contractor marketplace. Inside, don’t forget to freshen up the baseboards, doors and ceilings after you tackle the walls.

Just remember to stick to neutral colors if you’re thinking of selling sometime soon, advises Lupberger. Buyers might not share your appreciation for the eye-popping combo of Fireball Orange and Traffic Light Green in the living room.

2) Basic Maintenance

Cost: $250 for a home inspection, including walk-through and report of suggested fixes.

“You have to be careful with remodeling because you can spend money in the wrong place and not get it all back,” says Lyle Martin, co-founder of Assist-2-Sell, a Reno, Nev.-based real estate brokerage. A common mistake: making aesthetic upgrades while ignoring basic maintenance. New bathroom tiles mean nothing if the plumbing is faulty or the underlying wall has dry rot.

If you don’t address these problems before putting your home on the market, it’ll cost you. Buyers traditionally negotiate a $2 discount for every $1 in damage that turns up in a home inspection, according to home inspection service HouseMaster.

Aim to complete a few small maintenance projects each year, like fixing that creaky floorboard or replacing a cracked light switch plate, advises Martin. Not sure where to start? Hire a home inspector to point out which areas would be problematic were your home on the market.

3) Energy-Efficiency Upgrades

Cost: $500 to replace your old clothes washer with an Energy-Star certified Frigidaire washer (including a $50 utility-provided rebate and an estimated $50 in energy savings the first year).

Energy-efficiency projects such as installing Energy-Star windows or swapping for a high-efficiency boiler are one of the few upgrades that hold their value in a down market. Not only will such improvements cut your energy bills, but they’ll also be more attractive to buyers who are hunting for more earth-friendly homes. “Homeowners can show buyers their utility bills as documentation of the effects of those energy-efficiency improvements,” says Rozanne Weissman, a spokeswoman for the Alliance to Save Energy. “With energy prices so high, it makes a big difference.”

Look for incentives and rebates through your utility providers and state and local governments. And don’t forget about federal tax credits. Both the House and Senate have given tentative approval to a two-year extension of the energy-efficiency tax credits from the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which offered a credit of up to $500 for select projects completed in 2006 and 2007. Look to the Tax Incentives Assistance Project to refresh your memory on what criteria projects must meet to qualify.

4) Install New Fixtures

Cost: $86 for an American Standard faucet, 10 drawer pulls and 10 knobs.

Giving a room a more modern look requires little more than a screwdriver and some new fixtures. “New hardware can completely freshen a house,” says Amy Matthews, host of DIY Network’s “Sweat Equity.” “Things that are outdated are things that buyers would turn their noses up at.” As far as fixes go, it’s dirt cheap. New drawer handles or knobs can be had for as little as $2 each. There are also plenty of options out there for personalizing your space. Home Depot lists almost 900 kitchen and bathroom faucets priced below $50. You might also try swapping out ceiling-mount light fixtures or doorknobs.

5) Landscaping

Cost: $200 for five each of dogwood, forsythia and red-flowering butterfly shrubs, plus $100 for enough mulch to cover 200 square feet of planting beds.

“A good first impression is crucial,” says Jennifer Michaels, senior vice president for FSBO.com, a for-sale-by-owner listing site. Your carefully groomed landscaping — or, in contrast, weed-overgrown jungle — is one of the first things a potential buyer notices. But enhancing curb appeal is also something every seller does. You’ll score more points with a yard that was obviously fixed up long before you listed your property.

Savings can be had as well, as long as you plant wisely. Drought-resistant shrubs require less water, while perennials won’t require repeat plant purchases in coming years. Leafy deciduous trees shade your home from the hot summer sun, and allow maximum heat transfer inside during cold winters.

Copyrighted, SmartMoney.com. All Rights Reserved.

Written by Kelli B. Grant

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Former options trader and hedge fund manager Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “the black swan”—a human incarnation of the sort of highly improbable but overpowering event that he investigates in his bestselling 2007 book of the same name. Like the strangely hued avian that was thought not to exist until 17th-century Dutch explorers discovered its native habitat, Australia, Taleb fits his own definition: 1) He lies outside the realm of normal expectations; 2) He has had an extreme impact, particularly in the world of finance; and 3) Many observers—journalists, admirers, and especially detractors—have been at pains to explain and categorize him after the fact.

Taleb’s unlikely existence began 48 years ago in Lebanon, where he was born into a politically prominent, highly educated Greek Orthodox family. When he was 15, catastrophe struck in the form of the Lebanese civil war, an unexpected anomaly after 3,000 years of relative calm. He spent his war years reading in the family basement, hiding from the mayhem on the streets, and eventually received advanced degrees at Wharton and the University of Paris before going to work on Wall Street trading derivatives, currencies, commodities, and other complex instruments.

As a 29-year-old options trader at First Boston, he became rich on a single day—Black Monday, the Dow crash of October 19, 1987—when he had the foresight, or amazing good luck, to make tens of millions of dollars by shorting the market. Then one black swan followed another as Taleb, a lifelong non-smoker, was diagnosed with throat cancer. He beat the disease and in 2001 another black swan appeared when his first attempt at writing a book, Fooled by Randomness, was a cult hit and then a surprise bestseller. Today he is a principal in Universa, a billion-dollar hedge fund based in Santa Monica, California, but he spends most of his time as a much sought-after scholar—thinking, reading, writing, and occasionally giving high-dollar lectures.

In an exclusive interview last Friday with Portfolio.com—conducted as Taleb wandered, almost randomly, from his favorite French restaurant to his yacht club to a sidewalk café in the unnamed New York bedroom community where he lives—he shared his thoughts on the nature of risk, the ignorance of so-called experts, and the perils of boring bankers in suits and ties.

Lloyd Grove: You don’t watch videos and you don’t read newspapers. Why don’t you watch videos?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The moving image doesn’t have the aesthetic appeal of the written word. And I don’t like people to watch images to get a representation of the world because it’s going to be severely marred. If you see a plane crashing it’s going to distort your statistical representation of the world. The press already has a problem in what it represents. They give you what can get your attention, so the press is not going to make you aware of the 40,000 to 50,000 car crashes every year that people die in—you don’t hear about that. You hear about a plane crashing, you hear about a soldier dead in a war, because you have some emotional attachment to it. You don’t hear of people dying of diabetes. You don’t realize that this—this thing on the table, sugar—is killing more people than anything.

L.G.: Granted that videos are not an accurate statistical representation of what’s going on in the real world, but why aren’t you watching them?

N.N.T: I don’t like it. My world is much, much more serene without audiovisual stimulation. That’s too much. I understand the nature of how to cope with uncertainty in a world which is human. I’m a classicist. I live like a classicist. I think like a classicist. I don’t like movies. I just read. I like reading. I like music, but I can’t listen to music while doing something else.

L.G.: I don’t want to invade your privacy, but do you allow your kids?

N.N.T.: Yeah, I don’t influence other people.

L.G.: So if they say “We’re going to go see Batman” —

N.N.T.: I don’t tell people “Don’t watch movies.” There are plenty of good movies. I tell people don’t get your representation of the news from television, because it hits you in a part of your brain, and the way it hits you is much more the story than if you’d read it. And if you read it, it’s much more distorting if you read words than if you’re reading statistics. When did I stop watching news on television? I never really watched television, even as a child, I never liked it. I grew up with a lot of books, and television for me was something that other people did. I never watched sports, so I don’t watch sports. I bought a TV set when I was in school here at Wharton [business school at the University of Pennsylvania] and hardly ever turned it on.

L.G.: Because it reduces something to—

N.N.T.: A burning building is going to be a lot more anecdotal than a statement about what happened—and a statement about what happened is going to be a lot more anecdotal than statistics of what happens in the world to put it in context. To give you an idea, I go to Beirut all the time. If I watched television, I couldn’t—it would sort of convince me to not go. The risk of death is nothing, right? I mean, it’s minor compared to the risk of being killed in a car accident, you see?

L.G.: So statistically it’s more likely to have a car accident and injure yourself in a Westchester bedroom community than in—

N.N.T.: Than in Lebanon. Iraq is the only place where you’re vastly much more likely to get hurt or killed, but if you count how many people die every year in the States by car versus how many people die violent deaths in Lebanon, it’s minor.

L.G.: And why don’t you read newspapers?

N.N.T.: Newspapers I stopped reading in the ’80s. You know how I know a subject is worth it? If you hear about it in a social setting. That’s the best filter.

L.G.: So if you go to a party, they’re screeners for you?

N.N.T.: In a normal society, people talk about events. By not having much exposure to TV, I’m necessarily faced with having a contextual reality around me which corresponds a lot more to the normal one, the social fabric and stuff like that. I do go online. You want to minimize your exposure to very bad uncertainty, and maximize your exposure to small events. If you live in Iowa, and are locked up in your house, even if you have internet, you’re not going to get exposure to the world of ideas. Most ideas came from serendipity, and you want to maximize serendipity. How do you maximize serendipity? You go to parties, okay?

L.G.: But you know what the markets are doing.

N.N.T.: Same thing with the markets. I don’t know what they’re doing at any point in time except when they do a lot—because your brain cannot distinguish between small and big. We have so much evidence of that. Some events have massive consequences, and you should look at them. But if you look at the Dow and it moves a little, it’s not even statistically significant, you cannot see it without some emotional reaction and some theorizing. So you want to theorize as little as possible. But today, I am interested in the market, because the euro had the biggest move in a long time. Today, I’m concerned. The euro moved a lot.

L.G.: Downward.

N.N.T.: Yeah, and I’m interested—so today it’s information. When something is moving barely, it’s not information. If you were to read the newspaper account of things, the discussion should be, because of the size of the move today, a billion times longer than the discussion you get on a regular day. It moved 3 cents. To $1.50-something. That is worth discussing when it happens once a year in the euro. If the stock market crashes, that’s information. If it moves five points, it’s not. So when you listen to radio, they’re going to tell you in the same-length program whether it moved five points, or 23 percent. And the lengths of newspapers should be in proportion to the importance of the facts—and they’re not.

L.G.: Is your interest in the movement of the euro today because you advise a hedge fund?

N.N.T.: It’s too complicated, because I have—well, I can’t talk about my investments. People are reading too much into what I say, so I’m not going to disclose everything I’m doing, see? People take a small piece of what I do and then read too much into it.

L.G.: That must be a weird phenomenon.

N.N.T: I know. But I’m a thinker about randomness and my ideas about randomness are the ones that matter, not what I ate for breakfast or whether I watch television.

L.G.: And this “hating ties” business, and I know you’re being funny, but you distrust people who wear ties?

N.N.T.: It correlates rather well with incompetence.

L.G.: You lambaste bankers as boring people in suits and ties who pretend that they’re very prudent but are in fact taking reckless risks without even understanding them.

N.N.T.: Exactly. If they wear a tie they look conservative. The guy in Silicon Valley looks wild, but he’s less risky than a banker.

L.G.: So bankers are actually mad men in sane peoples’ clothing?

N.N.T.: Exactly. One second. [Stares intensely into his BlackBerry.] Before we met, I was trying to do something…

L.G.: Are you trying to execute a trade? Are you losing money?

N.N.T.: I have receipts, I have a business. I get a lot of income from my books in Europe. I just want to make sure that I’m not bothered by that drop [in the euro]. I sell three times more in the U.K. than here. It sold 178,000 copies—115,000 in the last three months. But I’ve got income coming from different places, and I set up contracts where I’m paid in local currency.

L.G.: And the dollar is advancing against the pound.

N.N.T.: Not good for me. But what I do is, I allocate a portion of it, I keep it in pounds in the U.K.—I’m in London every month—and a portion of it in euros that I spend there, and then the rest I’ve got to hedge it…Have you read this book called The 4-Hour Workweek?

L.G.: No.

N.N.T.: It’s similar to these concepts. I try to avoid drag-down work, so when I write, I don’t write more than an hour in any given day. When I’ve done an hour, I make sure I don’t write more. And I make sure I don’t work hard because when you work hard, you sort of dilute yourself.

L.G.: You probably define “work” more narrowly than other people.

N.N.T.: Yeah, probably. Writing is not work for me.

L.G.: Yes, it almost made me hate you when you wrote in your book that it “wrote itself.”

N.N.T.: Yeah, I only do things where there’s a natural stimulation. I had no natural stimulation to sit in a meeting, so I would not sit in a meeting, and that has worked for me. I want to free up the time to think—that requires the details in my reading and my writing and thinking. Enjoyable activities. When I’m writing, if I get bored, I’ll stop immediately, mid-sentence, that’s it, I don’t write anything that bores me…You have a copy of The Black Swan? Let me show you, I think I have it here, page 225, in the footnote. Read it.

L.G: [Reads] “Likewise, the government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at their risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry, their large staff of scientists deem these events ‘unlikely.’”

N.N.T: That’s the central point. The rest is noise.

L.G.: You wrote that footnote in 2005?

N.N.T: Yes, but actually I saw their positions in 2003, when a very smart journalist, Alex Berenson of the New York Times, came to me and said, Can I show you the risk of Fannie Mae? When I saw it, I almost choked. [In Berenson’s August 2003 article, Taleb was quoted as saying Fannie Mae and other major holders of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities chronically underestimate the odds of a big move in interest rates that could decimate the value of their portfolios, over-relying on computer models that don’t account for rare but devastating events, i.e. black swans. “The fact that they have not blown up in the past doesn’t mean that they’re not going to blow up in the future. The math is bogus,” he told the Times.] The core of my idea, the central problem here, is not to be a sucker for 1,000 days—not to be a turkey. See?

L.G.: In other words, just because you’re a turkey and being well fed for 999 days doesn’t mean the butcher isn’t going to get you on the 1,000th day?

N.N.T.: Correct. The problem of The Black Swan is that people don’t understand the place in the world that we know the least about, where our knowledge is the softest, are where the most charlatans exist—and that’s pretty much predicting rare events. I’m talking about “Extremistan” [the complex real world, as Taleb defines it, where an unpredictable and devastating event can dictate the outcome, as opposed to “Mediocristan,” a bogus model of reality favored by “charlatans” where no rare events occur and probabilities are distributed along a predictable bell curve.] That is my big problem. In 2003, I saw that they didn’t have a clue about the risks. So I looked at the report, I made a statement in the New York Times that these guys don’t know what’s going on, and I was pestered by bankers completely. And then, right after, of course, the chairman of Fannie Mae [Franklin Raines] resigned, so they left me alone, but I later heard people on it wanted to sue me for defaming Fannie Mae. I heard that they were very angry about my statement that you can’t manage the risks. But I wish someone had sued me because I would’ve had the chance to warn society about this.

The way that I look at it, people who live in Extremistan, not understanding that they’re in Extremistan, build up positions on rare events because “they don’t happen”—and businesses blow up when these events do happen. It doesn’t take long to understand if you’re exposed to it or not. Instead, they produce all these theories, there’s a Nobel Prize in economics for them, and these theories don’t work. So my request for people making bets against the black swan is to just tell us “We don’t know anything.” They’ll come in with some scientists to produce numbers, but they’re unreliable. In other words, if you’re piloting a plane, tell the passengers, “I don’t know the probability of this plane crashing.” That’s not what they did. The other problem I have is, most people don’t realize that some businesses are positively exposed to black swans and some are negatively exposed to black swans.

L.G.: Like high-tech businesses?

N.N.T: Positively exposed. Some of them are both—like real estate. But what happened was that individuals get the upside, and banks lose the downside. Big business is exposed to negative black swans. Take banks. I wrote in The Black Swan that 193 banks lost 100 percent of everything they ever made on Latin America, but not to worry—that can’t happen to other businesses, right? Now it’s a big $1.4 trillion loss. Look at how much money that banks have made in history. These institutions are very good at losing every penny they make outside the risk-taking, like Citibank and all these firms. We’re bailing them out now.

At a micro level, I don’t have a lot of things to say, except, “Don’t rescue banks.” … I think that the longer you defer the big non-bailout, the harder it’s going to get for us, because banks aren’t learning. Think about it. The biggest problem we have on Wall Street, the classical one, is “How many people do you know who made millions when their investments went wrong?” The Fannie Mae chairman, all these guys, didn’t they make a lot of money? Did they pay back when they lost? They had a moral hazard, and you and I are financing it. I don’t know what we should do in a particular case. In general, if there’s some guiding principles, I think government makes things worse. Now that we face globalization, the government is out there to create more volatility and more instability because the nation-state is not a structure that’s adapted to the modern world. So they still use bogus metrics.

L.G.: What about all these mortgages that are going into default? Does the government have no role?

N.N.T.: I don’t know now what to do. I told people about the subprime problem before it happened, so I told people how to prevent it, by looking at risk of banks. And people for 10 years would make fun of me, for 10 years made my life miserable, more than 10 years, from 1994 on. Eleven years ago, 1997, is when I attacked these methods to evaluate risk, and people have been giving me a hard time. And now look at what was caused by their pseudo-science, “measuring” risk!

Economics is a tragedy for me. Because look at how the whole world now is designed according to some ideas that have not proved adequate. The whole financial system. We don’t understand economic policy, do you realize that? Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates thinking it would help the economy. All it did was push banks to take risks—hidden risks. Do you realize that we don’t understand globalization? Globalization increases Extremistan. That’s one problem with this Tom Friedman guy—he [the bestselling author of The World Is Flat, which argues the advantages of globalization in the internet age] didn’t seem to understand the very simple dynamics that globalization forces redundancy out of the system. And whenever you don’t have redundancy, you have Extremistan. Things are way too efficient, so the smallest mistake blows up. We depend so much on the internet. Tomorrow, if there’s a problem in Bangalore, we’re toast for a long time, you see?

I’m on a committee at the Pentagon, [the Highland Forum, a study group on risk] and one of the founders of the internet is on it and all these people understand that we need more redundancy in the system to avoid a second crisis that may come from the internet, because we don’t understand it. So, in other words, I have a lot of lists of what to do, you see, but they’re all unpopular or unpleasant.

The structure of uncertainty in the world is vastly greater than we think. So let’s stop playing the narrative fallacy. Take economics, for example. How many economists figured out that when people go to the store to buy products from China, they’re raising the price of oil at the pump? How many people thought of that? They raise the price at the pump just by going there.

L.G.: Buying things from China, whose economy then has an exploding demand for oil?

N.N.T.: Yeah, people don’t think of that. We don’t live in a simple structure, and all these models are useless. How did the internet come about? From Ronald Reagan spending a lot of money for defense against Russians, his obsessive disorder with the Russians. Thanks to him I can call my mom for 8 cents a minute in Lebanon.

L.G.: An unintended positive outcome. Viagra is another example. [Pfizer scientists discovered the erectile dysfunction remedy while trying to develop a heart medication.]

N.N.T.: Beyond Viagra. Almost everything. A lot of things in medicine that we thought came by design in fact came by serendipity and were dressed up later as design. My point is what I call “rationalism” versus “empiricism.” Rationalism is a platonic way of viewing the world—I call it “platonicity”—where you want to put the world in a box. But empirical reality is different. In my next book, Tinkering [due at some indeterminate point in the future, because Taleb refuses deadlines], I’ve made the case that medicine failed when it was platonic, because we’re suckers for pseudo-experts that will kill you. We know that in the past, surgeons multiplied your risk of death by four times.

L.G.: If you went to the hospital in the 19th century, you were increasing your risk?

N.N.T.: Up until Semmelweis [mid-19th-century Hungarian physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, who, over much official opposition, introduced hand-washing with chlorinated lime solutions], there was a high probability of a death sentence attached to giving birth in a hospital. But then again, life expectancy did not increase thanks to doctors. The big break didn’t even come until 1940 when we had penicillin. So what I’m saying is we’re suckers. We’d go to a doctor just to have the illusion of control. Likewise, we give ourselves to pseudo-experts simply because we believe these people help us.

Montaigne understood it. Don’t ask a doctor if you need an examination. Montaigne said, “Don’t ask a general if you need peace.” Warren Buffett repeats it as “Don’t ask a barber if you need a haircut.” I mean, I’m not providing the answer because I don’t want to sound like a charlatan, but in fact when I dig down, I wrote some rules. For my next book, I’m calling for more bottom-up tinkering, less top-down theorizing. I have a lot of things to say, but I’ll talk to you about it when the thing comes out.

L.G.: Whenever that is, because you don’t do deadlines?

N.N.T.: My minimum is three years from today to deliver the manuscript. With The Black Swan, they were very, very nice to me at Random House. They said “when you’re ready.” It’s the same thinking with Tinkering. You’ve got to tinker with a book.

L.G.: I read that you got a $4 million advance.

N.N.T.: I don’t know if it’s true.

L.G.: Have you already put it in euros and you don’t know what the dollar value of it is now?

N.N.T.: Some of it comes from euros, but I have no idea.

L.G.: Are the people who are running our financial institutions capable of learning from their mistakes and fixing them?

N.N.T.: No, and this is the problem with incentives. A C.E.O.’s incentive is not to learn, because he’s not paid on real value. He’s paid on cosmetic value. So he’s paid to be nice to the Merrill Lynch analysts or the Wall Street analysts. So this is where the problem starts.

L.G.: What if you hear that a bunch of Wall Street folks got together and decided to offer some risk-management prescriptions so we won’t have this kind of subprime meltdown again? [Last week, top risk managers at several Wall Street firms presented just such a report on the fiasco to the secretary of the Treasury.] Are you skeptical?

N.N.T.: I don’t know, I just try to stay out of it, to just not lose my intuition. It seems to me that a lot of these people who shot the poor guy are now trying to medicate him. The very same people that were responsible for the crisis are trying to fix it. The problem is, I’m so suspicious of government, particularly the Federal Reserve, that I see self-serving stuff all the way, particularly in hindsight. I don’t want to talk about the crisis in hindsight. I spoke about it in foresight beforehand, and that’s it. So now I’m moving on to the next crisis.

L.G.: Describe to me the fallacy involved in coming at a crisis with hindsight and reinterpreting it and then coming up with solutions for it.

N.N.T.: Because then you get a Maginot Line problem. [After World War I, the French erected concrete fortifications to prevent Germany from invading again—a response to the previous war, which proved ineffective for the next one.] You know, they make sure they solve that particular problem, the Germans will not invade from here. The thing you have to be aware of most obviously is scenario planning, because typically if you talk about scenarios, you’ll overestimate the probability of these scenarios. If you examine them at the expense of those you don’t examine, sometimes it has left a lot of people worse off, so scenario planning can be bad. I’ll just take my track record. Those who did scenario planning have not fared better than those who did not do scenario planning. A lot of people have done some kind of “make-sense” type measures, and that has made them more vulnerable because they give the illusion of having done your job. This is the problem with risk management. I always come back to a classical question. Don’t give a fool the illusion of risk management. Don’t ask someone to guess the number of dentists in Manhattan after asking him the last four digits of his Social Security number. The numbers will always be correlated. I actually did some work on risk management, to show how stupid we are when it comes to risk.

L.G.: You got your, as you put it, “fuck you” money from the 1987 crash of the Dow, when you were an options trader at First Boston. Did you have any sense that was going to happen? Did you position yourself against the possibility?

N.N.T: But that’s not too relevant to my point, because a rare event for me is not an opportunity to make money. The whole point is you should tell people about rare events. A charlatan is the guy who tells you how to make money. The guy who tells you how not to lose your money is not a charlatan, because negative advice is much more robust. Look at the Ten Commandments—don’t do this, don’t do that. So I never play the charlatan, I never tell people to try to make money off rare events, I tell people to not rely on rare events.

L.G.: So then you set up a system with your own hedge fund?

N.N.T.: What we did is, I risk-managed portfolios for institutions by protecting them. You take the portfolio and then make sure that we’re covered for a rare event. Typically you can’t hedge it—but that’s not what interested me. Mostly I wanted to be a scholar, and it took me about 20 years to finish The Black Swan.

L.G.: Right, and you’re comfortable, you can obviously provide for yourself and your family.

N.N.T.: Listen, I would’ve been starving and it would have been the same. This is the thing. Everybody says I haven’t changed, I’m still the same. My problem is what my mother kept telling me: I’m too messianic in my views.

L.G.: Has your mom been telling you that for a long time or just recently?

N.N.T.: More recently, because before she didn’t think that I was going to, well, I was never going to be someone who plans to try and make a career. Listen, at age 15 I was put in jail for attacking a cop. That tells you something.

L.G.: But you no longer physically act out?

N.N.T.: No, no longer.

L.G.: When was the last fight you got in?

N.N.T.: Oh, with a cab driver in New York in ‘86. I won, he ran away, I tried to break his windshield with my hand. The fiancée of my cousin was getting in the cab, and he started driving as she’s getting in. I told him “What are you doing?” He said “You guys take too much time to start,” and started cursing. I said, “I’m going to take care of you, all right?” So I got out of the car and I chased him, got him on the traffic light, tried to break his thing. I almost broke my hand. That was the last time, in ‘86. But someone tried to kill me in the pit in 1992 [when Taleb was an options trader at the Chicago Board of Trade].

L.G.: He was losing money?

N.N.T.: Whatever it was, he said “Get out of this space, it’s mine,” and I told him to get lost. He got angry, in a state of rage, and he tried to strangle me. He said, “You’ve got to get out,” I said, “I’m not going to get out.” So he lost—he couldn’t get me to leave.

L.G.: This comes from your having spent a childhood in Beirut in the basement reading books while shells were bursting overhead?

N.N.T.: Maybe, but this is a biographical fallacy. It’s nice to write a little bit for context, but other people have had the same experience. No, I always say it the way it is, so I’m driven with a sense of duty to say it the way it is. I’m not interested when speakers’ bureaus tell me, “They want your portrait.” I’m not going to go give them my portrait. I have a sense of security, and it produces income, but it’s uncompromising. It so happens that being uncompromising has worked for me so far—more than worked.

The point is, I don’t give a flying damn about the public eye. I care about ideas, all right? So I cannot be divorced from my ideas. I have very strong ideas, coherent ideas, and I have a worldview and it’s a worldview that is convincing to so many people that my problem is I’m not doing enough for that world view.

L.G.: So you don’t feel like there’s a slippery slope going from being a public intellectual to becoming an entertainer?

N.N.T.: For me it’s impossible.

L.G.: But you’re a very entertaining man.

N.N.T.: Maybe, but I’m not playing a role. If someone asked me for an op-ed, I wouldn’t write it. Harper’s asked me for an op-ed, “Can We Save Capitalism?” you know, and I told them, “Listen, no editing, these are my rules, this is the style.”

L.G.: Did they do it?

N.N.T.: No, they stopped talking to me. But at this point, my books are read by more people than any journal.

L.G.: How many copies of your two bestsellers are in print now?

N.N.T.: Now I should have 700,000 of The Black Swan in all languages out. I have a contract for 27 languages, and both books together [Swan along with Fooled By Randomness] should be 1-point-some million copies. And 400 million people have read coverage on the internet. When there’s a profile published, you count how many readers have the profile and you add it up.

L.G.: So you can track this accurately, you think?

N.N.T: Not accurately, but within 100 million.

L.G.: But you’re not content, obviously, to be a prophet without honor in his own country—you want to actually have some impact on policy?

N.N.T.: I just have my ideas, but I’m not a public intellectual. I’m a thinker. In the end, the only thing that counts is the book. I have an obsessive disorder, it’s not like I’m interested in my own welfare. Tomorrow if someone pays me a million dollars to talk about blueberries, I won’t go. This is what I can afford. If you offered me a million dollars to talk about the weather tomorrow at noon, I wouldn’t do it. No. And I usually turn down the ones that have a lot of people with ties. I have a thing about ties.

L.G.: Have you been to a shrink to find out what that’s all about?

N.N.T.: It’s simple heuristics. You want to see the people that are the most fake, that’s why they’re wearing a tie. But maybe there’s some disorder, some hatred of ties.

L.G.: Some people have a fear of snakes. What’s the Latin phrase for tie-phobic?

N.N.T.: Cravatphobia.

L.G.: I’m just curious, how much in lecture fees have you turned down?

N.N.T.: I turn down things all the time. I’ve definitely turned down $60,000 for something.

L.G.: Because they wanted you to talk on a topic that didn’t interest you?

N.N.T.: No, because the crowd didn’t interest me, I’d rather stay home and work in my library.

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By Alan Greene

This book is wonderful and enlightening. It addresses the structure of your instrument, your voice, and he trains you how to use it properly. You start by NOT singing. You exercise using certain muscles and not using others. It is dramatically different than anything else I’ve read or been taught. There are three mechanisms that work together to produce your sound: the sound-producing mechanism, the sound-supporting mechanism, and the word-producing mechanism. He gives you many exercises for each. It will seem weird at first, getting used to a new concept. As a singer, I never had thought about how I made sound, I just sung and if it sounded bad I’d get frustrated and try to blindly fix it. But this book teaches you how to do it properly, so that even if you’re under stress you will be concious of how your voice is reacting and still be able to sing properly. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in singing or even speaking publicly.

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It is very common not to hear some of the vowels when we pronounce some words. These are called unstressed vowels.

A MALAYSIAN man who was on holiday at his sister’s in Toronto asked for an envelope from his niece but she could not comprehend what he wanted.

He repeated the word “envelope” a few times, yet his niece did not know what he wanted so he enunciated, “En-ve-luhp.”

But the Canadian-born girl was still puzzled so she went to ask her Malaysian-born mother what her uncle wanted.

The lady said, “He’d like an onv-luhp.”

What had confused the niece was that her uncle was unaware of the unstressed vowel in the word envelope and had pronounced it giving the word three syllables instead of the usual two.

What are unstressed vowels?

It is very common not to hear some of the vowels when we pronounce some words. These are called unstressed vowels. Such a vowel is shown in dictionaries as an italicised schwa or a bracketed schwa which tells you that the vowel is not usually pronounced in the word.

Here are examples of some words with the unstressed vowel missing in each word.

1. bre_kfast

2. veg_table

3. bus_ness

4. diff_rent

5. int_rest

6. myst_ry

7. sep_rate

8. choc_late

9. di_mond

10. ev_ry

11. hist_ry

Here are the pronunciations of some words with an unstressed vowel missed out in each word. Did you know the words? Check in a dictionary for the italicised or bracketed schwa.

1. temprature

2. mathmatics

3. camra

4. factry

5. poisnous

6. cemetry

7. Wensday

Here are some common phrases with an unstressed vowel in each phrase:

1. sister-in-law – sistrin law

2. mother-in-law – mothrin law (_thrin assimilated and pronounced as _drin)

3. father-in-law – fathrin law

4. brother-in-law – brothrin law

5. daughter-in-law – daughtrin law

6. Mr & Mrs – mistruhn misiz

Silent letters

Some letters in certain words are not pronounced, i.e. they are silent. Here are some common silent letters, showing where they occur:

1. b

o plumber, plumbing

o bomber, bombing

o climber, climbing

o debt, debtor

o subtle

o doubt, doubting

2. c

o scent

o science

o scythe

o rescind

o sceptre

o descend

3. k

o knob

o knack

o knight

o knuckle

o knell

o knead

4. g

o gnat

o gnash

o sign, design

o align, alignment

o gnaw

o gnarled

5. h

o exhibit

o exhaust

o heir

o honour, honourable

o honest, honesty

o vehicle

6 . l

o salmon

o almond

o yolk

o walk

o alms

o palm

7. w

o wrath

o writhe

o wreck

o wracking

o wriggle

o answer

8. p

o raspberry

o pneumatic

o psychology, psychiatry

o pneumonia

o pseudonym

o psalm

9. s

o isle

o aisle

o viscount

o debris

o island

10. t

o fasten

o listen, listener, listening

o often

o glisten

o christen

o jostling

11. u

o guitar

o circuit

o guillotine

o guilt, guilty, guiltless

o biscuit

o guard

Elisions

Elision – the ‘missing out’ of a consonant or vowel or both is also very common in informal speech.

1. elision of a vowel

o go away (go way )

o try again (try gain)

o run along (run long)

o may as well (may-s well )

o get another (get nother)

2 . elision of a consonant

t

o must be

o left turn

o next day

o post office

o went up

d

o stand still

o a thousand ringgit

o could be

o bold face

o found out

o loved traveling

This is just a very simple and rather superficial explanation on the eliding of sounds in pronunciation as I am unable to use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) on the computer.

For a more detailed explanation, one can refer to books on spoken English or pronunciation.

I have referred to Modern Spoken English by Thomas Lee Crowell, Jr (Late Professor of English, Columbia University and Hunter College), Listening to Spoken English by Gillian Brown (Professor of English as an International Language, University of Cambridge) and An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English by A.C. Gimson (formerly Professor of Phonetics, University College, London).

A dictionary is one of the most frequently used books for getting information and I have found the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English quite adequate for everyday use. Should you have any questions on the pronunciation of English or phonetics, do contact me – luketeoh2@yahoo.com

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From Library Journal
These are happy hunting days for lovers of dinosaur paraphernalia. As such, the Macmillan encyclopedia has something for everyone: colored reconstructions of the animals matched with a text whose style is accessible to most enthusiasts but whose content is extensive enough for more serious students. Both newly discovered and classic fossil animals are included, and there is background information to put each animal in time, place, and taxonomic perspective. The book’s strongest feature is its inclusion of vertebrate animals other than dinosaurs. The variety of fossil fish and mammals should convince the skeptical that dinosaurs had no monopoly on bizarre structure. (See also R. McNeill Alexander’s Dynamics of Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Giants , reviewed in this issue, p.00.)– Margery C. Coombs, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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“When most men approach their partner’s breasts they go directly for the nipples.
The male reasoning is logical. Since the nipple is the most excitable part of a woman’s breast, why waste time on the less important areas, why not get to the point! Not a good idea.
Women are a lot more complex. Women love to wonder about what’s coming next. Tension and anticipation are some of the biggest turn-ons for her. She love to be waiting on the edge of her seat.
While making love, women prefer you to build towards the center of interest rather than go to it directly.”

 
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Whether you are a webmaster, a gamer, or just an occasional online shopper, the digital world is increasingly a vital part of all of our lives. And if you’re anything like us, you’ve come to depend on the Internet for many of your everyday needs, both work and play. But despite all the new ways to utilize connectivity in our lives, for most of us, there are still large parts of our day when we can’t be connected … or can we?

Through a blend of private and public investment, a number of cities have had remarkable success in providing almost complete connectivity throughout their city limits. For residents in these cities, high-speed access is available almost anywhere and at any time, and often for below-market rates.

So without further adieu, here are the 10 most connected cities in the world.

1. Seoul, South Korea

Boasting a metropolitan area population of more than 22 million people, Seoul is the second most populated metro area in the world and second to none in terms of modern technology. Seoul is home to some of the biggest telecommunications and technology companies in the world, including SK Telecom, KT Corporation, Samsung and LG. If you’re looking for the latest and greatest cell phone or miniature wifi gadget, Seoul should be your first stop.

When it comes to broadband penetration, South Korea is the world leader with an 83 percent penetration rate. This is in part due to the full blown broadband revolution that has been taking place in Seoul for the past 8 years.

Seoul is full of Internet cafés, wireless hotspots and gaming areas (called “pc baangs”) making it the ideal city to use the Internet on the go. In most areas, a pc baang can be found on every corner. How’s that for service?

Koreans have a fascination with PC gaming unlike any other country in the world. In South Korea, there are multiple television channels dedicated solely to broadcasting the day’s video game events. Talented video game players are treated like celebrities similar to famous basketball players in the United States. At the center of all of the gaming is Seoul, which has played an important part in expanding Internet usage throughout all of South Korea.

Internet access in Seoul is extremely cheap, averaging around $20 per month for a 10Mpbs connection — that’s more than 4 times as fast and half the price of the average broadband connection in the United States. Some areas of Seoul boast commercial Internet speeds of more than 100Mbps for merely $30 per month. With speeds that fast it would only take you 5 minutes to download a two-hour high definition movie.

Seoul’s current expansion plans include a $439 million project to add wireless Internet access to the subway trains. “The plan would be to create a wifi network, and then charge roughly $20 per month for access.”

With such a huge broadband presence and a dedication to offering cheap, fast Internet solutions, Seoul is the definition of wired.

2. Taipei, Taiwan

In 2004 Ying-jeou Ma, the mayor of Taipei set out to make his city the world’s foremost wireless “cyber city.” In less than three years he did just that by blanketing the city in one of the world’s largest WiFi grids.

For a mere $70 million, Q-Ware Corp. was able to build a wireless network consisting of more than 20,000 access points with enough range to provide service for 90 percent of Taipei’s population. That number is remarkable considering Taipei has more than 2.6 million residents in a 105 square mile area. Access to the city wide WiFi network is available for a low monthly fee ranging from $4.50 to $12.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of having city wide WiFi comes in the form of a near-ubiquitous Internet access. Users no longer have to find Internet cafés or wait until they get home to receive stock updates or check email on their laptops. Instead, anyone can simply activate a WiFi enabled device and enjoy — pending they have purchased the service from Q-Ware Corp. of course.

To go along with the WiFi project, Ying-jeou Ma has implemented several types of free web services for the city’s inhabitants including lifetime email accounts, ability to pay for city service bills online and a “three-hour online training course for Taipei citizens to acquire and sharpen their Internet skills.”

Although in size and overall Internet capabilities Taipei is no Seoul, in terms of wireless penetration Taipei comes in at number one.

3. Tokyo, Japan

As the largest metropolitan area in the world, Tokyo is no stranger to connecting tens of millions of people. For a business to be run profitably in Tokyo, it truly must be wired. From the office to the home, Tokyo boasts an amazing appetite for technology and an infrastructure that supports rapid expansion.

Internet in Japan is fairly cheap considering the speed trade off. Japan’s most popular Internet option comes in the form of 100Mbps VDSL from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) for $50 per month. For the truly ambitious Internet user, a 1Gbps fiber to the home (FTTH) option is available from Kansai Electric Power for $90 per month.

Because of the great speeds and availability Tokyo broadband users are able to obtain, web conferencing and VoIP calls have become the norm. In fact, the VoIP market in Japan totals more than 10 million unique IP lines.

Between 2005 and 2010 NTT plans on spending more than $40 billion making it the single most expensive telecommunications project in the history of the country. The renovations include plans for providing ubiquitous broadband for the entire country’s 45 million households.

When it comes to raw broadband speed for the most number of users, Tokyo leads the world.

4. Hong Kong, China

Unsurprisingly, another one of the four East Asian Tigers — Asian countries experiencing rapid industrialization since 1960 — has made this list due to its commitment to economic and technological growth.

As the case with most of the other Asian IT markets, broadband in Hong Kong is very cheap considering the amount of bandwidth provided. Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN), the leading IT company in the area, provides a 10Mbps residential connection for merely $16 per month. A 100Mbps connection costs $34 per month, making Hong Kong one of the few cities in the world with the ability to provide such high speeds to residential areas at an affordable cost.

HKBN also offers a broadband TV service equipped with more than 70 channels (displayed in DVD quality) on topics from the news to education to adult movies. Hong Kong is also in the process of pushing VoIP telephony technology as opposed to the old fashion telephone. HKBN offers a second generation broadband phone capable of video conferencing, instant messaging and all of the standard expected features for $6 a month.

If you’re looking for the total digital experience, Hong Kong is your destination of choice.

5. Singapore

After separating from Malaysia in 1965, the city-state Singapore set off on an industrial revolution modernizing the entire country. Along the way, Singapore gained a keen eye for IT and has since built one of the most impressive broadband infrastructures in the world with a 65 percent penetration rate.

Compared to the other Asian epicenters, Singapore’s Internet is relatively expensive as a 30Mbps connection costs around $77 per month. However, for the same Internet service in the United States, you would expect to pay at least $180 per month. Fortunately, if you’re willing to have a few restrictions placed on your surfing, you can receive free 4Mpbs broadband from Singapore ISP StarHub.

When it comes to IT expansion, Singapore might be the most active country in the world. Last year, the Singapore government launched a 10 year plan to modernize the country’s IT approach.

“The capacity to innovate and create new business models, solutions and services will enable Singapore to be more competitive in a globalized environment.” — Singapore Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts Dr Lee Boon Yang.

The plan calls for 80,000 new jobs, improving broadband penetration to 90 percent, improving IT assets and revenue and increasing broadband infrastructure capabilities to support IPv6 and speeds up to 1Gbps. For a complete look at Singapore’s expansion plans, click here.

6. Stockholm, Sweden

Internet in the Nordic countries is very similar to that of the Asian countries: very widespread and very fast (however not quite as cheap). In terms of broadband penetration by population, Nordic countries make up five of the top eight on OECD’s official list. The pinnacle of the Nordic Internet market can be found in Stockholm, Sweden.

TeliaSonera, the leading telecommunications company in Sweden, offers a 24Mpbs broadband Internet service for $50 per month pending the user signs an 18 month contract and uses a TeliaSonera phone which costs around $20 per month. Considering how expensive everything else in Sweden is, $70 per month for fast and reliable broadband is a steal.

In addition to widespread home access, cybercafés play an important role in the recreational lives of Swedes and increase accessibility. Some of the biggest PC gaming cybercafés in the world can be found in Stockholm.

While most cities are developing plans to increase the number of WiFi hotspots they have, Stockholm is busy engaging in a different type of wireless Internet technology:WiMAX. WiMAX is similar to WiFi in that it provides wireless Internet within a limited range. However, when it comes to the radius of the range and available bandwidth produced by the signal, WiMAX is far superior to WiFi (we’re talking 20 feet versus 2 miles). Stockholm is currently testing ways to blanket the city in a WiMAX grid.

7. Various Municipal Projects, United States

With the invention of wireless mesh networks, WiFi access around the globe is beginning to increase at an exponential rate. Wireless mesh networks work by transmitting signals from strategically placed receivers (or nodes) within a network rather than one central location. In turn, the wireless signal is able to travel very large distances offering service to a record number of users.

Currently, several cities in the United States are taking on municipal WiFi projects to offer city wide Internet access at a very affordable (and occasionally free) price. Most of the cities’ solutions involve some form of a wireless mesh network. Here are some of the cities experimenting with this technology.

St. Cloud, Fla.
St. Cloud’s network spans 24 square miles and is available to all users in the city free of cost. After 6 months, 77 percent of the cities inhabitants had registered for the service.

Mountain View, Calif.
As part of their effort to “reach out to [their] hometown” Google is currently offering free wireless Internet to the city of Mountain View.

Tempe, Ariz.
As one of the pioneering municipal WiFi cities in America, Tempe boasts an impressive 40 square mile WiFi network. Despite its grand implementation, access to the WiFi network requires a subscription and as such has seen slow integration with the cities residents. Currently only 15 percent of Tempe’s residents own a municipal WiFi subscription.

Corpus Christi, Texas
Corpus Christi employs a unique 147 square mile WiFi network designed primarily for use by public works and public safety departments. The city is now saving a great deal of money in utility costs by reading meters digitally, police officers are able to do their jobs better by having instant access to various criminal mug shot databases and of course city employees are better able to telecommute to work from all across the city.

Other Cities
Several major U.S. cities including San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston currently have WiFi plans in the works to provide Internet access to millions of residents and visitors.

To view a complete list of municipal WiFi projects in the United States, click here.

8. Paris, France

Although Paris is usually associated with fashion and leisure, a recent surge of technological advancement has placed Paris on the map of connected cities. After all, it was only a matter of time before Paris began to convert all of its infamous cafés to WiFi hotspots.

France’s most prominent ISP France Télécom offers an 18Mbps connection, a VoIP package and digital TV for $45 per month.

Currently Paris is developing a strategy to employ city wide FTTH on an “open network.” The project is currently being run by “Free”, a subsidiary of French telecommunications company Iliad and is expected to take 5 years to complete costing around $1.3 billion. Subscribers to the service will receive a 50Mbps broadband connection, unlimited local calls (including some international options) and HDTV for $40 per month.

Not to be outdone, France Télécom is currently implementing an optical network capable of producing 2.5Gbps downstream speeds for its subscribers. The project is in developmental phases right now and available to a very limited number of users for $90 per month.

The government is also flirting with the idea of blanketing Paris in a WiMAX grid.

9. Shoreditch, England

For the most part, the United Kingdom has reasonable broadband options with an 8Mbps connection averaging between $40 and $80 per month. The U.K. is loaded with Internet hotspots and offers a wide variety of WiFi options. If you’re looking to shop around and get the most bang for your buck, the U.K. boasts enough broadband plans (and prices) to accommodate the most infrequent Internet user to the biggest businesses. As for the nation’s most connected city, however, one need look no farther than Shoreditch, a town in east London.

An experiment in Shoreditch to reduce the crime rate and improve the quality of living turns a user’s television into a full scale digital device. The project is called “Digital Bridge” and includes broadband Internet on your TV, unlimited evening and weekend phone calls, digital TV and our favorite feature: Shoreditch TV.

Shoreditch TV allows users to monitor a network of local cameras and watch the daily events in the city. If you’re concerned about traffic on a particular road no problem, just change the channel and check it out! Shoreditch TV also allows the city to regulate crime. After all, what type of criminal would be inclined to steal a car knowing that a few hundred people are watching him?

10. Silicon Valley, United States

With companies residing in the area including Google, Cisco, HP, Intel and Yahoo!, you can be sure that Silicon Valley is sure to rank among the world’s most connected regions.

It what proves to be the biggest wireless project yet, Silicon Valley (an area covering 42 municipalities and 1,500 square miles in California) plans to provide its 4.2 million residents with free WiFi. The project aims to offer 1Mbps wireless Internet free of charge and is being spearheaded by IBM and Cisco.

Currently several cities in Silicon Valley — including San Jose, Mountain View, and Santa Clara — already offer city wide WiFi to their residents, making the area a frequent candidate among world leaders in broadband penetration.

When it comes to Internet access and speed, these 10 cities are going above and beyond the status quo in providing the best technology at the right price to its residents. From DSL to Cable to Fiber in the home, these cities have combined both public and private efforts to ensure widespread accessibility at speeds much higher and rates much lower than their peers.

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Though Houston has plenty of fat cats, this is not a story about America’s Most Overweight Cities.

Rather, Houston is recognized here for its dynamic business environment, low unemployment and high wages relative to income. These factors make Houston the best city to earn a living by our calculations.

© AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Philadelphia

A record amount of money has been made off oil and commodities this year, and Houston is the American business hub of those industries. Throw in the weak dollar, which allows Houston-based materials companies to glean more cash off exports and increases the price of gasoline, and it’s easy to understand why the city excels.

And it’s not likely to change anytime soon. When you add up the projected gross state product growth, business openings vs. closings, and venture capital investments in Texas, based on data from Moody’s Economy.com and Pacific Research Institute, the Lone Star state ranks fourth in the country for its future economic prospects.

Right behind Houston are Minneapolis, home to more of the nation’s top companies per capita than any other city; Boston, fueled heavily by the biotech industry; and Washington, D.C., where unless the government goes out of business, consulting firms will continue to make a killing.

© Skip ODonnell/iStockphoto

Dallas

Behind the Numbers

To compile our list, we looked at the country’s 40 largest Census-defined metros and gauged the quality of the business environment by how many of the Forbes’ 400 best big companies and 200 best small companies were headquartered there. These are companies with strong growth prospects and positive revenue streams. The best big companies are perfect for the company man, and the rate of success for small businesses is an indicator of the business environment’s hospitality to entrepreneurs.

We also looked at each metro’s median incomes, collected from the U.S. Census Bureau, compared them to cost of living (provided by the Council for Community and Economic Research), and factored in job-growth forecasts from Moody’s Economy.com.

Some might object that the industries in remission in some of these cities offer jobs few would call alluring. For instance, jobs in Phoenix or Las Vegas are declining because of a stall in the number of new homes being built, and in Detroit they’re shrinking as the auto industry contracts.

However, when a local industry crashes, it drags the local economy down with it. High-paying consulting or marketing jobs in Detroit are affected by the Big Three’s financial woes, as are shops or restaurants in Phoenix whose customers lack discretionary income due to falling home prices.

In other words, the more successful local companies and employed denizens, the brighter the future of a city. Even if you work in San Francisco and aren’t in tech, or in New York and don’t have a job on Wall Street, the health of those industries means a great deal to you.

San Francisco ranked seventh, thanks to a healthy tech industry. The City by the Bay has an extremely high cost of living, but the San Francisco metro includes San Jose. Between them is a who’s who of the top tech companies in the country. Whether you’re a start-up, or want to work at Google, high salaries and available venture capital are concentrated here.

New York’s economy is one of the most broadly based in the country. Need proof? Wall Street has been at the focus of our current economic woes related to subprime. Banks have lost billions and mass layoffs have followed, but the metro still maintains an unemployment rate of 5.1%, comfortably below the national average of 5.7%.

That’s not the case in many cities across the Rust Belt. Just run through our list of America’s Fastest Dying Cities and count how many of those cities are in states rated as the worst places to do business thanks to high tax, regulation, labor and energy costs.

It’s a far better bet to catch one of these ten cities on the upswing.

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Now in a totally updated edition–the secrets of how to stretch memory skills to the fullest. Buzan has devised an ingenious system for memory improvement, geared to handle each specific memory problem–from everyday names and phone numbers to special programs for card players to showing students how to prepare for and get optimum results on exams.

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