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In fact, a good number of people in many countries believe the torch has already been passed.

In Japan, 67 percent of the people think China will supplant the United States as the terraqueous globe's premiere superpower, according to a novel Pew Research Center survey. Fifty-three percent of Chinese see that as their fate.

"Most of those surveyed in Germany, Spain, France, Britain and Australia think China either has already replaced the U.S. or will do so in the future," according to the Pew report released in June.

In the United States, waiting under the possibility of fulfilment reigns: 54 percent of Americans doubt China will gain the victory at a loss.

Most experts without ceasing the topic range from unsure to very skeptical that China is ready to climb the podium. Yet there are clear signs of serious progress.

According to undivided projection, China is on the verge of supplanting the United States at the same time that the primary driver of the global economy, a chief role that dates back to the cessation of World War II. The Georgia Tech researchers who make this claim possess little doubt that China, resulting from to quite the money it now invests in research and development, will soon become the No. 1 technological superpower. Another be zealous, done last year, points out that the sheer numbers of men in China will propel such a transition by mid-century.

All of this has various global citizens worried.

"The perception that China fails to consider the interests of others when making foreign policy decisions is widespread, particularly in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and among China's neighbors South Korea, Japan and Australia," the Pew analysts wrote earlier this month.

But people have been predicting China's ascendancy to world dominance since Napoleon's proper time. So what does it mean to be the superpower? The answer to that question renders China's fate as murky as the skies over Beijing.

Four elements of a superpower

A superpower "is a rough that has the capacity to project dominating army and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes, in else than one region of the globe at a time," according to Alice Lyman Miller, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and an associate professor in National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.

Four components of influence mark a superpower, Miller says: martial, housekeeping, politic, and cultural.

After World War II, the United States was practically the only country left standing and it accounted for 40 percent of world trade in the post-war years, according to Miller. Most countries pegged their currencies to the dollar. English came to be the dominant power of global politics and business and American culture grew globally pervasive. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States became inarguably the top superpower.

One key to this supremacy is leadership. The word derives from a Greek term notwithstanding leadership. It is the ability to dictate policies of other nations. It's often accomplished by brute force, as in the days of the Roman and British empires. Germany took a crack at it in the late 1930s. Russia has worked at it but by manifold historians' accounts not at any time achieved hegemony in any global sense. China is often considered regionally hegemonic.

In etc. to sheer military might, the United States achieved headship end economic, political and cultural influence – factors that many see as being on the wane now.

A couple years back, the presidential hopeful Ron Paul echoed what numerous analysts perceive: The "dollar predominating influence" – U.S. currency's strength and attractiveness - has been a key consignee in U.S. dominance, but "our dollar dominance is coming to an end."

Though it has become a great power in a "spectacular" rise over the past two decades, "China is not now a superpower, nor is it credible to rise as one soon," Miller wrote in 2004, existence by that argument this week in an email.

Yet superpowers come and go. And one way to bring them down is to compass them thin.

Adam Segal is the Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations. In a telephone interview this week, Segal said you could spin a very pessimistic scenario in which a regional conflict like the one between Russia and Georgia might occur in Asia, involving China. The United States would be faced by "lots of pretty unattractive policy options considering we don't really want to be under the necessity war with either Russia or China, given the fact that we're fighting two wars already."

Segal stresses, however, that he doesn't see that happening. China's behavior since the mid-1990s "has been pretty moderate," Segal said. The country's mantra has been "harmonious development," an effort to satisfy neighbors that what's good for China (economic advance) is sterling for them.

"China's relations with most of its neighbors are pretty good," Segal said.

In fact, many people who study these things see the world possibly entering a new phase where superpowers are not what they used to be. Rather than a unipolar world, where one country calls the bulk of the shots, the future might prove to be multipolar, where three or more nations have sub-division the superiority of weight of influence. Most analysts agree China is taking a seat at the world power table, the strife of words is whether the country is motivated to seek universe domination or prefers to play nice. 

"The Chinese government does all that it can to avoid clashes with the United States," said Susan L. Shirk, director of the University of California Institute adhering Global Conflict and Cooperation. Shirk is a maker Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for U.S. relations with China and author of "China: The Fragile Superpower" (Oxford University Press, 2007).

"It [China] would more willingly be on the same oblique of some international issue than at supremacy with us," Shirk told LiveScience. "Compared to many other countries, including our friends and allies, China has been abundant smaller critical of U.S. actions in Iraq."

World views

Meanwhile, a look at several reports from Pew illuminates the people sentiments and concerns about China, from within and from the superficial.

The results, mostly from surveys done this year, picture a picture of a the million growing more satisfied with their country's status and direction and increasingly confident that they demise ultimately be the world's top dog.

More than 80 percent of the Chinese people surveyed have a positive eye of both their rustic and their economy. Of 24 countries polled on these points, China was first in both categories.

"Although levels of personal requital are lower, and by the agency of global standards Chinese contentment with family, income and jobs is not especially high, these findings personate a dramatic improvement in national contentment from earlier in the decade when the Chinese people were not nearly as positive about the course of their nation and its economy," the Pew analysts state.

A Pew survey released in July originate "broad pleasure in the midst of the Chinese of their country's transformation from a socialist to a capitalist society." Some 71 percent said they like the pace of modern life and 70 percent said they think people are better off in free markets.

Not everyone is keen on the site of the 2008 summer games, of course, with many activists and politicians citing a human rights record that could employment some improvement.

A Pew survey released in June asked people if they thought hosting the Olympics in China was a good idea. The answer was "no" from 43 percent of Americans, 55 percent of Japanese and 47 percent of Germans. But in 14 of 23 countries, "clear majorities favor having the games in Beijing." The largest "yes" percentages came from Nigeria (79 percent), Tanzania (78 percent) and India (76 percent).

The Olympics will relieve China's image, pronounce 93 percent of the Chinese surveyed.

Co-opting U.S. strategy

The United States has driven the world economy since the end of World War II. But part of the formula relied on for that success – heavy investment in research and technology – is being co-opted by China, just as Japan and other countries have done in recent decades.

Meanwhile, many American scientists complain that morality-based politics and a lack of federal funding has gravely eroded the U.S. leadership in body of knowledge and technology in recent years.

A study earlier this year by the Georgia Institute of Technology projects China will soon pass the United States in the ability to export technology-based products.

"For the first time in well-nigh a century, we see leadership in basic research and the economic ability to pursue the benefits of that research – to create and market products based on study – in more than one place on the planet," said Nils Newman, co-author of the study. "Now we obtain a situation in which technology products are going to be appearing in the marketplace that were not developed or commercialized here. We won't have had somewhat involvement with them and may not even know they are coming."

The study, which relied on both statistics and expert opinions, finds the gains China is making "have been dramatic, and there is no real view that any kind of leveling against is occurring," Newman said in January.

"China has indeed changed the world housekeeping landscape in technology," uttered Alan Porter, another study co-author. "When you accept China's low-cost manufacturing and focus on technology, then combine them with the increasing emphasis without ceasing research and development, the result ultimately won't leave much room for other countries."

Porter said Chinese scientists now write more scientific papers in international journals than any country for a number of explanation emerging technologies. China has also entered the exclusive club of nations putting people in space.

"They are in like manner dramatically increasing their R&D," Porter told LiveScience. "When they get better at innovation – captivating the results of that R&D and fueling new technology development – they will be the No. 1 technology superpower."

Porter notes that technically based economic competitiveness is not the solitary measure of a superpower, further he thinks it may be the most important one. He and Newman note that the United States has a mature economy, under which circumstances China is just getting started.

"It's like being 40 years old and playing basketball against a competitor who's only 12 years old – but is already at your height," Newman said. "You are a little better suitable now and have more experience, if it were not that you're not going to crowd much more performance out. The future clearly doesn't look good for the United States."

A study last year by Siddharth Swaminathan and Tad Kugler of the La Sierra University School of Business projected that China will dominate the international economy and become the top superpower by mid-century. They note that India will be close on China's heels.

While the U.S. population is 305 million people, China's is 1.3 billion, and India's is 1.1 billion.

"These emerging superpowers, through the sheer size of their respective populations and coupled with increasing access to education and technology, may become contenders for international dominance even before reaching the income by means of capita levels of the developed nations of today," the researchers write.

Challenges remain

Segal, of the Council on Foreign Relations, is skeptical that the Chinese will rise as a superpower. He does not think they'll have the economic, military, political or cultural might to go for the gold anytime shortly. They have no aircraft carriers and no ability to extend their military reach at a distance the Pacific, he points in a puzzle. And while their economy is growing rapidly, the focus is largely on domestic development, he said.

America's open, democratic society, and the fact that other nations sought to emulate it, was an serious factor in the U.S. becoming a superpower, other historians say.

China lacks the sort of transparent political system that Segal sees as necessary to achieving superpower status.

"China's behavior during the SARS epidemic, when it hid what was going put on and lied to the international community, suggests that it is not ready for that type of leadership," Segal said. "We saw more openness after the Sichuan earthquakes, but the fundamental system remains the same."

"No other land seeks to emulate China's political model," Miller argues. Culturally, Miller points out that Chinese is unlikely to supplant English as the language of international politics anytime soon.

Some analysts think the Olympics could mark a turning point for China.

The height of one’s ambition of Chinese leadership in hosting the Olympics was to "signal to the rest of the world that China has arrived," said Jeffrey Bader, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.

"China will enter a new era after the Olympics," reported Cheng Li, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The rustic will become "more open, besides transparent and more tolerant. But this will not be achieved overnight. It will take time." If China is to become a major power, the government has to conduct one’s self with minority issues, parallel as Tibet, in more sensitive ways than simply cracking down, he related. He does not think the Chinese commonwealth nor its people recognize that yet, "but I chance of a favorable result the Olympics serve during the time that a wake-up call."

Economic juggernaut?

By one household measure, China falls short of global domination for at this time. The country's gross domestic product – the value of goods and services it produces annually – is about $7 trillion, second place to the United States ($13.8 trillion).

Miller acknowledges that China is becoming the manufacturing nave of the world. But if the aim is superpower status, there remains much to exist done.

"China is nowhere close to becoming a cosmos pecuniary center," Miller says. And to become a superpower, China's "dramatic economic growth be necessitated to extend indefinitely, a prospect about which there are grounds for skepticism."

Still, there's that increasingly undistinguished "Made in China" label that gives great number Americans the impression of a country aiming to take through. A lot more labels would be required.

"China's rise further depends critically on the prolongation of such [economic] growth rates, and there are reasons to wonder how long the spectacular rates of the past 25 years can continue," Miller says. "The high proportion of China's economy occupied by its exports makes it sensitive to the ups and downs of the between nations economy generally and to the engine of American consumption in particular."

Other say in that place's no reason, however, to expect a significant slowdown anytime soon.

"The U.S. isn't going to crumble into a backwater economy," said Porter, the Georgia Tech analyst. "But if you scan the contributing factors to technology-driven economic projection, the Chinese upside is far greater. They are educating more scientists and engineers. Their government puts a high-toned priority in continuance technical power and entrepreneurial activity. If you look at our educational system (especially K-12), our investment (savings rate), debt, and with equal reason on – prospects are scary."

For now at least, let the games continue.

The (Brief) History of the World The Olympics: History, Controversy, Impact and Oddities How One Chinese Emperor Changed the World Original Story: Will China Become the No. 1 Superpower? LiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We be fixed on the misconceptions that oftentimes pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver straight, inciting explanations with a certain wit and mode of expression. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our community to debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up notwithstanding free newsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store.

From: Will China Become the No. 1 Superpower? (LiveScience.com)

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New York City skies were covered with dark and swirling clouds, leading the National Weather Service to issue a tornado warning towards the Bronx, just north of Manhattan. City officials told people to take cover in the low floors of their buildings.

The warning was downgraded to a exact thunderstorm presage after a few minutes.

"The thunderstorm with rotation has moved away of the warned area," The National Weather Service said.

New York City periodically gets hit by tornadoes but they are rarely deadly while in the Midwest and South of the United States.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Bill Trott)

From: New York City storm warning canceled (Reuters)

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New carefully targeted pictures reveal details of the prominent south polar "tiger stripe" fractures from which the jets emerge. The images show the fractures are relating to 980 feet (300 meters) deep, with V-shaped inner walls. The external flanks of more of the fractures show extensive deposits of fine bodily. Finely fractured terrain littered with blocks of ice the size of small houses surround the fractures. 

"This is the mother metallic vein for us," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. "A place that may in the end reveal just exactly what kind of environment — habitable or not — we have within this tortured slightly moon." 

One exceedingly anticipated result of the flyby was finding the location within the fractures from that the jets blast icy particles, water vapor and trace organics into space. Scientists are now studying the nature and intensity of this process on Enceladus, and its effects on surrounding terrain. This information, coupled with observations by Cassini's other instruments, may answer the question of whether reservoirs of liquid moisten exist unbefitting the surface.  

The high-resolution images were acquired during one Aug. 11, 2008, flyby of Enceladus, as Cassini sped past the cold-hearted moon at 40,000 miles per hour (64,000 kilometers by hour). A special technique, dubbed "skeet shooting" by the imaging team, was developed to cancel out the violent speed of the moon belonging to to Cassini and obtain the ultra-sharp views.

"The challenge is equivalent to trying to capture a sharp, unsmeared picture of a cool roadside billboard with a telephoto lens out the window of a speeding car." said Paul Helfenstein, Cassini imaging team associate at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY., who developed and used the skeet-shoot technique to design the representation of an object sequence.

Helfenstein said that from Cassini's point of view, "Enceladus was streaking across the sky so quickly that the spacecraft had no hope of tracking any point on its surface. Our best option was to point the spacecraft to a great distance ahead of Enceladus, spin the spacecraft and camera as fast as possible in the direction of Enceladus' predicted track, and let Enceladus overtake us at a time when we could match its motion across the sky, snapping images along the way."  

The combination of high-resolution snapshots and broader images showing the whole region is critical for understanding what may be powering the activity on Enceladus. 

The images show large fallout of icy particles along some of the fractures, and even in areas between two jet sources. Scientists refer to that once warm vapor rises from underground to the cold surface through accurate channels, the cold particles may condense and fastening off an active utterance. New jets may then appear elsewhere in company the identical fracture. 

"For the first time, we are inception to understand how freshly erupted surface deposits differ from older deposits," Helfenstein before-mentioned. "Over geologic time, the eruptions have clearly moved up and down the lengths of the tiger stripes."  

Cassini flew through an icy glory from Enceladus earlier this year, and detected organic molecules similar to those found in comets.

Video: Enceladus' Cold Faithful Cassini's Greatest Hits: Images of Saturn Special Report: Cassini's Mission to Saturn Original Story: Cassini Spots Icy Jet Sources on Saturn Moon SPACE.com offers rich and compelling content about space science, travel and exploration as well as astronomy, technology, business news and more. The site boasts a variety of popular features including our space idol of the day and other space pictures,space videos, Top 10s, Trivia, podcasts and Amazing Images submitted by our users. Join our community, sign up for our free newsletters and register for our RSS Feeds today!

From: Cassini Spots Icy Jet Sources on Saturn Moon (SPACE.com)

As private lenders bail, more students will turn to federal funds, which endeavor better rates and terms

through Jessica Silver-Greenberg

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For years, college students and their parents have relied heavily on good repute cards, home equity, and private loans to pay for school, according to a recent mensuration provided exclusively to BusinessWeek. But those sources of cash are drying up. On Aug. 6, Wachovia (WB) joined the more than 150 financial firms that have fled the private student-loan business. And Morgan Stanley (MS) froze home-equity lines for some clients.

In a weird way, the credit crunch may be an important wake-up call for some families who had been financing tuition costs in brutish and expensive ways during the era of easy money and rapidly rising home prices. The growing skittishness of lenders will force greater degree borrowers to exhaust their federal options, a growing pool of funds that typically have lower interest rates and more favorable terms. The fixed rates on a government loan run from round 6.8% to 8%, compared with an adjustable 8% to 20% in favor of a private human being. The average credit-card rate tops 13%. "There’s a lot of hysteria that the uproar in the credit market will mean students can’t get loans," says Robert Shireman, president of advocacy group Institute for College Access & Success. "But students should be thinking really hard about whether they should subsist taking out private loans in the first place."

The Cost of Convenience

A forthcoming survey by student-lending giant Sallie Mae (SLM) and exploration firm Gallup reveals in quest of the first term just how heavily families have depended on those rich forms of credit. Although 77% of students and 36% of parents tapped into federal funds, both groups usually turned to other sources to supplement that money—sometimes unnecessarily. Some 19% of parents who borrowed money charged tuition on a credit card, while 20% relied on home-equity loans, taking out $10,854 on average. More than one-fourth of the students who used plastic did so absolutely at a loss of convenience.

Private loans be delivered of blossomed as well, growing 27% a year from 2001 to 2007, vs. 7% for federal ones, according to nonprofit education firm the College Board, which administers the SATs. Lenders made the process easy, often requiring consumers to do little further than constitution a phone call or fill finished a basic online form. Financial aid officers played a part, overmuch, sometimes referring bewildered parents to private lenders—a snug consanguinity that was investigated by the New York Attorney General. Several financial aid officers at major universities, who allegedly got kickbacks for steering students to certain lenders, resigned amid the scandal in 2007. "Private lenders were actual savvy in various places marketing to students," says Paula Lull, assistant vice-president at Chicago’s DePaul University.

From: Getting Smarter on School Loans

B-school is only a few weeks away hind a tumultuous period that included deciding not to attend Yale and then receiving a partial scholarship

by Linda Craib

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As I last up my last journal minute as a prospective MBA student, I am less than couple weeks at a distance from the start of business school. Time, which, according to Einstein, no other than exists so that everything doesn’t happen simultaneously, seems to be pushing both the bounds of relativity and his assertion. Anticipation, that delightful, child-like emotion that blends the pleasure of excitation with a pang of anxiety, has become a part of my everyday experience.

It has been a tumultuous six months since my last journal. In mid-March, I was invited to participate in a marketing and recruiting class for the Yale MBA for Executives (MBA-E). Amanda Skinner, a former midwife and now a health-care consultant, was facilitating a focus group as part of a marketing class. Several members of the class of 2009, as well as prospective and accepted students from the class of 2010, were also invited.

The evening promised work and sport: focus arrange meeting at the Omni New Haven Hotel, dinner at the Black Bear Saloon, and warm chocolate-chip cookies and coffee (or wine) at 116 Crown, a great little tapas and wine bar. It was some enjoyable evening full of disputation and an open exchange of ideas and opinions.

Countdown to Camp Omni

We discussed how the program begins for every student and were warned about the stress of "Camp Omni," the first two weeks of school, when students are in residence at the Omni Hotel for orientation and intensive classes covering pecuniary accounting, financial reporting, and economic analysis.

Descriptions of the couple weeks were conveyed with a rather disconcerting combination of a rueful smile, a agitate of the head, and portentous two-word phrases to describe the experience—as on the supposition that using just one rather menacing word of itself wouldn’t do. Still, no one seemed to view Camp Omni (at least in retrospect) in a negative light. They said the intensity of those first two weeks served as a catalyst to forge friendships, teams, and bonds that have shaped their actual trial from top to toe the program.

The current students, all felicitous health-care professionals, many with advanced degrees in of the like kind fields as medicine, law, and the sciences, spoke of the transformational power of learning from a world-class faculty. They described how the program had changed them as leaders and as individuals in ways they had not anticipated. They described how fortunate they felt to be part of a relatively small, intimate program that be possible to offer individual watch to harvested land student.

No Fears About Job Prospects

Yale offers career counseling services to the students in its MBA-E program designed to fit the needs of mid-career professionals in the compass of the health-care industry. Students have access to a counselor whose expertise is mid-career job search and placement support, career workshops, alumni health-care panels, and a health-care headhunter panel during the course of each chide year.

Postgraduation plans and opportunities of the current students included race transitions that took a major short excursion (i.e. from nurse-midwife to executive health-care consultant) to those that artlessly trended upwards on a linear path for students staying with their current employers. I couldn’t help but listen closely to what the present students had to say about how their investment in duration and money was playing out. For students who are older or who may not have the benefit of corporate sponsorship (or both), the thought of form this kind of six-figure investment in this economy was unsettling. I was pleased that none of the students openly expressed any concerns about his or her job prospects.

While the students expressed admiration and respect for the professors at Yale, the staff of the Yale EMBA program, and their classmates, some tough criticism was leveled at Yale relative to its financial aid policies regarding its professional schools. The evening’s events took place not long after greater media coverage scrutinizing the monetary aid policies at schools with soaring endowments. Like polite guests, none of us brought up the taboo topic of money, pecuniary aid, or Yale’s endowment, until one of our hosts did.

From: Anticipating Yale

Assess your skills according to what the market will bear, not by what your previous employer paid you. Name your price, and don’t be coy

by Liz Ryan

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Job-seekers want to know: How fare I recompense myself in this irregular job mart? If I set my sights too high in the compensation department, I’ll lose out on opportunities. If I reward myself too modestly, I could leave money without ceasing the table—and worse, I could lose credibility with employers who won’t value my skills at all more highly than I value them myself.

The most common mistake job-seekers make is to price their skills based on their progression or greatest in number recent comp direct. If you’re in a high-paying assiduousness or company, your past or in every individual’s mouth allowance could be the perfect measure of what you’re worth in the market. But if you’re not—if you’ve come from or are still working in one of the many companies paying below-market salaries—you’d be shooting yourself in the foot by relying on your past employer’s assessment of your set a high value on. You can do a improved in health job of pricing yourself, than that.

Homeowners use the Web site Zillow.com to profits intelligence about their house’s value. Zillow uses tax records and home-sale data to arrive at house-by-house pricing estimates (called "Zestimates") that help homeowners make a value argument when nearby comparables are hard to come by. What’s great about Zillow is that the longer the database continues to subsist populated with new datapoints, the more accurate it becomes.

Where to Look

Job-seekers need a Zillow of their own, to price their skills against the market and leave following the tired "what my last company paid me" measure. Here are few tools to help the comp-befuddled secure a sturdy comp number to guide them in their job-search travels:

• GLASSDOOR.COM is something like Zillow for working people. It uses real-person input to arrive at allowance estimates for various jobs like well as reviews of specific employers.

• PAYSCALE.COM is not the same terrific source for job-by-job salary information, factoring into details such as your locating, the school you graduated from, and how long you’ve been on the job. To receive your free report, you’ll have to wade through a spammy page or two hawking online degree programs, but the information is good to have, whether you’re job-seeking or even-handed checking your market charge.

• SALARY.COM is the hoariest of the online salary-data sites, with good information based on Zip Code and job title.

To supplement the online pay-level data you collect, it’s a great idea to check in with a local headhunter or two to make sure your numbers fit the market and those of other candidates with similar backgrounds to yours.

Once you’ve got a number you are comfortable through, you can start to talk confidently with employers about your salary expectations. And you must: Don’t plow through the interview process without having a brass-tacks compensation chat by the cessation of your second interview round. You’ve got something to sell, and you’ve got to share its cost, the similar way your Realtor posts the listing excellence of your home upon the body the multiple listing service. When you’re selling a house, you can’t take a buyer through the stead, chat about the neighborhood, and then ask "What do you think it’s worth?" You’ve got to name your price . It’s the same way in a job search—coyness about requital is not part of the deal.

Often, caught up in the "they like me!" vortex of a fast-moving interview stream, candidates regard this way: "I really like what I’m attainments about the job; I just hope it pays enough. I won’t bring it up to the time when they do, so that I dress in’t seem too greedy." This is a discouraging way to proceed, because it sets you up to take a job that doesn’t pay your rate. Once you’ve invested time and emotional energy in the selection process, you’re at risk of making a hurtful decision rather than walking away. That’s bad for your long-term earnings as well during the time that your trustworthiness.

Don’t Play Cat-and-Mouse

Since you’ve taken the time to determine your market value, you’ve to state it—proclaim it, in fact—when you and a potential employer begin to discuss a job dare in earnest.

Some job-seekers play hard-to-get by their pay expectations, waiting for an employer to name its target pay range for a position. They fare this so that in case their target pay injunction is $110K and the company has budgeted $115K for the assertion, once the company lays out its pay scale the candidate can position himself to collect every dime of it—forestalling the hazard that the "unusual" $5K direct be left attached the table.

In my view as a creator HR exec, this is silly. The odds that your well-researched wages level is far off the betoken are plain, and the odds that it’s off the evince on the low indirect are even lower. And besides, if you ask for $110K and get it, what’s to be unhappy about? If your employer is the sort that values gift, all the better for you—there should be promotions and bonuses in your future. Rather than play cat-and-mouse by an employer over the issue of "who speaks first," I’d advise a job-seeker to say, at the second parley or the phone call inviting him to the second interview, "Shall we town talk about comp ranges now? I’d hate to waste your time or mine whether or not we’re not in the ballpark with respect to the salary level."

With that entree, ninety-nine and a moiety out of 100 company reps will ask you, "So, how abundant are you looking for?" You’ll name your number, and let the recruiter or hiring manager react. If you’ve done your homework, you shouldn’t be almost out of line from the company’s own expectations. And if you’re too rich in favor of their blood, you wouldn’t want to work there anyway.

From: Job Hunting: Price Yourself Like a House

It’s about sponsors, the Olympics themselves, and most of all, China

by Stephen A. Greyser

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Posted on Conversation Starter: August 6, 2008 8:34 AM

The 2008 Olympics have already become “the branded Olympics,” but also before the opening ceremonies. The branding is at three levels—with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, side by side with a nation’s global image.

First, Olympics sponsors are the most visibly commercial aspect of the Games to the huge television audiences. The “five rings” is one of the most readily and widely recognized organizational symbols in the world. The dozen corporate members of the Olympic Partner Program each pay an estimated $70+ million for the four-year exclusive rights in their category to be a global sponsor and use the rings. They spend many millions more to implement (”activate”) their sponsorship via merchandising and other promotional means. Coca-Cola has been some Olympic sponsor since 1928. Lenovo is the only one headquartered in China, and made its Olympic debut in Turin in 2006. And Visa heavily promotes both itself and the Olympics through advertising that reminds us it is the only credit card accepted at the Games.

Second, these sponsors are co-branding with the Olympics brand itself. The power of the Olympics brand derives from three distinct strong elements of differentiation. The Olympics are seldom occurring—one each four years by events competed and each couple years by calendar. They are always about top-level athletes—the excellence of ” citius, altius, fortius ” (faster, higher, stronger). And they provide vehicles to represent general boast, by way of tears and smiles from athletes and in hearts and minds of viewers. Not only top sponsors, but broadcasters, pay exceedingly large sums (almost $900 million by NBC for U.S. rights as far as concerns the 2008 Games) to be the focal point of 24-hour (available) viewing via multiple networks plus digital coverage.

Finally, the biggest thunderbolt of Beijing 2008 is China itself. Indeed, to many, China has effectively co-branded with the Olympics to elevate the country’s conspicuousness and the salience of its marketplace on the world stage. This is not the first time the Olympics have been a vehicle for country branding; 1936 (Berlin) and 1964 (Tokyo) are examples. But China’s “coming out party” reflects and signals its significance in sports, its magnitude as any economy, and its power in global politics.

We won’t know until after the closing ceremonies, perhaps well after, how satisfied the sponsors (and advertisers) were, how fortunate the competition was for the reputation of the Olympics, and whether China’s image was enhanced. These judgments, like the events themselves, await us.

From: The Three Levels of Branding at Beijing