Same-sex couples Paul Katami （L), Jeff Zarillo （2nd L), and Kris Perry （2nd R) and Sandy S

gical treadmill.

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erica's most successful technology companies.

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son. Thus a person is not just a physical entity, but also a mental or emotional entity, even their spiritual side will be included. Acupuncture itself works on an energy system basically. If that energy is blocked or out of balance, you will show certain symptoms. And to stay healthy, diet, exercise and regular life schedule are surely three essential elements. If we live in tune with laws of the universe, we won't get sick.

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, and at least as important as, the problem of the division of labour," Friedrich Hayek told the London Economic Club in 1936. What Mr. Hayek could not have known about knowledge was that 70 years later weblogs, or blogs, would be pooling it into a vast, virtual conversation. That economists are typing as prolifically as anyone speaks both to the value of the medium and to the worth they put on their time.

Like millions of others, economists from circles of academia and public policy spend hours each day writing for nothing. The concept seems at odds with the notion of economists as intellectual instruments trained in the maximisation of utility or profit. Yet the demand is there: some of their blogs get thousands of visitors daily, often from people at influential institutions like the IMF and the Federal Reserve. One of the most active "econobloggers" is Brad DeLong, of the University of California, Berkeley, whose site, delong, typepad, com,, features a morning-coffee videocast and an afiernoon-tea audiocast in which he holds forth on a spread of topics from the Treasury to Trotsky.

So why do it? "It's a place in the intellectual influence game," Mr. DeLong replies (by e-mail, naturally). For prominent economists, that place can come with a price. Time spent on the Internet could otherwise be spent on traditional publishing or collecting consulting fees. Mr. DeLong caps his blogging at 90 minutes a day. His only blog revenue comes from selling advertising links to help cover the cost of his servers, which handle more than 20,000 visitors daily.

Gary Becket, a Nobel-prize winning economist, and Richard Posner, a federal circuit judge and law professor, began a joint blog in 2004. The pair, colleagues at the University of Chicago, believed that their site, becker-posner-blog, com, would permit "instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers." The practice began as an educational tool for Greg Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chairman of George Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. His site, gregmankiw, blogspot, com, started as a group e-mail sent to students, with commentary on articles and new ideas. But the market for his musings grew beyond the classroom, and a blog was the solution. "It's a natural extension of my day job—to engage in intellectual discourse about economics," Mr. Mankiw says.

With professors spending so much time blogging for no payment, universities might wonder whether this detracts from their value. Although there is no evidence of a direct link between blogging and publishing productivity, a new study by E. Hah Kim and Adair Morse, of the University of Michigan, and Luigi Zingales, of the University of Chicago, shows that the Internet's ability to spread knowledge beyond university classrooms has diminished the competitive edge that elite schools once held.

Top universities once benefited from having clusters of star professors. The study showed that during the 1970s, an economics professor from a random university, outside the top 25 programmes, would double his research productivity by moving to Harvard. The strong relationship between individual output and that of one's colleagues weakened in the 1980s, and vanished by the end of the 1990s.

The faster flow of information and the waning importance of location—which blogs exemplify—have made it easier for economists from any university to have access to the best brains in their field. That anyone with an internet connection can sit in on a virtual lecture from Mr. DeLong means that his ideas move freely beyond the boundaries of Berkeley, creating a welfare gain for professors and the public.

Universities can also benefit in this part of the equation.

les.

s literally an iconic company. Some of the power of its brand comes from the extraordinary story of a computer company rescued from near-collapse by its co-founder, Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple in 1997 after years of exile, reinvented it as a consumer-electronics firm and is now taking it into the billion-unit-a-year mobile-phone industry. But mostly Apple's zest comes from its reputation for inventiveness. From its first computer in 1977 to the iPhone now, which goes on sale in America this month, Apple has prospered by keeping just ahead of the times.

The company, however, is not without its critics. The firm has come under attack for refusing to make its operating-system and music-protection software available to others (a price worth paying, Apple responds, for greater reliability and consistency). And there are grumbles about manufacturing defects and customer service.

Apple is hardly alone in the high-tech industry when it comes to duff gadgets and unhelpful call centers, but in other respects it is highly unusual. In particular, it inspires an almost religious fervor among its customers. That is no doubt helped by the fact that its corporate biography is so closely bound up with the mercurial Mr. Jobs, a rare showman in his industry.

as in bankcard systems. Currency and coin are abandoned. The immediate benefits would be profound and fundamental.

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seller is asking, although he may be thousands of miles away. Thus the market for anything is, potentially, the whole world.

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al activities throughout the country. The performing arts are well established, with professional and amateur companies active in music, drama and dance. New Zealand writing, painting, pottery and weaving have achieved growing international recognition in recent years. Filmmaking has also become an important industry over the past 20 years. The educational system strongly encourages music, drama and visual arts at all levels.

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