Prof. Richard Restak is a great author and a very good thinker around neuroscience and its meaning in the real world. Here he is speaking on some of the strange things that subliminal messaging does:

Well it’s been a year to savour for those who like the darker side of miserable failure.

I have chosen only those outstanding errors that reek of schaudenfreude.

Could have gone with Google’s purchase of $240 million for a 1.6% share of Facebook, (Well, it is only $240,000,000), but who knows that might work out, right?

After all they did buy the advertising rights, and we all click ads when we visit Facebook, right? Oh dear.

Or the Aqua Teen movie publicity stunt that caused numerous bomb scare reports in the Boston area, but has since been widely praised as a brilliant if albeit risky (it did cost the CEO of the Cartoon Network, Jim Samples, his job) tactic to publicize a fanboy movie offering.

Or dozens of others, including giants like Microsoft’s Vista (an acquaintance described to me very venomously as “the biggest and slowest suicide note in history”), or Apple’s stunning own goal regarding the pricing of the iPhone.

Data loss is a growing trend (And more of those later), and data collectors are growing very long tails and horns:Yahoo! seem to demand new information about you for everything. Amazon, who know more about your purchasing habits than a professional shopper, and almost inevitably, AOL, who are running a spyware campaign that includes a data gather. Nice. (Source: Business Intelligence Lowdown)

Then there’s just plain messed-up finances like well, a lot of mortgages.While all are good, none are so great as to be labelled monumentally FUBAR’d.

Life is regrettably even more bizarre.

So, some of the below are well known to us all, some perhaps not so well known.

However, the ones chosen I believe all show merit for truly messing on their own carpet in elephantine quantities and are truly deserving of the immortal epithet:

“Teamwork is fun - it allows you to blame someone else.”

Perhaps not surprisingly two involved mass transportation, and definitely not surprising to anyone at all, all involved IT in one form or another.

Two involved IT in, well, a huge way.

If you count the biggest (probable) robbery in history as huge.

The winner is actually missing from most other lists on the internet as it happened on the 21st December 2007, but given the amount involved it really does make the top of the list.

So here goes:

The runner-ups.

A real doozie to kick-off the proceedings, Response Unlimited, a marketing company of some importance, that took on the task of marketing a fund-raising campaign for Terri Schiavo’s family (The most famous right to life case of 2007) and then sold the list as sales leads. Outstanding. And for biting the hands that feed them, Response Unlimited, got burned at Christian Media Research’s pages.

LA Airport.

Some 17,000 planes were grounded at Los Angeles International Airport earlier this year because of a software problem. The problem that hit systems at United States Customs and Border Protection (USCBP) agency was a simple one caused in a piece of lowly, inexpensive equipment.

The device in question was a network card that cascaded out until it hit the entire network at the USCBP and brought it to a standstill. Nobody could be authorised to leave or enter the US through the airport for eight hours. Passengers were not impressed. (Source: ZDNet)

And the winner of the lack of personal perspective award:

John Mackey. Former CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc.

Who not only disguised postings on Yahoo!’s message boards in order to beef up the stock price but proved himself to have a Zeppelin sized ego while doing it. Among several classic lines: “I like Mackey’s hair. I think he looks cute.”

Bet he smiled as he posted it.

Bet he’s not smiling now.

For getting it so wrong in the quality steaks (sic):Topps Meat who redefined the expectations of the company BBQ by letting standards drift a little. Well, they did recall 21.7 million pounds of meat. That’s a lot of burgers. Their nationwide e-coli scare led a recall that cost the company so much money it simply went broke.

And, for the most effective Valentine’s day Massacre since Al Capone also offered free transportation in the Chicago area:(Not just because it gave Jay Leno jokes forever) Jet Blue. The previously excellent low-cost airline stranded, or rather imprisoned, thousands during a Valentine Day’s marketing stunt.

Jet Blue could have been forgiven, it was due to snowstorms, but their follow-up efforts were just horrible. To experience what sardines die for, being enclosed in tight proximity of strangers in a metal can, Jet Blue gets a reasonable mention.

And so to IT and personal information:

It’s a tie:

For achieving what millions of fake Ebay emails and all those phishing sites couldn’t TJMaxx; who singlehandedly found that 45.7 million credit card details had been snatched from their new wireless setup with a worm, which to top it all had lain undetected on their system for eighteen months.

Possibly the biggest bank robbery in history, no-one will say how much was eventually taken. No one yet has been caught.

And,

Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (UK) for losing the details of 25 million individuals, with some 7.25 million UK families potentially affected.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, said that two discs containing the details of everybody in the UK who claims and receives child benefits had been lost.

Details on the discs, which were only password protected, included names, addresses, dates of birth, national insurance numbers and bank and building society account details.”This is an extremely serious matter,” said Darling.

No kidding.

Expect a very large number of passport applications from people with Eastern European English very soon.

And the 2007 runner-up:

Northern Rock Building Society

Who’d have thought a British Building Society would have made a global list. What a mess - like a page from a lost Victorian melodrama the Bank of England was called in to valiantly shored up the BS after the positively Hollywood-like sight of a genuine bank run by the good people of Britain. I promise to pay the bearer…. not on your nelly.

Dropping from the FTSE 100 to the 250 was bad enough, but for the largest mortgage lender in the UK to have to go the Bank of England as a lender of last resort, well, it was just not cricket.

On the first day of the run it is estimated that some £1 billion was withdrawn by customers - including a couple who barricaded themselves in the Cheltenham branch as they were unable to access their savings of £1 million online due to traffic to the site.

It wasn’t all bad news though, there were some hedge funds managers who thoroughly deserve their Christmas bonus as they conservatively made their funds some £1 billion.

Oh, and don’t be surprised to see more of this financial shenanigans in the future.

And finally, just getting in at the timestamp, the winner is:

Morgan Stanley.

Yes, one of the top financial institutions, who wisely left the announcement until after most magazines had published their lists on December 21st 2007 announced a single catastrophic mistake by traders at Morgan Stanley’s mortgage business which blew a US$8 billion ($10.6 billion) hole in the bank’s finances.

That’s $8,000,000,000.

Or a lot of presents at Costco. Which is where some bank’s staff will no doubt be shortly applying for work.

In what might be the biggest single loss by a trading desk on Wall St, Morgan Stanley said it was stuck holding vast quantities of mortgage derivatives that had plunged in value since mid-year and kept on plunging in November.

John Mack, chief executive, called it “an error of judgment”. Colm Kelleher, chief financial officer, said the bank had learned “a very expensive and humbling lesson”.

Amen to that.

Congratulations to all those who didn’t make this list, and commiserations to all those that did. We wish all a better 2008, and hope that your records, flights, investments, and IT are all safe in the coming year.

Business Intelegant Guide to accounting, auditing, excel, financial tools, and personal investing links

Spreadsheet Mistakes
Fabulous news stories of horrible real-life accounting mistakes
http://www.eusprig.org/stories.htm

Excel tips and tricks etc;
http://www.ddmcomputing.com/excel/index.html
http://www.exceladvisor.net/

Financial Career Options
http://www.accountingcrossing.com/article/index.php?id=400008

Magazines
News, jobs, and general audit, finance (UK)
http://www.gaapweb.com/Default.aspx
Finance Executive Magazine
http://www.businessfinancemag.com/
Accountancy Magazine.com
http://www.accountancymagazine.com/
Accountants World publish Abacus magazine for Accountants
http://www.accountantsworld.com/
Business Finance Magazine.com: Larger issues for Larger Firms
http://www.businessfinancemag.com/
Fortune Watch - Personal Finance and Wealth Management Magazine
http://www.fortunewatch.com/
Entrepreneur and Small Business
http://www.inc.com/

Intelegant Financial Toolbox
New York State CPA Lexicon
http://www.nysscpa.org/prof_library/guide.htm
Financial Calculators - Lots of ‘em
http://www.padgettnb.com/tools.html
http://www.fincalc.com/iarfc.htm
Wonderfully simple accounting and audit primer
http://www.dwmbeancounter.com/tutorial/Tutorial.html
Financial Ratios For Financial Statement Analysis
http://cpaclass.com/fsa/ratio-01a.htm
Capital Budget
http://www.studyfinance.com/lessons/capbudget/index.mv?page=02
Practice accounting worksheets: fun, eh!
http://faculty.dbcc.edu/accounting/accounting_forms-Downloads.htm
Federal depreciation rates
http://www.smbiz.com/sbrl012.html
Inflation calculator
http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm
Business Plan Archive
http://www.businessplanarchive.org/

Institutions
The Institute For Fiscal Studies (UK)
http://www.ifs.org.uk/

Personal Finance
Debt
http://www.reallifedebt.com/
Private Finance Privacy including Off-shore Banking
http://www.privacyworld.com/auto/citz.html
Seven Ways to Generate Passive Income
http://www.savingexplained.com/2007/08/31/7-quick-ideas-to-generate-some-passive-income/
Estimate When You Will Become A Millionaire
http://rule72.info/millionaire_estimation
102 Personal Financial Tips
http://www.yourcreditadvisor.com/blog/2006/10/102_personal_fi.html
46 Things I Wish My Mother Had Taught Me About Finance
http://www.directnaturalgame.com/lb/a/46-things-i-wish-my-mom-taught-me-about-money.html
101 Ways To Save Money
http://www.creditcave.com/101-ways-to-save-money.php

Investing: Very good investment glossaries
http://www.duke.edu/~charvey/Classes/wpg/bfglosr.htm
http://www.investorwords.com/
Learn via simulators how to invest in shares, Forex etc;
http://www.investingonline.org/isc/
Worldwide Stock Charts
http://stockcharts.com/charts/

Company Set-up
Complete US company set-up papers: including asset protection, all tax forms, hiring and firing, all benefit forms etc; etc; etc; very nicely organized
http://www.officedepot.com/renderStaticPage.do?context=/content&file=/BusinessTools/forms/default.jsp

Forensic Accounting and Litigation Support: A Good Guide
http://www.forensicaccounting.com/

And Just Plain Interesting…

Counterfeiting and the Central Bank
http://www.rulesforuse.org/pub/index.php?lang=en
Banking History (UK)
http://www.georgianindex.net/banking_economics/banking.html
Online Economics Reading
http://www.econsources.com/
http://www.oswego.edu/~economic/newbooks.htm

Happy hunting!

Amazon are now offering the “next generation” gizmo a lightweight electronic reading device called Kindle. Apart from the fact that the screen flashes black on every page turn, and takes two seconds to load each page, and has some DRM issues, as the reviews by users at amazon.com themselves forlornly admit; does no-one else think that this is kind of souless?

The immense pleasure in paper, opening the book, smelling the book even(!), carefully preserving the spine and dust covers and building a library over the years that tells a life story?

That can now be replaced by a push button.
[I do think this is useful installed at airports and at Starbucks for newspapers and magazines, but as a way of owning books, no thanks.]

I love real books, and so do my children. I used to spend wonderful mornings as a geeky teenager in the book shops on the Charing Cross in London loving every minute. They have all gone, beaten out by huge conglomerates. As a business thinker I admire the strategic efficiency and clout, but as a human being I mourn the lovely sensation of serendipity of finding an old 19th century leather-bound edition of Tennyson, or a wine list from the 1940s, or old Hotspurs, and Beanos (The heyday of British comics), or just that good novel that I never got round to reading in the 5p pile.

What’s next for publishers? Is this a symptom? Is it really good-bye books? I don’t think so, but I think it is a trend. Already libraries are buying e-books rather than books. Now publishers would make lots of money - no print or distribution costs - and libraries will become a thing of the past. They’ll say they won’t of course, but eventually…

The more paranoid will see a conspiracy. I see an attempt by Amazon to reduce logistics and stock - but when and why do we accept the social cost? I like paper, it’s organic, cellulose, and beautiful. I also live in Sweden where paper matters to companies like Södra.

I would also argue the neurological event of reading and the memory process are curtailed. Further, I can’t give the book to a friend, I can’t take out from the shelf a vloume a once baby chewed on (!) and I’d never hold a wonderful oversized colour atlas again, and that’s a thing of immense beauty.

And beauty will be gone, for on Kindle all books will become the same size. No special bindings, or bookmarks, no dog-eared interruptions, or books with watermarks, and flyleafs, tracing paper, and watercolours, and jammy fingers that bring smiles of memories of midnight snacks, torches, and childhood. More than that, I fear that books, the absolute pinnacle of human learning and the repository of thought and ideas, laughter, sorrow, and wisdom will become just another commercial commodity. I wouldn’t even want a Kindle for the train or the beach, and yes, I get that I can get thousands of books that I can’t get in a bookstore - but for me that’s hardly the point.

My suggestion to Amazon would be to emphasize that printed books will continue to be the number one way of enjoying reading; and to bundle the book and electronic version together for a dollar more (As in buy two get one free) for those who want that. Me, no thanks. You, maybe both? Maybe just Kindle?

Just think this though, every purchase or read of an electronic book, somewhere a printed book dies. The logic of the strategic model might be that we really are meant to lose most printed books to an electronic e-book format over the next 50 years…So kindle or kindling? You judge.

For me every real book is a wonderful testament to human freedom - I run my hand across my bookshelf from Beatrix Potter to Essays On Exchange Rates: Deterministic Chaos and Technical Analysis on my bookshelf and feel a lifetime of memories…The loss of that seems to my way of thinking as bad as losing childhood itself…Or am I wrong?