A drop in reputation scores for hundreds of prominent Web sites this week has bloggers buzzing that Google has tweaked its PageRank algorithm. Although Google hasn’t admitted to tweaking PR (PageRank), which appears in the Google Toolbar and is Google’s system for weighing a Web page for its relevance to a specific query based on the number of links that it has to it, Search Engine Land, one of many search-oriented sites to notice the move, pointed out the PR drops on Oct. 24, noting that Forbes.com, WashintonPost.com, SFGate.com, SunTimes.com and Engadget.com all dropped from PR7 to PR5.

http://www.timw.com itself has dropped from PR4 to PR1. I’ll admit I’m annoyed, but as long as my daily visitor count doesn’t drop, I’ll keep quiet.

A 34-year-old woman has been charged with using the Internet to try to get revenge on an old boyfriend by breaking up his marriage. Pilar Stofega has been charged with second-degree harassment and breach of peace and released on $2,500 bond.

Waterford police say she created phony profiles of the former boyfriend’s current wife on some adult Web sites that included the wife’s home and work phone numbers and high school yearbook picture.

Stofega said she did to it “to be vindictive, knowing that the profiles would create marital problems between” the victim and her husband, according to court documents.

The plot came to life when strange men started calling a Waterford woman’s house over the summer, saying they had seen her profile on an adult Web site.

The man Stofega had dated eight years ago used his own computer to investigate and discovered someone had created a profile for his wife on several Internet sites, according to court records.

Police say the husband did more online investigating and was able to find out that the person behind the phony profiles of his wife was the woman he dated in 1999. He passed the information on to Waterford police, leading to Stofega’s arrest last week.

Waterford police got a court order to seize Stofega’s Internet records. They reviewed the account records before searching her house in late September.

Stofega was at the house when police served the warrant. Officers said she provided them with a sworn written statement in which she admitted to intentionally creating the profiles in the victim’s likeness on the adult Web sites.

Stofega is scheduled to appear in New London Superior Court on Monday. Court records did not list an attorney and her phone number was not listed.

A dead man’s fingers were cut off for identification in Albania even though he was carrying identity papers and his killer confessed.

Police confirmed a media report that shocked the family of the victim, who had returned to Albania to marry his fiancee.

“This action was performed by the investigative team not only to identify the corpse, but also to clarify some doubts about the evidence,” the Police Science Institute said on Thursday.

It said the removal of fingers was justified when the body was decomposed.

The man’s best friend has confessed to killing him in a dispute about money on October 4. The body was found in a marsh by a shepherd eight days later.

Instead of walking down the aisle of a church, a former New York couple will traipse down the aisle of a court room to settle a fight over a $48,800 diamond engagement ring.

Dean Kuehnen Jr. is suing his ex-fiance, Andria Castellano, to compel her to either return the ring or give him cash — as well as cover his legal fees and costs, according to the complaint filed in New York State Court.

Castellano has threatened to sell or destroy the 3.23-carat ring, even though the couple agreed the ring would be returned to Kuehnen if their engagement was ever broken off, the complaint says.

Both were 21 years old when they became engaged in December last year, but by September this year the wedding was off.

“The sole and exclusive consideration, motivation and reason for buying the ring was the contemplated marriage,” the complaint says.

Attempts to contact Castellano were unsuccessful.

According to the United States’ Emily Post Institute that offers etiquette and manners advice, “if an engagement is broken, the bride should immediately return the ring to her former fiance.”

“The only “but” in this case is if the ring is a family heirloom of the bride’s. She should then keep the ring,” the institute said on its Web site.

Everyone around me wants to start a new business. Everyone wants to be the next greatest entrepreneur. But 99.9% of them seem to lack the understanding that a business plan is not just important, but vital.

When launching a new venture or expanding on an existing one, the most important step will be the construction of a business plan. The plan must include your short and long-term goals for the enterprise, details on the products or services you wish to offer, and the market opportunities you have anticipated for them, as well as specifics on resources you require, and how you plan to utilise them to reach your goal in the face of competition.

Preparing an ample business plan is no easy task. Spending hundreds of man hours on it is not far-fetched, depending on how much data you have already gathered. Such an effort is necessary if you are to crystallise and focus your ideas, and test your resolve about entering or expanding your business. When finished, your business plan will act like any map, and help guide the user from start to destination.

There are several key benefits for preparing a business plan:

• This systematic approach to planning enables you to make mistakes on paper as opposed to in a real-life market place. One potential entrepreneur found that the local competitor he believed was a one-man band was in fact the pilot operation for a nation-wide chan of franchised outlets. This indeed caused an overwhelming effect on his market entry strategy! Another entrepreneur found that at the price he proposed, he would never recover his overheads, or break even.
• Once the business plan has been completed, it should make you feel much more confident about your ability to set up and operate the venture. It may even compensate for lack of experience and / or capital, provided you have other factors in your favour, such as a strong market gap for you to fill.
• Your business plan will allow you to see what resources you require, more specifically how much money is required, what and when it is needed, as well as how long it is needed for. Under-capitalisation and early cash-flow problems are two major reasons as to why new businesses fail, hence a strongly prepared business plan can help reduce such risks. Whilst researching, one can experiment with a range of alternative strategies, and thus pick out the ones that make best use of scare financial resources.
• It would be an exaggeration to say your business plan is the key to sources of finance. It will however, help you display your entrepreneurial ability and managerial talent to the full, aiding in communicating your ideas to others in a way that is easy for them to understand – including the reasoning behind your decisions and ideas. These ‘others’ could be bankers, potential investors, partners or advisory agencies. The better they know what you are trying to do, the better they will be able to help you.
• Putting together a business plan gives you an insight into the planning process. It is this process that is vital to the long-term health of a business, and not simply the plan that comes out of it. Businesses are dynamic, as are the commercial and competitive environments they operate in. You cannot expect every event recorded on a business plan to occur as written, but the knowledge and understanding created by the process of business planning will prepare the business for any changes that may occur, and so enable it to adjust quickly.

Despite these many valuable benefits, thousands of would-be entrepreneurs still try to start a venture without a business plan. The most common among such are businesses that appear to either not require any or much capital at the beginning, or whose founders have funds of their own; in both cases it is unnecessary to expose the project to harsh financial appraisal.

There is an overused thought that customers will pay all cash immediately, and suppliers will wait indefinitely to be paid, during which the business can use such funds to finance itself. Such model customers and suppliers are much harder to find if ever than optimistic entrepreneurs think. Regardless, two important market rules apply: either the product or service on offer fails to sell like hot cakes, and mountains of unpaid stockpile builds up (all of which need to be financed); or it does sell like mad and more financially strong entrepreneurs are attracted to the business. Without the staying power that adequate financing provides, you and your new venture is dead.

Those would-be entrepreneurs with funds of their own, or worse still with funds borrowed from ‘innocent’ friends and relatives, tend to think that the time spent on preparing a business plan could more usefully and enjoyably be spent looking for a new office, buying a new car, or setting up a new computer. In essence, anything that inhibits them from immediate action is considered time wasting.

Because most people’s view of their business venture is flawed in some important respect, it follows that jumping in at the deep end is risky. However, with a business plan, flaws can be discovered cheaply and far in advance; whenever such flaws are found in the marketplace, they are almost always found at a much higher and fatal cost.

There was a common myth at the start of the Internet boom that the pace of development in the sector was far too fast for business planning. The first generation of dot.com businesses and their backers seemed happy to pump money into what they called a ‘business’ or a ‘revenue’ model. These ‘models’ were little more than brief statements followed by wishful thinking. A few months into the new millennium, and a sense of realism came to the Internet sector. Now, only ventures with well-prepared business plans have any chance of getting off the ground, or being supported in later-stage financing rounds. If you can’t put together a proper business plan, you can’t start a new venture. Simple.

A Mexican priest briefly ended up behind bars after punching a policeman who caught him driving drunkenly through the streets of the northern city of Monterrey.

Priest Manuel Raul Ortega, who was not wearing clerical dress but was clutching a prayer book when captured, launched himself at the traffic cop who pulled him over earlier this week.

“The individual became very violent because they were going to tow away his car. He attacked a policeman and was taken away,” said transit department spokesman Hector Lozano on Thursday.

Ortega’s papers identified him as a priest. He was released a few hours after his arrest after paying the fines for his offenses.

Monterrey and Mexico City are in the midst of a tough new drive to clamp down on widespread drunken driving after tequila and beer-fueled lunches and parties.

Australian doctors have kept an Italian tourist alive by feeding him vodka through a drip for three days, medical staff in Queensland say.
The 24-year-old man, who had swallowed a poison in an apparent suicide attempt, was treated while in a coma.

Doctors set up the drip after running out of medicinal alcohol, used as an antidote to the poison.

Medical staff said the patient had made a full recovery, and the hangover had worn off by the time he woke up.

He had been taken to hospital in the northern Queensland town of Mackay after swallowing ethylene glycol – a poison contained in anti-freeze.

“The patient was drip-fed about three standard drinks an hour for three days in the intensive care unit,” Dr Todd Fraser said in a statement.

“Fortunately for him he was in a medically induced coma for a good portion of that. By the time he woke up I think his hangover would have well and truly gone.”

He spent 20 days in hospital before being discharged.

Deal or no deal? An online exchange between a woman looking for a husband who earns more than $500,000 a year and a mystery Wall Street banker, who assessed her potential for romance as a business deal, has cause quite an Internet stir.

The anonymous 25-year-old woman recently posted an ad on the free online New York community Web site Craigslist, appealing for advice on how to find a wealthy husband.

“I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all,” the woman, who described herself as “spectacularly beautiful” and “superficial,” wrote.

“I dated a business man who makes average around 200 – 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. $250,000 won’t get me to Central Park West,” she said, asking questions like “where do rich single men hang out?”

The mystery banker, who said he fit the bill, offered the woman an analysis of her predicament, describing it as “plain and simple a crappy business deal.”

“Your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity … in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!” the banker wrote.

“So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset,” he said. “Let me explain, you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!”

“It doesn’t make good business sense to “buy you” (which is what you’re asking) so I’d rather lease,” he said.

While the woman has since removed the ad from Craigslist, it — along with the response — has become a popular email joke that, bank JPMorgan Chase says, led to one of its bankers mistakenly being credited with writing the response.

Brian Marchiony, spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, said the banker did not write the response and that his email signature accidentally became attached to the ad and response when he forwarded it to friends and it then wound up on blogs.

Craigslist was not immediately available for comment, but a spokeswoman told The New York Times that “it does look as if the post was made sincerely.”

Shoplifters at Country Mart tend to favor cold medicines and packaged meats. They used to steal cigarettes, too, until tobacco was moved behind the counter. But the doughnuts were never a target for thieves.

Country Mart’s doughnuts — fried fresh daily in the store — sell for just 52 cents each. That is why the “shoplifters will be prosecuted” signs are displayed in aisle 4 with the pricey pain and allergy pills, and not in aisle 5 beside the glass doughnut case with its tiger tails, jelly-filleds and eclairs.

Then one man’s sweet tooth got the better of him. He stole a doughnut. A single doughnut.

Read more here

They’ve been left on doorsteps and outside post offices in the dead of night, but no one knows what to make of the mystery of the stone heads.

As many as 20 artfully carved faces, miniature versions of the Easter Island sculptures, have been deposited in sleepy villages across northern England in recent weeks, leaving the recipients intrigued and confused.

Each of the stone heads, some measuring up to 45 cm (18 inches) high, is slightly different, but all of them have the same riddle attached, written on a thin blue card.

“Twinkle twinkle like a star, does love blaze less from afar?” it reads, with the word “paradox” written around the points of a star.

While a publicity stunt of some sort is suspected, not unlike the crop circle mysteries that obsessed Britain a decade ago, there are no clues as to who may be leaving the heads. Police, residents and recipients are all non-plussed.

“It appeared last Monday in the early hours of the morning,” said Fiona Gould, the owner of the Forresters Arms Hotel in the village of Kilburn, North Yorkshire.

“I love it. We’ve nicknamed it Forest Lump. We’ve put him on the end of the bar and he gets a pat on the head before everyone goes to the races.”

Valerie Hoyes, who runs the post office in the village of Braithwell, about 40 miles south of Kilburn, discovered hers back in August, but thought nothing of it. She didn’t tell anyone until others came forward.

After the discovery, her husband reviewed security camera footage and caught a glimpse of a man getting out of a car, but his face was indistinguishable and the mystery remained.

“This chappie just drove up at 4.15 in the morning, parked his car and dropped off these three stone heads on the doorstep,” Valerie Hoyes told Reuters.

“They’re a bit like gargoyles. They’re very bizarre.

“We’ve been living in Braithwell for 26 years and we’ve never known anything like this at all. Never. People wonder if it’s part of the occult.”

Stonemasons say the sculpting is good, and the stone of high quality. It would have taken hours of careful work to make them.

Since her discovery, Gould has received emails from all over with suggestions of who might be responsible. One pointed to a local sculptor called Billy Johnson, but he’s not been found.

Either way, she’s not worried. “Forest Lump” has brought her luck, she says.

“It put the wind up everyone for the first week or so, but now I like it. Friends who I haven’t heard from or seen in years are getting in touch, so I’m very happy.”