US Mint ends production of one dollar coins

Last Tuesday, 13 December 2011, The U.S. Mint announced that current production of one dollar coins is ending. The Mint will continue to produce a few one dollar coins for collectors, as required by law. But these will have numismatic value, and cost more than $1.00.

instead of producing 70-80 million coins per president, the Mint will now only produce as many as collectors order.

2010 Native American $1 Coin reverse

Forty percent of $1 coins were returned, unwanted, to the Federal Reserve Bank each year.

Circulating demand for $1 coins will be met through the Federal Reserve’s existing stockpile, which will be drawn down over time.

My favorite $1 coin featured Sacagawea, guide to Lewis & Clark. This is the 2010 Native American $1 coin, reverse side. It is beautiful. Click through for full details from the U.S. Mint.

Arrivé à Tunis, un avion Air France fait demi-tour sans atterrir

Due to political unrest in Tunis, this Air France flight returned to Paris on 31 January without approaching the terminal. All passengers and crew remained on board.  The French airline had suspended flights on 14 and January 15 because of Tunisia’s political situation, but resumed schedules without interruption since 16 January 2011.

After arriving in Tunis, an Air France plane turns back for Paris

via cibletrade.com

Ben Ali a quitté la Tunisie, le Premier ministre prêt à assumer le pouvoir

Heraldry of Tunisia

Ben-Ali fled the country last week. Rumors of his whereabouts were many but uncertain. Possible destinations included Paris or Malta.

Ben Ali departs Tunisia after decades of autocracy. The Prime Minister has assumed the role of head-of-state.

Read more at www.cibletrade.com

Political Risk Exposure and Social Media

URL shortening was rarely seen anywhere other than micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter and Status Net’s identi.ca. Shortened URL’s are not prudent from an information security point-of-view, as one takes a leap of faith by clicking on a link that is not descriptive. Descriptive links are also preferable for economic reasons, as they are reputed to figure positively in the mysterious world of search engine optimization (SEO) for page rank.

Yet shortened URL’s are gaining acceptance. They are very convenient.

Libyan Hawk of Qureish via Wikipedia

Twitter introduced its own shortening service in September. Facebook did too. Google provided URL shortening with its goo.gl product in December 2009. Google expanded the range of goo.gl for use on any domain, as it was restricted for use with Google product pages before October. However, there is a new and surprising consideration when making a case for, or against, URL shortening: Political risk exposure.

Top-level domains (TLD’s) are assigned by ICANN. Generally speaking, each sovereign nation has its own TLD. For example, websites registered in Australia use the .au suffix, German sites are .de , while Japanese sites are .jp . The Libyan Government is the official registrar, as designated by ICANN in 2005, for all .ly sites, which are also the domain-of-choice for leading URL shortening services bit.ly , ow.ly and vb.ly .  What will be the consequences of Libya’s domain seizure of vb.ly on October 6, reported by Econsultancy- When All Your Shortlinks Belong to the Libyan Government, on these .ly URLs?

RowFeeder is a social media oriented web analytics service. It stands out from the glut of other Twitter-verse services by delivering reports directly to a spreadsheet. In the RowFeeder company site’s latest post, lead developer and co-founder Damon Cortesi described a new feature for RowFeeder customers: availability of URL shortener bit.ly.

RowFeeder Offers URL Shortening with bit.ly

You can now put a bit.ly link in the tracking field, and have a new column in your downloads with bit.ly click counts at the time of each post… [storing] the click data along with the Tweets and Facebook posts about a specific piece of content.

In light of the recent disruption in the .ly domain space, I enjoyed the closing lines of the announcement:

Please note: This feature has not been approved by the Libyan government, so count clicks at your own risk. Our vb.ly integration is on hold pending recent news.

*Emphasis is NOT mine.

U.S. Foreign Policy: State or Federal?

I was reading my hometown paper, The Las Cruces Sun News online version a few days ago and was unsettled after a glance at

Headline: Border governors meeting set for Sept. 19-20 in NM

Why are five governors of Mexico, our neighbor to the south but a foreign power nonetheless, meeting with governors of bordering states in Albuquerque? Doesn’t foreign policy fall under the federal aegis?

Then I thought, “Well, perhaps this is merely a wobble in the balance between State’s Rights versus The Federalist.”

I read the Associated Press news article more closely. It reminded me why foreign policy should be led by the Federal government: the RSVP list from North of the Border showed California and New Mexico attending the September meeting, with Arizona and Texas declining. I presume that Arizona State Bill 1070 regarding immigration law is the polarizing concern. And THAT sums up nicely the rationale for centrally coordinated foreign policy leadership. Solidly Federal-level. So that we remain indivisible, one nation, under… ummm well you know how it goes. No bifurcation. No squabbling. We don’t lose sight of the big picture. Secessionary sentiments remain historical artifacts and the stuff of science fiction nightmares.

I like stability and a unified front. I confess, I am a worrier. I am worried about the State of Our Union.