Eideard

The United States Mint launched a new coin Tuesday featuring jazz legend Duke Ellington, making him the first African-American to appear by himself on a circulating U.S. coin.

Ellington, the composer of classics including “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” appears on the “tails” side of the new D.C. quarter. George Washington is on the “heads” side, as is usual with U.S. quarters.

The coin was issued to celebrate Ellington’s birthplace, the District of Columbia…

Ellington won the honor by a vote of D.C. residents, beating out abolitionist Frederick Douglass and astronomer Benjamin Banneker…

Ellington was born in the district in 1899 and composed more than 3,000 songs, including “Satin Doll,” “Perdido” and “Don’t Get Around Much Any More.” “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” helped usher in the swing era of jazz.

Ellington really was the Duke. An ambassador of the best of American original music. A kindly, disciplined spokesman for the creative side of America’s Black community in the time when racism ws the law of the land.

China Daily, China’s national English-language newspaper, had Deputy Editor-in-Chief Qu Yingpu ring the opening bell at the NASDAQ Stock Market at 9:30 a.m. EST on Feb 23rd to mark the launch of China Daily’s U.S. edition. The event marks another milestone for China Daily, which is leading the way for Chinese media companies to expand their networks in North America and provide dedicated services to this key market. While on her first trip to Beijing as top diplomat, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also congratulated China Daily on launching the U.S. edition.

Joining Qu at the podium was David Wicks, vice president of NASDAQ OMX.

“The US Edition is focused on meeting ever-increasing demand for information on doing business with China,” says Qu. “NASDAQ’s community of technology, business and finance is the perfect place to celebrate this launch.”

Targeted at North American businesses and observers of China’s changing economic, cultural and political landscape, the U.S. Edition will feature reports of local events related to China in the U.S. It will also have analysis and opinions from American and Chinese thinkers and business leaders, and personal profiles of noted contributors to China and America’s growing understanding of each other.

That’s mostly PR speak – and translated from Chinese thought to Wall Street-ish, as well. Still, China Daily is a useful, accurate, journalistic source.

President Barack Obama has vowed to crack down on costly military programs, citing a project to build a new presidential helicopter fleet as an example of the procurement process “gone amok.”

Lockheed Martin Corp’s helicopter program is now more expensive than Air Force One, the high-tech Boeing 747 that ferries the president…

“This is going to be one of our highest priorities,” Obama assured Senator McCain when the senator told him at the summit that the government had to act to curb the “excesses of procurement.”

Obama has pledged to review major defense programs. As a result of the cost growth, the Defense Department must either end programs or certify them essential for national security and meet other tests established by law.

“I have already talked to (Defense Secretary Robert) Gates about a thorough review of the helicopter situation. The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” Obama told about 130 lawmakers, academics and business leaders gathered at the White House.

“It is an example of the procurement process gone amok and we are going to have to fix it…”

We’ve had the opportunity since the end of the Cold War to redefine our military forces, redefine roles, confine the essential expenditures to defense – instead of the quasi-imperial expeditionary forces we have stationed all over the world.

The new generation of engagement with terrorists has nothing to do with models and cadres still based on World War One functionality.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly makes a provocative claim relative to Amazon’s successful e-book reader, the Kindle: embrace open e-book standards, or be run over by them.

It’s a bold prediction, considering what Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone. It may also be wrong.

O’Reilly writes: (Apple) seems to have a knack for balancing the benefits of both open and closed architectures that Amazon has yet to discover. While Apple maintains tight control over what goes into the App Store, there’s a loophole big enough to drive a truck through: Any Web page can act as an application for the iPhone.

O’Reilly then explains that the Kindle doesn’t provide this same loophole (i.e., allowing open-formatted e-books to be read on the Kindle in the same way that the iPhone enables Web applications to run on the iPhone, and in which the iPod encouraged MP3s and other free formats to flourish on the iPod).

I don’t think I agree. On my Kindle, I read a variety of books that I downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg, and I suspect that this will only increase as more and more free content is formatted for the Kindle.

Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins.

“Open wins?” Baloney! Open wins in the small and parochial world of the hobbyist.

Comparison in the article based on Sony and Apple are patently absurd. Apple knows how to sell good stuff. Sony doesn’t know how to sell anything.

A new skin disorder caused by use of games consoles has been identified by skin specialists. The condition, dubbed PlayStation palmar hidradenitis, is described in the British Journal of Dermatology.

Researchers outline the case of a 12-year-old girl who attended a Swiss hospital with intensely painful sores on the palms of her hands.

The girl, who had been using a games console regularly, recovered fully after 10 days of abstinence.

Doctors who examined her at the Geneva University Hospital concluded she had a condition known as ‘idiopathic eccrine hidradenitis’, a skin disorder that generally causes red, sore lumps on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet.

The condition has been previously found on the soles of the feet in children taking part in heavy physical activity, such as jogging.

It it is thought to be linked to intense sweating.

Almost as debilitating as Wiiitus.

As layoffs continue apace, a survey shows what many companies fear–exiting workers are taking a lot more with them than just their personal plants and paperweights.

Of about 950 people who said they had lost or left their jobs during the last 12 months, nearly 60 percent admitted to taking confidential company information with them, including customer contact lists and other data that could potentially end up in the hands of a competitor for the employee’s next job stint.

“I don’t think these people see themselves as being thieves or as stealing,” said Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute, which conducted the online survey last month. “They feel they have a right to the information because they created it or it is useful to them and not useful to the employer…”

The survey also found that many companies seem to be lax in protecting against data theft during layoffs. Eighty-two percent of the respondents said their employers did not perform an audit or review of documents before the employee headed out the door and 24 percent said they still had access to the corporate network after leaving the building.

Har! Confirms what most IT geeks already know. Most of what is labeled “hacking” in the press is someone using info that walked out the door.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

A row has broken out in the Italian city of Venice over a new $2.7 million sponsorship deal between the authorities and Coca Cola.

Venice’s mayor said the funds raised by allowing vending machines to sell the drink across the city would be used to safeguard its artistic heritage…

The Italian newspapers claim that Venice is not only being swamped with mass tourism and threatened by floods from the Adriatic Sea, but will soon also be awash with fizzy drinks.

Sixty vending machines will sell the drink all over the city, including at the main waterbus stations and reportedly even St Mark’s Square, where a city ordinance already forbids picnicking by tourists.

The Mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari, has complained loudly about the lack of state funding to conserve the crumbling palaces and churches of the city and has strongly defended his decision to accept money from the US company.

Commercial sponsorship is the only financial strategy for safeguarding the monuments of Venice, he says.

Will they repaint the gondolas in Coke’s red-and-white? Give ‘em that NASCAR look?

Daylife/Reuters Pictures – Solo Dancer

Daylife/Reuters Pictures – Group Dancers

Daylife/AP Photo by Gurinder Osan

The former headquarters of Campa Cola, a nearly defunct Indian soda brand, have been shuttered for years, but Radha Krishan, 70, remembers when the office was buzzing with activity and the bottling plant in the back turned out sweet, fizzy soda by the truckload…

Campa’s slogan, “The Great Indian Taste,” was a nod to a nationalist culture determined to get by without the cars, movies or colas of the West.

At the beginning of the domestic cola reign, a government-run company introduced a soda called “Double Seven.” It was named for 1977, the year India gave Coca-Cola the choice of handing control to its Indian subsidiary, or leaving. That would have meant revealing Coke’s secret recipe. Coke left.

Stripped of its product, Coca-Cola’s main bottler in India, Pure Drinks, scrambled to produce a soda of its own. Campa Cola, its name printed in the Coca-Cola font, was born.

“Campa tasted good – because we didn’t have any other options,” said Santosh Desai, a Times of India newspaper columnist. “Double Seven was a government-produced cola, and it tasted like that.”

The other leading soda was a spicier cola called Thums Up – a misspelling that has become iconic in India.

Since I still drank Moxie until I left New England, I can relate a bit to this tale. RTFA. It’s a gas.