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Posted: Tuesday, 22 April 2008 3:13PM

The Osgood File: Judgement Day for Democrats in Pennsylvania; The Bright Side of Earth Day; How Businesses Can Make Better Use of Their Time; The Art of Smile Measuring


New York (CBS)  -- JUDGEMENT DAY FOR DEMOCRATS IN PENNSYLVANIA

Pennsylvania Democrats vote in their Presidential Primary today.  Most people say Hillary Clinton will probably win there.  Even Barack Obama is saying that.  But she needs a strong win, and Obama hopes to keep it close enough there to maintain the momentum he's had up to now.  He told the Daily Show on Comedy Central last night.

"There's no doubt that Senator Clinton has done me a favor. She's put me through the paces. This has been like spring training.  And so, should I get the nomination, I think everything's going to be old news by October," said Obama.

And Clinton told the Pennsylvania voters to think of it as a hiring decision.

"We have had the longest job interview that anybody can imagine.  But now it is time for you to decide," said Clinton.

There's been a lot of negative campaigning in Pennsylvania, but Senator Clinton doesn't think of it that way.

"This election has been exciting and intense. It has brought out passionate feelings, and I think that's good," said Clinton.

As for Senator Obama:

"The American people probably get a pretty good sense of: 'Is this somebody who gets flustered under pressure?  Is this somebody who ends up having problems making decisions -- or is this somebody who can stay steady in a crisis?'" said Obama.

She's been taking off on his "Yes We Can" theme.

"The American people probably get a pretty good sense of: 'Is this somebody who gets flustered under pressure?  Is this somebody who ends up having problems making decisions -- or is this somebody who can stay steady in a crisis?'" said Clinton.

And he's been taking off on her "3 o'clock in the morning" question.

"Let me ask you a question. There are three candidates left. Who do you want answering that 3 AM phone call?  The person who got Iraq wrong or the person who got Iraq right?" said Obama.

Clinton may win. The question is will she win by enough?  Here's what her husband thinks.

"Winning's always enough. But obviously, the more she wins by, the better it is. We'll just have to see what happens," said former President Bill Clinton.

 

THE BRIGHT SIDE OF EARTH DAY

If nobody has pointed this out to you as yet, today is Earth Day. 

"We all get distracted with many different events during the course of the year. Earth Day gives us a chance to focus more precisely on our own personal responsibility to the environment and to future generations," said Professor Michael Vandenberg, Director of the Climate Change Research Network at Vanderbilt University.

Earth Day has been around for decades.  But the pressure is building.

"The combination of increasing concern about climate change and the limits on the amount of resources that we have are becoming clearer and clearer," said Vandenberg.

When it comes to doing anything about these pressures Michael Vandenberg thinks too many of us take ourselves off the hook by blaming the government, especially George Bush. 

"Many of the problems that we face today in the environment are problems that government alone can't address.  Individual and household behavior is not something that government is particularly good at changing.  So that's a first step.  And the second step is that as people begin thinking about their own behavior, they begin looking around and asking, 'What is the corporation down the street doing?  What is the government doing?'  So it's all becoming much more closely linked," said Vandenberg.

Fingerpointing alone isn't enough.

"You're seeing more interest in everything from recycling to idling changes to how much insulation we put in -- all things that sound mundane on their own, but again when you aggregate them and assemble them together, they begin to have a remarkable impact on the total U.S. environmental harm," said Vandenberg.

So Michael Vandenberg is that rarest of environmental specialists -- an optimist.

"I believe that we're reaching a tipping point on the attitudes and behavior of individuals and households.  At the same time, it's going to take a combination of individual change and change in governmental approaches, as well.  It is also going to take international coordination.  So these are big issues -- but I'm more optimistic than I was before about the changes that are occuring on the individual level in the United States," said Vandenberg.

Happy Earth Day to you.

 

HOW BUSINESSES CAN MAKE BETTER USE OF THEIR TIME

In business, as in life, the great equalizer is time. Some people have more money than others. Some have more staff, more branch offices, more resources to work with.  But everybody, from the mightiest CEO or chairman of the board of the biggest corporation in the world, to the operator of the tiniest newsstand on the corner, has exactly the same amount of what nobody has enough of -- time.

Which is to say 24 hours each day, 168 hours each week, 8736 hours each year. Not a minute more, not a minute less.  The difference is how we use that time.  How we organize it and what we do with it.  Some valuable advice after this.

"If you love life, guard well your time," wrote Benjamin Franklin, "for time's the stuff life's made of."

I promised you some valuable advice and here it is. Don't do what I do. Don't procrastinate.  Do the most important things first. Today rather than tomorrow.

Businessman Timothy Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week, came to realize that only five of his 120 customers were generating 95 percent of his revenue.  So he reorganized his business to focus on them.  Informed decision making is important but these days it's so easy to get so much information that you get bogged down in it.

We use getting still more information as an excuse to procrastinate, says David Allen, author of Getting Things Done.  He says we do not do our best work under pressure, and if we think we do we're only kidding ourselves.  Also, get enough sleep. You don't do your best work when sleep deprived either.  Small businesses have an advantage over big ones because you can have fewer meetings and smaller ones. The fewer people at a meeting the more productive it's likely to be.

Think small.  This valuable advice doesn't come from me.  I'm just passing it along.  Personally I'm too busy to take such advice.  And too tired.

 

THE ART OF SMILE MEASURING

This month a Japanese electronics and health care company, Omron, demonstrated for reporters a new software technology that scans a video image to find up to one hundred faces in an image and analyze the curves of the lips, eye movement and other facial characteristics to decide how much, if at all, each person is smiling.

"Okao Catch," which means face catch, rates smiles on a scale of zero to 89.  Eighty-nine would be a grin.  A somber expression would be a zero.

In Japanese culture, smiling is important. You're never supposed to frown in the presence of an authority figure, a teacher or your boss for example. Sony has developed a smile shutter function for it's digital cameras which automatically clicks the shutter when the subjects break into a smile.  In this country, we're not immune to robotic smiles either.

Frank Sinatra has a song that says: "When You're Smiling, When you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you..."

That much everybody knows.
At least that's how the theory goes.
Even babies quickly learn
That a baby smile will earn
At least as much as a baby cry.
Scientists say that is why
That's why we smile at babies too.
Instinctively that's what we do.
Unfortunately though, I fear.
Not all our smiling is sincere.
Politicians, like a baby
Soon figure out that maybe
If they sweetly smile a lot
Of votes they will compile a lot.
But when angrily they frown
The total vote they get goes down.
Similarly on TV.
Some TV newscasters we see.
Smile their way through every story
good and happy, sad and gory.
The good newscasters in these sessions
Give us at least two expressions.
So by all means learn to smile
But never smile at the Osgood File.


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