Top 10: Manly Summer Cocktails

If you want to drink beyond beer this summer and retain your masculinity, you won’t go wrong with these 10 manly cocktails.

By James Raiswell , Entertainment Correspondent

This article is sponsored by theBar.com. (What's this?)

Summer is upon us, and that means it’s time to hit the patio or the pool deck and relax with some tasty beverages. But when you’re sick of beer, where do you turn for refreshment? You’re a man, so sipping on a drink that’s garnished with an umbrella or a small tropical forest is not an option. You need something refreshing that packs a kick at the same time. Lucky for you, AskMen.com and theBar.com have teamed up to create this list of 10 of the best manly summer drinks to help you through the busy season.

Number 10

California Lemonade

The great thing about lemonade is that it’s the ideal summer drink. It’s refreshing, thirst-quenching and it packs a kick. That said, why not spruce up the old favorite with some quality mixers? California Lemonade does just that.

Ingredients:
1 oz Smirnoff No. 21^(TM) vodka
¼ oz Tanqueray ^(R) London Dry gin
¼ oz cognac
¼ oz grenadine
2 oz orange juice
1 splash lime juice
1 splash sugar syrup
1 wedge lemon

How to prepare it: Pour Smirnoff No. 21^(TM) vodka, Tanqueray ^(R) London Dry gin, cognac, grenadine, orange juice, lime juice, and sugar syrup into a shaker and agitate. Strain into a tall glass filled with ice and garnish with a lemon wedge.

Perfect summer occasion to drink it: This one has “front-porch sipping” written all over it. On a lazy summer afternoon, there’s nothing quite like kicking back, sipping on some California Lemonade and watching the world go by.

Number 9

Blue Lagoon

Any man is normally well advised to stay away from brightly colored drinks, but we’ll make an exception in this case. The Blue Lagoon is more than just flashy -- there’s a nice citrus kick there, too.

Ingredients:
1 oz Tanqueray^(R) London Dry gin
¼ oz Smirnoff No. 21^(TM) vodka
¼ oz blue curacao
1 splash lime juice

How to prepare it: Build your Blue Lagoon in a highball glass filled with ice. Add Tanqueray^(R) London Dry gin, Smirnoff No. 21^(TM)vodka, blue curacao, and lime juice. Stir and serve.

Perfect summer occasion to drink it: The Blue Lagoon’s electric color makes it an ideal club drink. It’ll pick up the light and -- hopefully -- the women.

Number 8

Hole in One

You need good technique and good form to shoot a hole in one. Less experienced golfers may prefer to practice their technique at the bar instead.

Ingredients:
1½ oz Johnnie Walker^(R) Red Label^(TM) whiskey
1 tbsp honey
3 oz unsweetened tea
1 wedge lemon

How to prepare it: Build Johnnie Walker^(R) Red Label^(TM) whiskey, honey and tea in a glass. Stir to incorporate. Serve over ice in a rocks glass and garnish with the lemon wedge. 

Perfect summer occasion to drink it: If you’re not exactly proud of your performance on the back nine, at least you can say you shot a Hole in One on the 19th tee.

Number 7

Cranberry Sea Breeze

It’s OK to drink fruity drinks, provided the main fruit in there is a cranberry -- those little buggers pack a punch. Drink this one with confidence.

Ingredients:
1½ oz Smirnoff^(R) Cranberry Twist Vodka
2 oz grapefruit juice
2 oz cranberry juice
1 twist lemon

How to prepare it: Fill a tall glass with ice. Add Smirnoff^(R) Cranberry Twist Vodka , grapefruit juice and cranberry juice. Stir well and garnish with the lemon twist.

Perfect summer occasion to drink it: This one is good for sipping at a backyard barbecue or at parties. Show off your cranberries with pride; no one will dare challenge your manliness.

More of the best manly summer cocktails...

Page 2: Manly summer drinks

Number 6

Vodka martini with a picholine olive

This one is a twist on the classic vodka martini. The drink is served as cold as possible and garnished with a picholine olive for a sophisticated note.

Ingredients:
1½ oz well-chilled Smirnoff No. 21^(TM) vodka
1 picholine olive

How to prepare it: Fill a martini glass with ice. Pour Smirnoff No. 21^(TM) vodka into a steel shaker with ice. Shake briefly to chill. Throw away the ice in the martini glass and strain in the vodka. Garnish with picholine olive

Perfect summer occasion to drink it:  Nothing chills quite like a frozen martini, but you’re best advised to start in on this one when the sun goes down. Get dressed up, head out to the wine bar and wow your date with this manly summer drink.

Number 5

Whiskey Sour

There’s nothing quite so refreshing as a Whiskey Sour and, hey, even the name sounds manly.

Ingredients:
1½ oz Johnnie Walker^(R) Red Label^(TM) whiskey
½ oz lemon juice
½ tsp powdered sugar
1 maraschino cherry

How to prepare it: Fill a tumbler with ice and add the Johnnie Walker^(R)  Red Label^(TM) whiskey, lemon juice and sugar. Garnish with a maraschino cherry

Perfect summer occasion to drink it: If you’re out in the hot sun, best to stay away from this one. It is, however, a great evening patio drink.

Number 4

Electric Screwdriver

A screwdriver with a twist!

Ingredients:
¾ oz Jose Cuervo Especial^(R) tequila
¾ oz Smirnoff No. 21^(TM) vodka
2 oz orange juice
1 oz energy drink
1 slice orange

How to prepare it: Fill a tall glass halfway with ice. Add Jose Cuervo Especial^(R) tequila, Smirnoff No. 21^(TM) vodka, orange juice, and energy drink. Stir well and garnish with the orange slice.

Perfect summer occasion to drink it: Again, it’s OK to go fruity if it’s backed up by something manly, and there are few alcohols manlier than tequila. Adding energy drink into the mix only ups the XY-chromosome quotient! Head out to the club and drink this with confidence.

Number 3

Moscow Mule

The Moscow Mule is vodka with a mean kick.

Ingredients:
1½ oz Smirnoff No. 21^(TM) vodka
3 oz ginger beer
1 tsp sugar syrup
¼ oz lime juice
1 sprig mint
1 slice lime

How to prepare it: Fill a highball glass with ice. In a steel mixer half-filled with ice, shake Smirnoff No. 21^(TM) vodka, sugar syrup and lime juice. Pour into the glass and top with ginger beer. Add the mint sprig and lime slice for garnish.

Perfect summer occasion to drink it: This one’s another great porch-sipping drink with a punch!

Number 2

Tom Collins

The old classics never go out of style and, hey, you can’t say this one’s not manly -- it’s named after a dude!

Ingredients:
1¼ oz Tanqueray^(R) London Dry gin
1 oz lemon juice or lime juice
1 tsp sweet and sour mix
1 splash club soda
1 maraschino cherry
1 slice orange

How to prepare it: Build the Tanqueray^(R) London Dry gin, juice, and sweet and sour mix in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a Collins glass filled with ice. Add club soda to mix and garnish with the maraschino cherry and orange slice.

Perfect summer occasion to drink it: This old standby is great anytime, though we’d suggest sipping this one by the pool or at your neighbor’s barbecue.

Number 1

Whiskey Shredder

This one sounds mean, but it’s a real smooth one.

Ingredients:
1½ oz Johnnie Walker^(R) Red Label^(TM) whiskey
3 oz pineapple juice

How to prepare it: Pour Johnnie Walker^(R) Red Label^(TM) whiskey and pineapple juice into a highball glass filled with ice.

Perfect summer occasion to drink it: Order this one anytime. It’s a nice one at the club because people will take notice, and it’s just as good on the patio or by the pool because it’s so easy to drink.

summertime and the drinking is manly

Gentlemen, summer isn’t the best time of year for no reason. Our advice to you is to take advantage of the nice weather and head out to a patio or pool and enjoy some of these fine manly cocktails. You won’t regret it!

This article is sponsored by theBar.com. (What's this?)

Challenging the Long-Held Belief in ‘Shareholder Value’

It’s a bedrock principle of our era: Companies should be run for the sole purpose of increasing their stock prices, or returning “value” to shareholders, the ultimate “owners.”

To Lynn A. Stout, however, it amounts to nothing more than a “shareholder dictatorship.”

Ms. Stout, a professor at Cornell Law School, has written a slim and elegant polemic, “The Shareholder Value Myth” (Berrett-Koehler Publishers) to explain the idea’s two problems: It’s worked out horribly and, as a matter of law, it’s not true.

The blame lies with economists and business professors who have pushed the idea, with generous enabling from the corporate governance do-gooder movement, Ms. Stout contends. Stocks, as a result, have become the playthings of hedge funds, warping corporate motivation and eroding stock market returns.

Economists have promulgated the idea of shareholder über alles based on what Ms. Stout says is a misreading of corporate law. In 1970, Milton Friedman wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine that contended “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Two business professors, Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling, expanded on the idea in their paper “Theory of the Firm,” arguing that the only obligation corporations had was to increase profits for their owners, the shareholders.

But the idea that shareholders “own” their companies isn’t actually so set in the law, Ms. Stout argues. It’s almost as if the legal world has been keeping a giant secret from the economists, business schools, investors and journalists.

Instead, as Ms. Stout explains, what the law actually says is that shareholders are more like contractors, similar to debtholders, employees and suppliers. Directors are not obligated to give them any and all profits, but may allocate the money in the best way they see fit. They may want to pay employees more or invest in research. Courts allow boards leeway to use their own judgments.

The law gives shareholders special consideration only during takeovers and in bankruptcy. In bankruptcy, shareholders become the “residual claimants” who get what’s left over.

That concept has expanded to mean that a corporation should always be run to maximize the size of shareholders’ claims. But Ms. Stout, who also serves as a trustee for the Eaton Vance family of mutual funds, argues that those special circumstances shouldn’t dominate how we view the obligations of continuing corporations. A solvent company has completely different purposes from those of insolvent ones. We don’t decide what to do with living horses because we turn dead horses into glue, she says.

It’s clear that something is deeply wrong with our capital markets. Stock market returns have been terrible for well over a decade. Wall Street investment banks, pushing their stock prices ever higher, took on risks that blew up the global financial system. In the early 2000s, companies sought to lift their share prices through an epidemic of accounting fraud.

The professor’s argument is that as companies have increasingly focused on their stock prices and given managers more shareholdings, they have inadvertently empowered hedge funds that push for short-term solutions. Mutual funds, dependent on winning money from retail investors, have become myopic as well. The average holding period of a stock was eight years in 1960; today, it’s four months.

The biggest ill has been to align top executives’ pay with performance, usually measured by the stock price. This has proved to be “a disaster,” Ms. Stout says. Managers have become obsessed with share price. By focusing on short-term moves in stock prices, managers are eroding the long-term value of their franchises.

Here, Ms. Stout also blames the corporate governance movement, which pushed for such alignment. It has “proven harmful to the very institutions that it is seeking to benefit,” she says. “Investors are actually causing corporations to do things that are eroding investor returns.”

She calls for a return to “managerialism,” where executives and directors run companies without being preoccupied with shareholder value. Companies would be freed up to think about their customers and their employees and even to start acting more socially responsible. Shareholders would have a limited “almost safety net” role, Ms. Stout says. They would be “relatively weak — and that’s a good thing.”

Of course, this is anathema to the corporate governance advocates. Sure, short-term thinking is bad, but it’s hard to believe that giving management more power will suddenly result in a wave of altruism.

“The era of managerial supremacy was not that successful then and would be more catastrophic now,” says Nell Minow, a standard-bearer of the corporate governance movement. “The idea of speaking of shareholders as owners is absolutely crucial.”

Shareholders need to be active to prevent manager conflicts of interest and self-dealing. That’s the safeguard to make managers “as careful with your money as you would be,” Ms. Minow says.

She contends that the idea that shareholders wield too much power is laughable. Shareholders have increasingly been voting against directors only to see them reappointed. Recently, shareholders at a handful of companies have voted the majority of shares against the pay packages of chief executives — and have been ignored.

Ms. Stout does, in fact, share some goals with the corporate governance movement. She is also trying to rein in out-of-whack executive pay, for one. But her idea is to sharply curtail the supposed alignment that comes from shareholdings. Instead, she calls for directors to pay executives for after-the-fact performance. Chief executives should get a salary and then be eligible for a bonus based on good performance.

She also advocates what campaigners have called the “Robin Hood tax” — a transaction charge on securities trades. A small tax would curtail zero-sum, socially useless trading and might insulate corporations.

Ms. Stout argues that we need less trading: “We need to lock investors into their own investments so as to not push them into short-term strategies.”

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How LinkedIn Has Turned Your Resume Into A Cash Machine

This is the cover story of the July 17th issue of Forbes

LinkedIn’s chief executive, Jeff Weiner, doesn’t want to talk about Facebook. No, no, no. “I’m not going to get into comparisons with them,” he declares. And yet a few minutes later Weiner rises from his chair, walks over to a whiteboard and energetically sketches a diagram that the world’s other giant social network can’t match.

Weiner draws three concentric circles to show how LinkedIn makes its money. The outer one is subscriptions. Next, marketing and advertising. And in the center is LinkedIn’s richest and fastest-growing opportunity: turning the company’s 161 million member profiles into the 21st-century version of a “little black book” that no corporate recruiter can live without.

“That’s the bull’s-eye,” he says.

Recent attention in the social space has focused almost entirely on Facebook, with its 900 million users, 28-year-old celebrity CEO and bumpy initial public offering. In the first month after its May 18 IPO Facebook stock skidded an embarrassing 17%. Hardly anyone noticed, meanwhile, that LinkedIn shares have leaped 64% this year. Mark May from Barclays Capital says LinkedIn is on track to gross $895 million and net $70 million, up 71% and 100%, respectively, from 2011.

Compare this performance to three and a half years ago, when Weiner joined LinkedIn. The company was running a $4.5 million annual loss, paying bills mostly by hawking online ads and peddling “premium subscriptions” for as little as $9.95 a month to journalists, hedge fund managers and the like. Linked In was too bashful for its own good.

That’s when Weiner’s bull’s-eye emerged. Rather than try to wring 20 bucks here and there from individual users, he refocused the company on selling a vastly more powerful service to corporate talent scouts, priced per user at as much as $8,200 a year. Today thousands of companies use LinkedIn’s flagship Recruiter product to hunt for skilled achievers. In human resources departments, having your own Recruiter account is like being a bond trader with a Bloomberg terminal—it’s the expensive, must-have tool that denotes you’re a player.

There’s no better way to understand LinkedIn’s quiet savvy, in the midst of Facebook’s noisy clatter, than to compare the two sites’ financial efficiency. With ComScore Web-usage data and public financial filings, it’s now possible to figure out how much revenue the two rivals collect for every hour that each user spends on the site. LinkedIn’s tally: $1.30. Facebook’s: a measly 6.2 cents.

One could argue that it’s better to have a small slice of something massive than a big slice of something smaller. But the numbers above are further skewed by a simple fact: Facebook, which derives 85% of its revenue from advertising, makes money only when you’re on Facebook. Once you sign up for LinkedIn, the social network monetizes your information, not your time. Mark Zuckerberg can crow about how his users spend, on average, 6.35 hours per month on Facebook versus 18 minutes for LinkedIn. But Facebook users may click on only one of every 2,000 ads. Ask yourself which model seems more sustainable.

These dynamics will get further magnified as the Web goes mobile. It’s hard to deliver ads to tablets and smartphones, which causes no small anxiety at companies like Facebook and Google. At LinkedIn, where 22% of visits now come from mobile devices— versus 8% a year earlier—this surge just means more of the kind of interactions and data that it can monetize.

To see how that plays out, wander the halls of a conference with Lars Schmidt, head of talent acquisition for NPR. “Recruiters don’t stay in the office anymore,” the public-radio executive explained one morning. “You need to be much more externally focused.” His old-fashioned ritual of swapping business cards has been redefined. Schmidt became a fan of CardMunch, a two-year-old iPhone app that turns photos of business cards into digital contacts. In January 2011 LinkedIn bought CardMunch and rebuilt it to pull up existing LinkedIn profiles from each card and prompt people to connect.

The LinkedIn experience, in some ways, gets richer away from the desktop. Says Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s senior vice president for products and user experience: “We love mobile.”

Much as LinkedIn’s long-term model makes sense, its near-term success stems from a manic dedication to selling services to people who buy talent for a living. During Weiner’s tenure LinkedIn has developed an intense, sales-focused culture in which new-account wins are celebrated by name at biweekly all-hands meetings. The best frontline salespeople for hot products such as Recruiter can earn $400,000 a year. And unlike at other Silicon Valley companies, where engineers rank as alpha dogs, LinkedIn’s salespeople pull off the most daring stunts. Sales- effectiveness leader Nate Bride once dyed his hair blue to match the LinkedIn logo—and shaved small parts of his skull to spell out the company name.

LinkedIn has doubled the number of sales employees in the past year, with the company now spending 33% of revenue on sales and marketing. That’s a startling number for a social network, more akin to the relentlessly hawking enterprise-software crowd. Oracle and Microsoft spend 20% of revenue on sales. Facebook spends 15%; Google is at 12%.

But Weiner makes no apologies. Each time the company has expanded its sales team for Recruiter and other hiring-solutions products, he says, the payoff has been “off the charts.” Sales keep surging, and existing customers keep spreading  enthusiasm for what LinkedIn has to offer. And once these sales are made, the customer becomes low maintenance and recurring. People familiar with selling Recruiter say LinkedIn keeps 95% of its big-company accounts each year. For smaller accounts the number is more like 80%. “I’m happy to invest,” Weiner says. “My concern was how quickly we could hire and still maintain quality.”

LinkedIn’s disruptive impact on the $27 billion recruiting industry can be seen in the stock prices of the job-hunting sector’s old guard. Heidrick & Struggles, a search firm that courts candidates the old-fashioned way, has slumped 67% in the past five years, compared with a 13% drop in the S&P Index. Monster Worldwide, which operates online job boards, has fared even worse, tumbling 81%. (Its shares briefly rallied in March on momentary speculation that it would be purchased by LinkedIn.)

At the apex of the job market—CEO searches and the like—it’s hard to imagine the face-to-face niceties of traditional search giving way to LinkedIn’s more automated approach. At the other end of the spectrum, job boards provide faster results for low-paying, low-skill jobs such as cashiers and truck drivers. But LinkedIn enjoys a vast sweet spot between those two extremes, helping fill high-skill jobs that pay anywhere from $50,000 to $250,000 or more a year.

In a downtown office tower in San Jose, Calif., Jeff Vijungco bears witness to the reasons that big companies crave LinkedIn’s data. He is vice president for global talent acquisition at Adobe Systems, which employs 10,000 people and at any moment is likely to face at least 750 openings worldwide. Traditionally, staffing agencies handled about 20% of Adobe’s hunts for highly specialized engineers and digital wizards.

Vijungco chafed at that approach. Agencies were expensive, charging as much as $20,000 for each job filled. Retention rates on their placements could be disappointing. Still, there wasn’t an obvious alternative. Good people at other tech companies didn’t answer job ads; such candidates wouldn’t switch employers unless someone found them and put forth an amazing offer.

Then a few years ago Vijungco staged a talent-scouting race. One pair of recruiters used the traditional way of finding 50 solid candidates for a technical job. Another pair used LinkedIn. “The ones using LinkedIn were done within hours,” Vijungco recalls with a grin. “The other ones were still going at it, weeks later.”

Today Adobe leases 70 Recruiter seats. A typical user is Trisha Colton, who leads Adobe’s hunt for digital media executives. On a recent afternoon she needed to fill five positions. With a few clicks of the mouse on her ThinkPad laptop, she could tailor a project-manager search that enabled her to look at possible candidates from 21 leading ad agencies, 15 publishing outfits and a host of other suitable backgrounds.

A few more tweaks of the dial and Colton had specified what current jobs these people should be holding, how many years of experience they should have and their locations. Moments later she had a list of 148 prospects. Recruiter informed her which candidates already knew people at Adobe, at least slightly. Colton could use that information to help open a dialogue. If no ties existed, she could use Linked In’s modified e-mail system to approach each candidate.

“We’re saving millions of dollars this way,” Vijungco says. Search agencies now get less than 2% of Adobe’s business in the Americas.

Some small-business users have abandoned Recruiter, preferring to get by with cheaper, more limited access to LinkedIn’s data. But power users say LinkedIn is invaluable in finding hidden candidates who wouldn’t show up via traditional searches. One such devotee is Elisa Bannon-Jones, the hiring chief for Wireless Vision, a Bloomfield Hills, Mich., mobile-phone retailer.

Earlier this year Bannon-Jones was asked to find an accounting manager with entrepreneurial spirit. Regular job ads in the Detroit metro area flopped; all she got were 100 unsuitable candidates. So she crafted a multistate search via LinkedIn. Her target: accountants who had worked in similar retail companies and whose profiles also included magic words such as “launched,” “created” and “built.” Within days she had found an Avis veteran in Virginia who had developed billing systems all by himself. They chatted. She liked his initiative; he liked the job, and Wireless Vision had its catch.

LinkedIn’s success ultimately is rooted in timing. Not the technology, which is a given, but rather the changing workplace ethos. When executives like the 42-year-old Weiner were growing up, the theory was that companies provided a career for life. Creating a public profile that could win recruiters’ attention would have seemed rude and risky.

Then came a barrage of layoffs, mergers and strategic zigzags that sent entire corporate divisions to the scrap heap. The average baby boomer was likely to have held 11 jobs over the course of his or her career, including “large numbers of short-duration jobs even at middle age,” said the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2010. So employees at all skill levels returned the favor. They stopped feeling much loyalty to their employer of the moment. Filling out a LinkedIn profile started seeming downright wise.

Among the earliest people to grasp the importance of this social transformation was Reid Hoffman, a Stanford graduate who in 2000 became one of PayPal’s earliest executives. Hoffman needed a new project after PayPal was sold to eBay; he cofounded LinkedIn in 2003 on the notion that getting lots of professionals connected in an online network was bound to be helpful, somehow. “We learned [from PayPal] that you could revolutionize an industry with people who are very smart, working hard and deploying a technology never seen before,” Hoffman told FORBES in April.

Hoffman’s vision took shape fitfully. By 2004 LinkedIn had 1 million members, with word of mouth pulling more people into the free site each week. Members posted their career bios. They competed to build out contact lists that consisted of dozens or even thousands of current and former business associates. People who signed up for free memberships could prowl through one another’s contacts a little bit; people who bought premium memberships could explore a bit more. It wasn’t clear, though, what else people were supposed to do.

As LinkedIn’s membership rocketed past 20 million in 2008, a winning business model began to take shape. Now LinkedIn’s database was rich not just with Silicon Valley programmers and venture capitalists but also with Wall Street traders, Texas geologists and highly skilled professionals of all callings outside the U.S. Talent hunters were ready to pay big-time for a chance to connect with the entire LinkedIn community.

One of the first people who tried to sell the newly coined Recruiter service to big companies was Nathan Egan, a Villanova graduate now running People Linx, a social business solutions company. While at LinkedIn he took on the greater Philadelphia territory in late 2008. Egan started selling Recruiter at $5,000 a seat, worried that customers would balk at the price. “But banks didn’t mind,” Egan recalls. “Consulting firms didn’t mind at all.” Within a month LinkedIn had handed Egan a revised price sheet. Now the minimum order was three seats, at a total cost of $21,000.

Simultaneously LinkedIn was making a leadership change. The company’s founding CEO, Hoffman, was more of a venture capitalist by temperament. By early 2007 Hoffman had recruited a veteran outside manager, Dan Nye, to try running the firm. But LinkedIn was having trouble meeting its financial targets and seemed to be spreading its energy too haphazardly among many projects that were behind schedule or having little impact. In December 2008 Hoffman hired Yahoo veteran Weiner to be president for a few months before taking over the CEO’s job.

Weiner’s fascination with Internet businesses dated back to 1992, when he was a senior at the University of Pennsylvania trying to make a desktop teleconferencing company work as part of an entrepreneurship class. A couple years later he wiggled his way into the strategic planning department of Warner Bros., where he caught people’s attention, at age 24, with a detailed report arguing for Warner to take a bold digital strategy. “I was just this little pisher, a nobody,” Weiner recalls. “But they liked the report.”

He joined Yahoo in 2001 as a protégé of then-CEO Terry Semel, an ex-Warner executive. Starting in corporate development, Weiner ended up running Yahoo’s best-known properties, including mail, search, sports and news. Colleagues remember him as a tireless champion of data-driven decisions. “Jeff has very strong applied-math capabilities,” says Andrew Braccia, an Accel Partners venture capitalist who worked with Weiner at Yahoo. “He wants everything measured.”

At LinkedIn Weiner showed a more nuanced touch. He spent his first few weeks on a listening tour, meeting with just about all of LinkedIn’s 338 employees either one-on-one or in small groups. Rather than repeat Yahoo’s mistakes of moving in too many directions, Weiner built his LinkedIn strategy around getting the simple stuff right. Fix the site so it doesn’t break down as often. Run a lot of tests to see what users want. Be rigorous about analyzing data. Get the product right. And then sell, sell, sell.

Weiner crystallized Hoffman’s original idea into a seven-word maxim: “connecting talent and opportunity at massive scale.” That slogan carried LinkedIn toward a successful IPO in May 2011. Today Hoffman remains LinkedIn’s executive chairman and its largest shareholder, with an 18% stake worth nearly $1.8 billion, but spends much of his time at Greylock Partners, where he’s become one of Silicon Valley’s most active venture capitalists.

Weiner, who controls $300 million in stock even after selling 18% of his holdings, is now tasked with wringing ever more from the hiring market. This spring LinkedIn launched Talent Pipeline, a service for recruiters that allows tracking of interesting candidates who might not be ready to job-hop yet. Another initiative, being led by LinkedIn data scientist Peter Skomoroch, aims to find ways of analyzing members’ profiles in more detail. The goal: distinguishing different levels of expertise between two candidates who may both claim expertise in an area such as protein folding or mobile apps.

Because the payoff for running a growing community is so obvious, LinkedIn spends briskly on new ways to get its free members to come back. Last year it launched LinkedIn Today, a customized news site that lets people see a front page tailored for their careers. LinkedIn also continues to expand its thousands of profession-specific discussion boards, which cater to everyone from auditors to zookeepers.

Even if nobody did anything to improve Recruiter for the next five years, “the product would keep getting better every day,” asserts David Hahn, the company’s vice president for product management. “We keep adding members, expanding into new geographies, and our existing members keep adding more information. It’s important to recognize how valuable those trends will be for us.”

LinkedIn’s success so far makes it a target for younger startups. BranchOut is building a career-related social network based on members’ Facebook profiles. Identified.com awards high scores to its members with especially popular profiles. For some newcomers, though, it’s hard to develop big enough networks to be useful. BranchOut blasted invitations across the Facebook network, only to annoy some users, who shunned the new service for being “spammy.”

Not that LinkedIn doesn’t have problems. Running a social network that adds two new users per second makes it a target for mischief. Last month a Russian hacker group breached LinkedIn’s company security system, gaining access to 6.5 million user passwords. While it doesn’t appear that member accounts were accessed, the attack displayed LinkedIn’s tardiness in implementing the most advanced password-encryption systems.

“Ultimately you don’t want to be reacting to this kind of thing,” concedes Weiner, who says the company immediately stepped up in this area. “You want to make it so difficult to be hacked that break-ins don’t occur.”

Any overseas unpleasantness, however, is outweighed by opportunity. Currently 60% of LinkedIn’s members are outside the U.S., but foreign revenue is only 36%. Evening that out would spell a large profit spike, so LinkedIn in the past year has opened sales offices in Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, Spain and Hong Kong.

Weiner has even grander plans. Specifically, he wants to use LinkedIn to create an “economic graph” that would show all the matches—and mismatches—between needed skills and available talent worldwide.

“This may be five to ten years away,” Weiner says. “But there could be data on every economic opportunity, every skill required to get those jobs and every company offering those roles. There could be a professional profile for every member of the 3.3 billion people in the global workforce. If that economic graph existed, imagine all the friction coming out of the system as those connections are forged.” That’s a vision as grand as Zuckerberg’s idea of every person on Earth hosting his personal life through a Facebook page—and given the trillions spent on business each year, it’s a bull’s-eye that’s potentially even bigger.

For more, read:

LinkedIn’s Spin On Putting Your Face In Ads

How To Spot A LinkedIn Fraud

Unbelievable: Top Ten Hacked LinkedIn Passwords

New Survey: LinkedIn Still The Top Social Networking Site For Job Seekers And Recruiters

Houston's Strip Clubs Hit by New 'Pole Tax'

By NATHAN KOPPEL

The city of Houston is turning to an unusual source to help fund rape investigations: strip clubs.

The City Council passed an ordinance Wednesday that requires strip clubs to pay a $5-per-visitor fee to help pay for the analysis of biological evidence collected from rape victims in hopes of identifying their attackers.

Police in Houston, and in many other parts of the U.S., lack the money to promptly analyze evidence such as hair particles and blood specimens, gathered by investigators in packets known as rape kits. Houston estimates it has 6,000 rape kits that have yet to be scrutinized by crime laboratories.

Supporters of the ordinance, which was supported by Mayor Annise Parker and approved on a 14-1 vote, contend that strip clubs should shoulder some of the costs of rape investigations because the establishments can cultivate unhealthy attitudes toward women that can lead to sexual assaults.

"There are negative secondary effects associated with adult-entertainment establishments," said Ellen Cohen, the council member who championed the ordinance, which could generate up to $3 million in annual revenue.

The fee would also apply to clubs that stage occasional adult entertainment, such as "a wet T-shirt contest or naked sushi contest," according to the ordinance, which states all the revenue is to go toward processing rape kits.

There are an estimated 30 clubs subject to the tax, according to Ms. Cohen's chief of staff.

Critics strongly question attempts to tie strip clubs to violence against women, calling the fee unfair. "There is no known correlation between people going to nice, high-end gentlemen's clubs and rape," said Albert Van Huff, a Houston lawyer who represents local strip clubs.

A 2009 report by the University of Texas at Austin concluded that no study has "authoritatively linked alcohol, sexually oriented businesses, and the perpetration of violence."

The Texas legislature last year passed a law requiring police departments to report rape evidence backlogs to the Texas Department of Public Safety, which has so far tallied 15,000 untested kits—a number expected to grow as more departments file their reports. Nationally, the backlog has reached about 400,000, according to a federal bill introduced in Congress last month that would provide greater funding for the testing of kits.

Of the 6,000 Houston kits, police don't believe they all would yield useful evidence. In some cases, for example, the victim has decided not to press charges.

In Texas, a state law passed in 2007 already imposes a $5-per-customer charge, dubbed the "pole tax," on strip clubs around the state. A portion of the fee, which has so far generated about $15.7 million in revenue, can be used to pay for testing rape kits.

The Texas Supreme Court last year rejected a claim that the state fee, sponsored by Ms. Cohen as a state lawmaker, violates free-speech rights by infringing on a mode of expression: sexually suggestive dancing.

Victoria Camp, Deputy Director of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, said no one in her field believes that "if you walk into a strip club you become a rapist." Still, she said, "the environment that goes on at strip clubs fosters a culture that is more tolerant, at the very least, of sexual violence."

Houston clubs now face a double fee. "You are going to rip the economic rug out from underneath" the clubs, said Angelina Spencer, Executive Director of the Association of Club Executives, a strip-club trade group.

Council member Jack Christie said the strip clubs will survive. "When you look at videos of these clubs and see women putting $5, $10 and $20 dollar bills in their remaining clothing, I don't think a $5 tax will hurt anybody," he said.

Write to Nathan Koppel at nathan.koppel@wsj.com

Nora Ephron Remarks to Wellesley College Class of 1996

President Walsh, trustees, faculty, friends, noble parents...and dear class of 1996, I am so proud of you. Thank you for asking me to speak to you today. I had a wonderful time trying to imagine who had been ahead of me on the list and had said no; I was positive you'd have to have gone to Martha Stewart first. And I meant to call her to see what she would have said, but I forgot. She would probably be up here telling you how to turn your lovely black robes into tents. I will try to be at least as helpful, if not quite as specific as that.

I'm very conscious of how easy it is to let people down on a day like this, because I remember my own graduation from Wellesley very, very well, I am sorry to say. The speaker was Santha Rama Rau who was a woman writer, and I was going to be a woman writer. And in fact, I had spent four years at Wellesley going to lectures by women writers hoping that I would be the beneficiary of some terrific secret -- which I never was. And now here I was at graduation, under these very trees, absolutely terrified. Something was over. Something safe and protected. And something else was about to begin. I was heading off to New York and I was sure that I would live there forever and never meet anyone and end up dying one of those New York deaths where no one even notices you're missing until the smell drifts into the hallway weeks later. And I sat here thinking, "O.K., Santha, this is my last chance for a really terrific secret, lay it on me," and she spoke about the need to place friendship over love of country, which I must tell you had never crossed my mind one way or the other.

I want to tell you a little bit about my class, the class of 1962. When we came to Wellesley in the fall of 1958, there was an article in the Harvard Crimson about the women's colleges, one of those stupid mean little articles full of stereotypes, like girls at Bryn Mawr wear black. We were girls then, by the way, Wellesley girls. How long ago was it? It was so long ago that while I was here, Wellesley actually threw six young women out for lesbianism. It was so long ago that we had curfews. It was so long ago that if you had a boy in your room, you had to leave the door open six inches, and if you closed the door you had to put a sock on the doorknob. In my class of, I don't know, maybe 375 young women, there were six Asians and 5 Blacks. There was a strict quota on the number of Jews. Tuition was $2,000 a year and in my junior year it was raised to $2,250 and my parents practically had a heart attack.

How long ago? If you needed an abortion, you drove to a gas station in Union, New Jersey with $500 in cash in an envelope and you were taken, blindfolded, to a motel room and operated on without an anesthetic. On the lighter side, and as you no doubt read in the New York Times magazine, and were flabbergasted to learn, there were the posture pictures. We not only took off most of our clothes to have our posture pictures taken, we took them off without ever even thinking, this is weird, why are we doing this? -- not only that, we had also had speech therapy -- I was told I had a New Jersey accent I really ought to do something about, which was a shock to me since I was from Beverly Hills, California and had never set foot in the state of New Jersey... not only that, we were required to take a course called Fundamentals, Fundies, where we actually were taught how to get in and out of the back seat of the car. Some of us were named things like Winkie. We all parted our hair in the middle. How long ago was it? It was so long ago that among the things that I honestly cannot conceive of life without, that had not yet been invented: panty hose, lattes, Advil, pasta (there was no pasta then, there was only spaghetti and macaroni) -- I sit here writing this speech on a computer next to a touch tone phone with an answering machine and a Rolodex, there are several CD's on my desk, a bottle of Snapple, there are felt-tip pens and an electric pencil sharpener... well, you get the point, it was a long time ago.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Crimson had this snippy article which said that Wellesley was a school for tunicata -- tunicata apparently being small fish who spend the first part of their lives frantically swimming around the ocean floor exploring their environment, and the second part of their lives just lying there breeding. It was mean and snippy, but it had the horrible ring of truth, it was one of those do-not-ask-for-whom-the-bell-tolls things, and it burned itself into our brains. Years later, at my 25th reunion, one of my classmates mentioned it, and everyone remembered what tunacata were, word for word.

My class went to college in the era when you got a masters degrees in teaching because it was "something to fall back on" in the worst case scenario, the worst case scenario being that no one married you and you actually had to go to work. As this same classmate said at our reunion, "Our education was a dress rehearsal for a life we never led." Isn't that the saddest line? We weren't meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren't' meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions, or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect. Non Ministrare sed Ministrari -- you know the old joke, not to be ministers but to be ministers' wives.

I've written about my years at Wellesley, and I don't want to repeat myself any more than is necessary. But I do want to retell one anecdote from the piece I did about my 10th Wellesley reunion. I'll tell it a little differently for those of you who read it. Which was that, during my junior year, when I was engaged for a very short period of time, I thought I might transfer to Barnard my senior year. I went to see my class dean and she said to me, "Let me give you some advice. You've worked so hard at Wellesley, when you marry, take a year off. Devote yourself to your husband and your marriage." Of course it was stunning piece of advice to give me because I'd always intended to work after college. My mother was a career women, and all of us, her four daughters, grew up understanding that the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was as valid for girls as for boys. Take a year off being a wife. I always wondered what I was supposed to do in that year. Iron? I repeated the story for years, as proof that Wellesley wanted its graduates to be merely housewives. But I turned out to be wrong, because years later I met another Wellesley graduate who had been as hell-bent on domesticity as I had been on a career. And she had gone to the same dean with the same problem, and the dean had said to her, "Don't have children right away. Take a year to work." And so I saw that what Wellesley wanted was for us to avoid the extremes. To be instead, that thing in the middle. A lady. We were to take the fabulous education we had received here and use it to preside at dinner table or at a committee meeting, and when two people disagreed we would be intelligent enough to step in and point out the remarkable similarities between their two opposing positions. We were to spend our lives making nice.

Many of my classmates did exactly what they were supposed to when they graduated from Wellesley, and some of them, by the way, lived happily ever after. But many of them didn't. All sorts of things happened that no one expected. They needed money so they had to work. They got divorced so they had to work. They were bored witless so they had to work. The women's movement came along and made harsh value judgments about their lives -- judgments that caught them by surprise, because they were doing what they were supposed to be doing, weren't they? The rules had changed, they were caught in some kind of strange time warp. They had never intended to be the heroines of their own lives, they'd intended to be -- what? -- First Ladies, I guess, first ladies in the lives of big men. They ended up feeling like victims. They ended up, and this is really sad, thinking that their years in college were the best years of their lives.

Why am I telling you this? It was a long time ago, right? Things have changed, haven't they? Yes, they have. But I mention it because I want to remind you of the undertow, of the specific gravity. American society has a remarkable ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away. Things are different for you than they were for us. Just the fact that you chose to come to a single-sex college makes you smarter than we were -- we came because it's what you did in those days -- and the college you are graduating from is a very different place. All sorts of things caused Wellesley to change, but it did change, and today it's a place that understands its obligations to women in today's world. The women's movement has made a huge difference, too, particularly for young women like you. There are women doctors and women lawyers. There are anchorwomen, although most of them are blonde. But at the same time, the pay differential between men and women has barely changed. In my business, the movie business, there are many more women directors, but it's just as hard to make a movie about women as it ever was, and look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, and nun. It's 1996, and you are graduating from Wellesley in the Year of the Wonderbra. The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women.

What I'm saying is, don't delude yourself that the powerful cultural values that wrecked the lives of so many of my classmates have vanished from the earth. Don't let the New York Times article about the brilliant success of Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you -- there's still a glass ceiling. Don't let the number of women in the work force trick you -- there are still lots of magazines devoted almost exclusively to making perfect casseroles and turning various things into tents.

Don't underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don't take it personally, but listen hard to what's going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn't serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you -- whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. Because you don't have the alibi my class had -- this is one of the great achievements and mixed blessings you inherit: unlike us, you can't say nobody told you there were other options. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead. Twenty-five years from now, you won't have as easy a time making excuses as my class did. You won't be able to blame the deans, or the culture, or anyone else: you will have no one to blame but yourselves. Whoa.

So what are you going to do? This is the season when a clutch of successful women -- who have it all -- give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can't have it all. Maybe young women don't wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands. And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn't know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever. We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things are for you today, they won't make the list in ten years -- not that you still won't be some of those things, but they won't be the five most important things about you. Which is one of the most delicious things available to women, and more particularly to women than to men. I think. It's slightly easier for us to shift, to change our minds, to take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee who made a specialty of saying things that were famously maladroit, quoted himself at a recent commencement speech he gave. "When you see a fork in the road," he said, "take it." Yes, it's supposed to be a joke, but as someone said in a movie I made, don't laugh this is my life, this is the life many women lead: two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to take them both. It's another of the nicest things about being women; we can do that. Did I say it was hard? Yes, but let me say it again so that none of you can ever say the words, nobody said it was so hard. But it's also incredibly interesting. You are so lucky to have that life as an option.

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives.

Alan Blinder: Stimulus Isn't a Dirty Word

By ALAN S. BLINDER

A debate now rages in Europe over whether fiscal austerity—that is, higher taxes and less spending—helps or hinders growth. That's progress of sorts. Not long ago, European policy makers seemed stuck on the notion that austerity promotes growth. Yes, we were supposed to believe that countries grow faster when their governments spend less and tax more.

Events in Europe seem to have dashed that idea. But a similar debate rages here in the U.S.—with the lone exception that our pro-austerity crowd abhors tax increases. It's a highly partisan debate, too, the sort that an election should decide.

Many Democrats, including President Obama, want to help state and local governments maintain their spending, which has now dropped 6.4% since its 2008 peak—and is still falling. Most Republicans reject that idea, even when it saves the jobs of teachers, fire fighters and police officers.

Many Democrats also want to build and repair more roads, bridges, tunnels and the like—taking advantage of the rare combination of historically low government borrowing rates and historically high unemployment among construction workers. Most Republicans reject that idea, too, even though the argument for more public capital is the same as the argument for more private capital—each promotes growth.

Democrats also typically seek a growth strategy that boosts the incomes of the middle class, not just of the top 1%. Many Republicans counter that the most effective way to bolster middle-class incomes is via trickle-down from the rich—who start and grow businesses.

Politics aside, suppose we actually got serious about a pro-growth agenda based on logic and facts rather than on partisan ideology. What would it look like? Here are a few ideas:

• Budget policy. For openers, as I advocated in these pages last month, we need a two-pronged fiscal package. In the near term, we need modest stimulus, focused tightly on creating jobs. But that stimulus should be paired with a vastly larger dose of long-run deficit reduction—perhaps 10 to 20 times as large as the stimulus—over the 10-year budget window.

Economically, this can be done; it's not even that hard. But if Republicans continue to reject even deals comprised of $10 of spending cuts for each $1 of tax increases, it's hard to see how we get there politically.

• Private investment. Republicans are right that business investment is the key to growth. Fortunately, business investment has done very nicely, thank you, despite the sluggish economy—growing 8.4% over the past year and at an annual rate of 10.8% over the past two years. (The corresponding growth rates for GDP were about 2%.) So while there's always room for improvement, business investment is not part of the problem. The best thing policy can do for private investment is to get the overall economy growing faster.

• Public investment. Unlike private investment, inadequate public investment is part of the problem. America's infrastructure needs are so huge, and so painfully obvious, that it's mind-boggling we're not investing more. The U.S. government can now borrow for five years at about 0.75% and for 10 years at about 1.7%. Both rates are far below expected inflation, making real interest rates sharply negative. Yet legions of skilled construction workers remain unemployed while we drive our cars over pothole-laden roads and creaky bridges. Does this make sense?

• Education. Everyone knows that the returns to education, while large, are long delayed. That means we have no time to waste. We should be doing a much better job of building a better educated, more productive work force for the future. A Council on Foreign Relations task force co-chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein recently argued that better K-12 education is critical to American leadership in the world and therefore to our national security.

That idea is neither new nor partisan. Where things do get partisan is in choosing between working harder on traditional public schools versus relying on vouchers, charter schools and the like to provide competition. Here, the research is interesting. It suggests that, on average, charter schools perform neither better nor worse than public schools.

• Tax reform. Finally, we could reap a small growth dividend by moving to a smarter, simpler, less distortionary tax system. Both parties agree that the current tax code is a disgrace, but that's about where bipartisan agreement on taxes ends.

Republicans often focus on lowering the top income tax rate. Just like Gingrich Republicans did in 1993, Romney-Boehner Republicans now want us to believe that the success or failure of the U.S. economy hinges on whether the top bracket rate is 39.6% (which President Obama prefers), 35% (where it is now), or 28% (as in Mitt Romney's proposal).

But the evidence is against the GOP on this one. We've experimented with moving the top rate up or down a few percentage points several times. Under President Clinton in 1993, we raised it to 39.6% from 36% and one of the greatest periods of prosperity in U.S. history followed. Then in 2001, under President George W. Bush, we cut the top rate to 35% from 39.6% and . . . well, you know what followed.

Why in the world are we still arguing about this? Our focus, instead, should be on devising a fairer and more neutral tax system in which decisions regarding the allocation of resources are made by individuals and businesses, not by Congress.

So let's see. If we are serious about an evidence-based program that spurs growth and improves the lots of average Americans, we should want a near-term jobs program, long-term deficit reduction, more spending on infrastructure, improvements in education, and a tax reform that clears out loopholes, returns to the 39.6% top rate, and protects the middle class.

Which candidate does that remind you of?

Mr. Blinder, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, is a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Big Bets On Big Data

Guest post written by Pat Gelsinger

Pat Gelsinger is President and COO of information infrastructure products at EMC.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, and leaders from technology firms, venture capital and research universities recently announced a  joint effort to position the Bay State as a hub for job creation in data science. It is a bet worth making.

Thirty-five years ago, computer science didn’t exist as an academic discipline. Now, it is taught on a global basis. Within years, data science will become the new “hot” discipline for the next generation, driven by the hottest buzzword in technology today: Big Data.

Big Data refers to the growth of data sets that have become so large that they defy the ability of conventional forms of information technology to store, manage, analyze and gather important insights from them.

According to the research firm IDC, all of the new information generated in the world in the year 2000 amounted to about 2 million terabytes. The digital universe now generates more than twice that much in a single day.

Driving the data deluge are technologies and applications that permeate our daily lives: mobile sensors, smart phones and social networking.

A utility that reads a smart meter on your home every 15 minutes generates 3,000 times more information about your electricity usage than the old way of reading meters once a month. Multiply that by millions of customers in a metro area, and a smart grid can produce a data set large enough to monitor power demand in real time and predict probable outages before they occur.

Until recently, the cost to store, access and analyze big data was so high that only government and a few business models could justify the cost. Law enforcement has discovered innovative ways to match fingerprints and ballistics against centralized, digitized databases. Counter-terrorism agencies and the gaming industry have adopted facial recognition technology to identify the bad guys before they step on an airplane or onto the casino floor.

Real-time analysis of Big Data is within the reach of almost any business model in any industry. The cost to sequence one human genome, for example, has fallen from $100 million in 2001 to less than $10,000, putting personalized medical treatments within the reach of masses.

Online retailers can sift through billions of purchase observations to recommend additional items that a particular consumer might want to buy at the point of sale. Pretty soon, location data on your smartphone matched with shopping records gathered from your loyalty card will enable a supermarket to send you personalized, digital coupons for items as you walk down the aisle.

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Crowd sourcing – think tens of thousands of drivers on your local highways – already generate enough traffic data for the GPS in your smartphone to suggest alternative routes when a stretch of road is clogged. Machine learning, the ability of computers to get smarter as they gather more information and more feedback from users will lead to even greater precision in information exchange.

To accelerate job creation in data science, Massachusetts announced matching grants for Big Data projects to be funded by public/private partnerships, funding for technology research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with a Big Data internship program modeled after a successful program in the life sciences, and support for an innovative non-profit community presence in Boston, where data scientists can share infrastructure and knowledge.

This is an exciting time for innovators in this arena. Last month, EMC held our second annual summit for data scientists in government, academia, biotechnology, retailing, marketing and other fields.

There, John Brownstein from Harvard Medical School told how an online innovation he co-founded, healthmap.org, seeks to be the weather.com for infectious diseases, using crowd sourcing to provide a global view of outbreaks – two weeks ahead of the Centers for Disease Control or the U.N.

He told how the SARS outbreak in China was first detected by someone examining a stock performance chart of a Chinese company that sold herbal remedies, and how the H1N1 virus outbreak was first reported by a local TV station in Veracruz, Mexico. The mobile app OutbreaksNearMe will disseminate information back to users who report in, providing an incentive for people to input their health information anonymously into a pool of data large enough to analyze. Information that once took months to flow up the chain of public health bureaucracy now reaches the public in weeks.

Entrepreneur Tarek Kamil spoke of how 6,000 sensors in a basketball can identify telemetry data that a human cannot see, feeding information for analysis that can recommend drills to improve technique. Business consultant Piyanka Jain explained how some of the quickest returns on Big Data analytics can be found in uncovering pain points in customer relationships to improve loyalty and profitability.

Making use of Big Data, however, requires new technology architectures and algorithms that go beyond conventional database management and business intelligence. Most new information created is not transaction data that resides in neat rows and columns in traditional office databases managed by an administrator. Eighty percent of new information is generated outside of enterprise data centers, and traditional databases simply cannot scale to the challenges of data sets 100 to 1,000 times larger.

Data science also requires a new breed of scientist. Imagine a Ph.D. in life sciences who manages petabytes of information for a pharmaceutical company that conducts drug research. These people have business acumen and subject matter expertise and understand the newest technology tools and possess the curiosity to help an organization recognize predictive patterns, or anomalies in patterns. Their skills are valuable and rare.

As academics from Columbia, Stanford and UC Berkeley told our summit last month, data science is a curriculum that did not exist five years ago. It is a science that requires multi-disciplinary skills, and most universities are not organized to teach in multi-disciplinary ways. Partnerships like the ones announced in Massachusetts will change that.

Data is the new science. Big Data holds the answers. Are you asking the right questions?