Culturite

The recent Hollywood writers’ strike tipped California into a recession, resulting in a loss of $2.1 billion to the state economy and costing 37,700 jobs, the Milken Institute said in a research report.

The report, issued by the economic think tank on Thursday, takes on increasing importance as the Screen Actors Guild and Hollywood’s major movie studios are embroiled in their own contract talks that threaten to throw the industry into another work stoppage as soon as the SAG contract expires on June 30.

Aristotle. Nietzsche. Buffy? The blonde heroine of the campy television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” as well as other works by director and writer Josh Whedon, will be the focus of a three-day academic conference held at Henderson State University beginning Friday.

The television series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar won cult fame and critical praise during its seven seasons on The WB and UPN networks.

Since it ended, the series has spawned enough academic books on the philosophy surrounding the roles of friendship and feminism to fill a bookshelf stretching 15 feet long at the college in Arkadelphia, said Kevin Durand, an associate professor of philosophy at the school.

“It has staying power,” Durand said. “It’s like I tell my students in philosophy a lot of times: We’re not so much about necessarily finding all the answers as wanting to ask better questions. ‘Buffy,’ I think, does that. ‘Buffy’ never really leaves you with nice, pat answers. You have even more questions than when you started.”

Durand said more than 90 academic papers will be discussed at the conference. He expects about 150 people to attend and discuss the vampire slayer and Whedon’s other works, like the television series “Firefly” and “Angel.” Another point of discussion will be a lesser-known part of Whedon’s work – his screenplay for the hit animated film “Toy Story.”

Among the papers: “Buffy and Feminism,” “Buffy and Identity,” “Gender Stereotypes and the Image of Domesticity in ‘Firefly,’” “‘Firefly:’ The Illusive Safety of Big Damn Heroes” and a Durand favorite by a British scholar, “Hero’s Journey, Heroine’s Return: Buffy, Eurydice and the Orpheus Myth.”

China readied on Friday to easepressure on a swelling “quake lake” threatening hundreds ofthousands of people in the southwestern province of Sichuanwhile forecast rains could bring more trouble on the weekend.

The Tangjiashan lake is the largest of the more than 30quake lakes formed when the May 12 earthquake triggeredlandslides that choked rivers, raising fears of secondaryflooding disasters after the tremor that killed more than69,000.

Water banked up behind Tangjiashan’s natural mud-and-rockdam edged to just 23 cm (9 inches) from a sluice built bytroops in recent days, state television said, which meantpartial discharge of floodwaters building up behind could occurwithin hours.

More than 250,000 people have been evacuated inquake-ravaged areas of Beichuan, Mianyang and Jiangyou, addingto the millions already displaced when their homes collapsed orwere badly damaged in the earthquake.

“Quake lakes” burst weeks after two powerful earthquakeshit the same area in 1786 and 1933, both killing several timesmore people than those who died directly from the tremors,Xinhua said.

The U.S. unemployment rate jumped by the most in 22 years in May, reaching its highest level in more than 3-1/2 years and underscoring the recessionary risk the economy still faces.

The jobless rate rose to 5.5 percent last month from 5 percent, its highest level since October 2004, the Labor Department said on Friday. Some 49,000 jobs were cut from payrolls in May, the fifth straight month of job losses.

Wall Street economists surveyed by Reuters forecast that 58,000 jobs would be lost in May, but had foreseen the unemployment rate rising only to 5.1 percent. So far in 2008, job losses have totaled 324,000, the department said.

The surprisingly high jobless rate shocked financial markets, causing prices for U.S. Treasury bonds to rise as investors bet the dismal employment outlook pushed back any possibility of early interest-rate rises from the Federal Reserve.

The dollar’s value fell against other major currencies and stock futures dropped.

“Let’s be clear: the economy is still very weak,” [Paul] Ashworth, [senior US. economist with London-based Capital Economics] said. “The economy has little forward momentum, employment is shrinking and the unemployment rate could reach 6 percent by the end of the year.”

Kluster, a startup built on the premise that it can in fact be productive, and perhaps even lucrative, to crowd-source tasks recently introduced to the world a project called Knewsroom, which I subsequently wrote a brief review of, calling it an intriguing effort that would surely be interesting to watch as it built itself a niche for news delivery on the Web. Today, Kluster adds another item to its budding portfolio.

It’s called NameThis, and it gives entrepreneurs the option to capitalize on the democratization of naming stuff. Not only entrepreneurs, even. Want a better name for your own private, or corporate social network? Maybe your robot? Anything, really. NameThis is there to make the process easy. If you’re willing to offer up $99, Kluster will present your concept or idea to the collective brain power that fuels NameThis. If you’re coming up empty when you’re ready to stamp out a brand or commission a big banner for your new shop, the folks tossing out names at NameThis can be a major help, and probably well worth the fee. (After all, marketing firms require massively larger deposits than what NameThis requests.)

When all is said and done, the system working behind the scenes will work some numbers and determine three winners; first- , second- , and third-place finishers. After Kluster takes its $20 cut, the parties responsible for the chosen names are each given $40, $16, and $8, respectively, with $10, $4, and $2 to be share amongst “influencers,” or those members who help promote the successful few to the top.

Minutes after New York Senator Hillary Clinton sent an email to her supporters ending her campaign, President Clinton changed his Facebook profile relationship status from “Married” to “It’s Complicated.” He also added that he was now looking for “friendship,” “dating,” and “a relationship.” We’re guessing Bill Clinton doesn’t actually update his own Facebook page and that the changes were more likely a frustrated campaign supporter’s way of venting. Not that Hillary Clinton’s campaign figured out as much. Asked by a reporter about the change, campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson answered: “What can I tell you? It’s complicated.”