Poor Mojo's Newswire

The solution is simple, when sending an email to a gmail user include a sentence or two that mentions catastrophic events or tragedies. Google does not use humans to read your email, only computers. These computers search for keywords that trigger the advertisements, however, if they happen to find a catastrophic event or tragedy Google errs on the side of good taste and removes the ads altogether. You may want to make mention of what you are doing so the recipient is not alarmed by your sudden Tourette's-like outburst. You can link to this site by way of explanation if need be. . . . If the message runs long google turns the ads back on, however, if you add another "sensitive" word they go off again. After extensive testing I've discovered you need 1 catastrophic event or tragedy for every 167 words in the rest of the email. I usually toss in a couple extra for good measure. I've been told by an early adopter that the very elegant and self explanatory "These words are designed to kill advertisements" works wonderfully.

David Cameron risked alienating the UK's Twitterocracy and the Civil Service alike this morning when he suggested the microblogging service was for "twats". ... During the interview, he careened off message to take a pop at Twitter. “The trouble with Twitter... The instantness [sic] of it [is that] too many twits might make a twat.”

Neil Williams, head of corporate digital channels at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, quietly posted his compact 5,382 word guide to setting up UK.gov Twitter feeds here last week. Highlighting the lightning speed at which web 2.0 can work, by this morning it was plastered all over the papers. The guide pitches Twitter as "free to use with a relatively low impact on resources [with] the potential to deliver many benefits in support of our communications objectives". It is, Williams says, "experiencing a phenomenal adoption curve in the UK and being used increasingly by government departments, Members of Parliament, a number of our stakeholders as well as millions of businesses, non government organisations and individuals."

The average fuel efficiency of the US vehicle fleet has risen by just 3 miles per gallon since the days of the Ford Model T, and has barely shifted at all since 1991. Those are the conclusions reached by Michael Sivak and Omer Tsimhoni at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. They analysed the fuel efficiency of the entire US vehicle fleet of cars, motorcycles, trucks and buses from 1923 to 2006. They found that from 1923 to 1935 fuel efficiency hovered around 14 mpg (5.95 km/l), but then fell gradually to a nadir of only 11.9 mpg (5.08 km/l) in 1973. By 1991, however, the efficiency of the total fleet had risen by 42 per cent on 1973 levels to 16.9 mpg (7.18 km/l), a compound annual rate of 2 per cent.

Jose Antonio Vargas, who has covered what he called “the marriage of the Internet and politics” for The Washington Post, is moving to a Web site that operates at that intersection: The Huffington Post. Mr. Vargas will join the Arianna Huffington outfit next month as the technology and innovations editor. He will oversee a new section about tech (coming this fall) and encourage site-wide innovation. The Huffington Post has been on something like a hiring tear in recent months. After the Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin was dismissed last month, Ms. Huffington happily scooped him up.