The World Economic Forum (WEF) for 2006 comes to Davos, Switzerland once again this week. What I once viewed as just another boring get-together of businessmen and world leaders I now see as something far less benign.

One nice feature of online shopping is that many Web sites can show you items similar to the one you are looking at. You might ask an online bookstore to show you books similar to a certain book. Or you can ask an online music store to display CDs in the same genre as the CD you're viewing.

Little did I know that Google offers much the same service. You can enter a site or page, and it will show you other sites or pages that its sophisticated search algorithms think are similar. You do this simply by going to www.google.com and entering related: followed by the URL of the site or page of interest.

For example, if you want to find sites similar to that of British journalist and altermondialist George Monbiot, just enter related:www.monbiot.com. If you're interested in Peak Oil you can search for sites similar to the Post Carbon Institute. Or you can look for sites dealing with sustainability similar to the Irish FEASTA Web site.

Then I happened to notice that Google does not find any sites similar to www.jimrudolf.com. Is that because this site is in a class by itself?

One of the unfortunate consequences of technological progress is that as a technology matures, advances come at an ever-slower pace, which means longer product cycles, lower sales volumes and therefore lower profits.

When this happens, marketing departments and product designers are called upon to use their imagination to dream up new features that are only indirectly related to the mature technology, but that supposedly add value nonetheless. These features can then be used to justify the introduction of a new model, so that we consumers will be tempted to replace our existing models that are still functioning perfectly well.

I always get frustrated when I drive to Geneva and it takes forever to find a parking place. The folks at scifi.com appear to have found a solution to my problem. Go to their downloads page and view the short TRANSFORMER video. QuickTime is required.

(For those of us in dead-end jobs, the HUMAN SUIT video may offer a ray of hope.)

There is no shortage of news about pro-technology advocates who suggest that technology will solve our environmental problems, implicitly assuring us that we won't need to make any lifestyle changes in order to reverse global warming.

Last week at the G8 summit in Scotland, President Bush placed his hopes in new technologies to address environmental problems; anything else might harm the economy. (Recall George Bush Sr., who proclaimed back in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that "The American Way of Life is not negotiable." Like father, like son?)

In the same vein, a Newsweek article in the run-up to the summit analyzed the opposing positions held by the Bush and Blair governments, pitting "technology optimists" versus "environmental pessimists."

Advertisers love to remind us that they work for us, the consumer. They say that by informing us about what goods and services are available, we can make better purchasing decisions.

But sometimes advertisers appear to be acting more in the interests of the client that hired them to "inform" us. For example, what should an advertiser do with information that would lead to lower sales for its client if we were to receive that information? In theory, it's the advertiser's duty to inform us, since we consumers can make better decisions if we have access to negative as well as positive information. Unfortunately, advertisers don't always see it that way. They typically prefer to give us only the good news about their client.

One technique for side-stepping the bad news is demonstrated by Today's Advertising Tip: Bend the truth. An example of "truth bending" can be found in a recent advertising campaign in the Swiss media for the Swiss Heating Oil Union. On behalf of its client, the advertising agency attempts to reassure consumers who may be worried about expensive oil and the long-term supply of oil. The following excerpt is translated from an advertisement in German:

When I became interested in sustainability and writing, I decided to write a novel. It would be a novel based at some arbitrary point in time, not too far in the future. It would have one foot in the present, so as to be familiar and believable, and one foot in the future, attempting to explore ideas about what a sustainable world might look like.

Although I'd never written a book, and had only written a few nonfiction articles in the past, I already knew what the book's message would be: We cannot expect technology to solve all of our problems. Although technology will play an important role, the majority of the necessary changes will be lifestyle changes that we must make.

Since I currently do not read much fiction, I wasn't sure if such a book already exists. It appears that I have just found one -- sort of. Published in 1995 by the late Pierre Thuillier, the book is called La Grande Implosion. This translates to The Great Implosion, with the subtitle Report on the Collapse of the West 1999-2002. The book describes what could happen to the West if it does not start making some major changes.

On 5 June 2005 the Swiss will vote on whether to become part of the Schengen area, which is a group of European countries that permits travel between those countries without presenting a passport.

The committee against the measure (www.schengen-nein.ch) is distributing flyers with sketches of a screaming man and woman, apparently scared out of their wits, along with the text: "Lose our security? Lose our jobs? NO to Schengen!" But thanks to those sketches, you don't need to understand German, French or Italian to figure out what the committee is up to.

This is a prime example of Today's Campaigning Tip: Fear works better than reason. If you want to promote a cause that is in the interest of a special interest group but not the majority of the population, and therefore you can't win using rational arguments, use scare tactics instead.

When democracy is working properly, each well-informed voter is able to weigh the pros and cons of an issue and make a decision based on his or her value system. It may be that in today's fast-paced world of short attention spans it is necessary to summarize the issue's most important aspects and leave out the details. But there is no justification for using scare tactics; doing so is essentially an admission by the campaigners that they would lose if voters were well informed.

Thanks to fear-mongering flyers such as this one, a vote on the Schengen issue based on rational debate, from which every Swiss voter would benefit, will be that much more difficult to achieve.

This week the OECD published its 2004 figures for Official Development Assistance (ODA). One way to interpret the numbers is to divide the amount of development aid by the gross national income (GNI) of the country, the latter figure giving a rough indication of the country's wealth.

ODA as a percentage of GNI for OECD countries is shown in the table below. The United Nations has set a goal for ODA of 0.7 percent of GNI. From the table we see that only five out of 22 OECD countries meet or exceed that target.