The mass adoption of cellphones as the only household phones people use began three years ago. The trending continues apace: A combined 29 percent of Americans either have only cellphones, or else pair them with a landline phone which they never use for talk.

The reasons for this aren’t surprising, but the source of the latest research is:

Such families often either have their landline hooked exclusively to a computer or rely so heavily on their cells that they ignore landline calls because they are probably from telephone solicitors, said Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author of the report.

Um, the CDC? The disease people? Why exactly they were commissioned to looking into telephone usage pattern is a mystery. Will the decline of a landline housephone lead to a lessening of germ transference via dirty earpiece/receiver? One can only hope.

As for viewing the landline as a junk-call magnet, I can relate to that. When I still had a landline phone myself (three years ago now), it had devolved into exactly that: A number that I never gave out, so I could always be assured that any incoming calls on it were ones I didn’t want to take. A relatively expensive filter, but its function was reflective of the state of personal telecommunications by this point.

If you’re packing a Y-chromosome, you’re (almost literally) a marked man lately, because there’s a gender divide characterizing the onset of this softening economy:

From last November through this April, American women aged 20 and up gained nearly 300,000 jobs, according to the household survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). At the same time, American men lost nearly 700,000 jobs. You might even say American men are in recession, and American women are not.

What’s going on? Simply put, men have the misfortune of being concentrated in the two sectors that are doing the worst: manufacturing and construction. Women are concentrated in sectors that are still growing, such as education and health care.

Based on this trending, it might be time for us guys to get in touch with our feminine sides — purely for vocational reasons.

The above is a crop from a bus-shelter ad I cameraphone-snapped a month ago, somewhere in midtown Manhattan. I like the composition, in that it used the familiar symbol signs for the human form to get its point across about the alienating effect of social phobia.

Not to mention that I have a touch of that particular anxiety myself. So I really identify with that black standalone glyph — much as I’d prefer to be one of those multicolored in-the-crowd types.

The general fixation on whether or not the economy’s in recession overlooks one key element: Just what metrics are being used to define “recession”, and if they’re correct.

Ignorance about recessions has taken hold because of a simplistic idea that a recession is two successive quarterly declines in gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the nation’s output.

The idea originated in a 1974 New York Times article by Julius Shiskin, who provided a laundry list of recession-spotting rules of thumb, including two down quarters of GDP. Over the years the rest of his rules somehow dropped away, leaving behind only “two down quarters of GDP.”

Like most rules of thumb, it’s far from perfect. It failed in the 2001 recession, for example. At the time and until July 2002, data showed just one down quarter of GDP, leading policy makers to claim there had been no recession. Yet, later that month, revisions showed GDP down for three straight quarters. Complicating matters further, with the benefit of time, we now know that GDP actually zigzagged between negative and positive readings, never showing two negative quarters in a row.

The far more important issue in 2001 was the loss of 2.7 million jobs - more than in any postwar recession. Even taking into account labor force growth, those job losses were greater than in most recessions over the past 50 years.

Shorthand tags for labeling economic conditions seem to have more to do with spin control than anything else. Fact is, the Bush administration is loathe to “officially” declare a recession on its watch because it’s such a black eye; and so it’ll tweak the numbers just enough to avoid the obvious. That sustains itself on Wall Street, where ever more media-conscious analysts play along with the blind-man’s game because there’s been no “official” pronouncement. All pretty foolish, but that’s the mechanism at play these days.

All told, if I were to go with a rule of thumb for describing the economy, I’ll stick with Harry Truman’s succinct and distinct delineation between “recession” and “depression”. Frankly, it’s much more apt than the other nonsense.

It used to be that executive-level businesswomen had to kiss the corporate world goodbye once they embarked upon the mommytrack. But the Internet, outsourcing, and networking have combined to offer up new opportunities for SWAT (”Smart Women with Available Time”) teams, made up of at-home ex-professionals being tapped to work on temporary business-development projects.

Skilled workers taking temp projects isn’t new, of course. What’s different about these teams is that they’re available on short notice because the women are usually at home; they tend to work cheap because their main motive is to keep their skills fresh; and they’re often extraordinarily well-qualified, having left the work force voluntarily when their careers were on the ascent.

That “work cheap” part is not exactly music to my ears, since I swim in a lot of these same waters nowadays. As always, it’s a matter of finding a value-add service to offer clients; still, I’m not thrilled about dealing with the undercutting of rates.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a PR-blast email offering up an interview opportunity with the CEO of SocialMedia Networks. Just another Web advertising middleman, but with a twist: It’s exclusively targeting the Facebooks and MySpaces of the online world.

I didn’t take the bait, partly because I knew someone else would.

Ads on social network sites aren’t new, although far-reaching monetization attempts have met resistance. Marketers follow the eyeballs, and when more and more people spend more and more Web time on these dedicated sites, that’s where the money will go.

But how effective will these ad pitches be? Operating on the premise that a website is just another website might not work in these settings, because something like MySpace is tacitly considered a no-sell zone. That doesn’t mean it won’t yield responses, but those will probably be accompanied by higher-than-normal instances of backlash.

In a sense, blogging marketer Paul Chaney probably best characterizes this approach thusly:

Advertising on social media sites like Facebook, Bebo and others is akin to going to a restaurant and asking for a seat at someone else’s table. Maybe they’ll be receptive and maybe they won’t. Conversely, to create your own branded socnet is to invite others to have a seat at your table.

It’s all context. That’s why I always felt that all those commercial presences via MySpace/Facebook pages — promoting movies, consumer products and even rock bands — are odd fits. If a social network’s purpose is to foster person-to-person connections, how is someone supposed to credibly claim a “relationship” with a marketing piece?

Conversely, I don’t agree with the call for advertisers to create their own dedicated, branded site just for a MySpace-like experience — that’s a lot of heavy lifting for a campaign which might or might not have a short shelf-life. I guess that opens up an opportunity for a third party to offer up a middle-ground solution: Cookie-cutter social-network setups that can be developed for single-purpose messaging campaigns and that can be ramped up quickly.

Demographically speaking, that is. Research polling firm Harris Interactive finds that homosexuals are a more receptive blog-reading audience than heteros, 51 percent versus 36 percent.

That includes both content and acceptance of blog advertising — meaning cha-ching for all those gay-themed AdSense ad units just waiting to render!

Despite this news, I kinda doubt too many gay surfers are visiting this blog all that frequently.

We’re all familiar with the socio-cultural explanations for why some people find themselves in a cycle of criminal activity and prison time. But I don’t think that I’ve ever come across a more succinct illustration of the syndrome than this, regarding an ex-convict work program in New Jersey:

It takes at least a year, [mechanic training school director Rich] Liebler said, to “deprogram” the felons. Most have never owned an alarm clock — months can pass before they show up for class on time — and few can name a family member with a regular job. “We treat them as if they were in a cult,” he said. “We have to reverse the thought process they’ve grown up into.”

This reinforces that there’s no next-day fix for rehabilitating someone who’s known nothing but a hardscrabble way of life. It’s a demanding approach and surely no guarantee of resulting in success, but it’s the right way to frame it.

Today would be Easter for the other Christians. Since I’m in that sect — Greek Orthodox, although don’t test me on devoutness — I’ll be spending time with the extended family, chiefly in the form of eating. The highlight for me will be doling out the chocolate Easter bunnies and Peeps to the little niece and nephews; I’ve been stockpiling that sugary goodness for a month, so the payoff will be nice.

Not to play a game of one-upmanship with the Western observance of this holiday, but I’ll point out that the Orthodox method of determining the date of Christ’s comeback is a bit more straightforward: Basically, Easter should fall on the first Sunday after Jewish Passover, based on the acknowledgment that Jesus celebrated Passover a few days before his crucifixion and resurrection.

Simple, although linkage with Jewish ritual is pretty much the root of this East-West schism:

The belief gradually grew that the phrase “with the Jews” was to be understood literally and that the Holy Fathers at Nicea had decreed that the Christian Easter must not, even accidentally, occur on the same day as the Passover; rather, it must be celebrated later. As a matter of fact, however, such an interpretation was not only inaccurate but contrary to the spirit of what was decreed at Nicea, considering that acceptance of this interpretation necessitates a chronological relationship between the Christian Easter and the Jewish Passover, the very undesirable connection the Great Council sought to abolish.

Contrast that with the hoops that Catholics and Protestants have to jump through to determine their annual Easter Sunday calendar spot. The lunar-calendar calculations are so complex that they had to come up with something called Computus, basically an ecumenical math algorithm.

All told, I’d rather stick “with the Jews”.

Further evidence that the 20-something MySpace generation has no shame: Disclosing annual salary among friends is now considered practically de rigueur.

For people old enough to remember phone booths, a blunt reference to salary in a social setting still represents the height of bad manners. But for many young professionals, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell etiquette of previous generations seems like a relic.

For them, salary information is now fair game, at least among friends. Many consider it crucial to prosper in an increasingly transient, winner-take-all workplace — regardless of the envy that full disclosure can raise. Besides, when the Internet already offers a cornucopia of personal information, it almost seems coy to keep personal income private.

As Ilana Arazie, 32, an online video producer for a media company in Manhattan, said, “If we can talk about how many orgasms we have with our mate, why can’t we discuss how much we make?”

Well, if you bring orgasms into, okay then.

Actually, I was joking about that “no shame” quip (mostly). I don’t disagree with this sharing concept, simply because it’s a rightly-recognized acknowledgment of modern-day working life:

Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell, said that an open flow of information is deemed crucial by young professionals who think of themselves as free agents, not company men.

“People move between jobs a lot more now than they used to,” Dr. Frank said. This mobility alone increases the instances that salary might come up among friends.

Indeed, no one should expect to stick around with a single company for their entire career, simply because the companies themselves don’t even tacitly offer that security anymore. I argued 10 years ago about that fundamental shift in American life; we’re all free agents these days, like it or not. So there’s nothing wrong with collaboratively comparing notes, in order to establish a market value among peers.

Does this mean I freely cough up my gross/net earnings? Well, no. For one thing, at 36, I’m old enough to cling to the oldschool taboo on the subject. For another, now that I’m a full-time consultant, my annual “salary” can vary, especially with the of-late recessionary rumblings. It’s a bit moot, as I don’t detect any requests from friends and colleagues for that information anyway (nor do they offer up theirs). If anything, I’ll more-or-less let my visible standards of living speak for themselves, and let those curious enough guess at the pricetags and do the resultant math.

A pretty clear tipping point in communications and media growth is an industry shift from time/unit-rate to flat-rate billing. The growth of the Web, for instance, really exploded once America Online, the dominant ISP of the mid-1990s, phased out per-minute dialup access plans in favor of an unlimited monthly flat-rate subscription fee (the model most of us still have for today’s broadband connections). The lifting of the built-in restrictions that a la carte pricing forces creates a more ubiquitous all-access service, one that users more tightly weave into their everyday lives.

It’s taken a while, but that offering concept is finally creeping into the wireless phone industry with unlimited talk and data plans, playing off consumer tendencies:

“Consumers avoid these services because they want to know how much they’ll pay at the end of each month,” says Jeff Kagan, a Marietta, Ga.-based telecom analyst. “No longer fearing extra costs, of any kind, is going to drive real change in the marketplace.”

That’s something that’s proved often: Price predictability. Consumers won’t necessarily balk at a set monthly charge, even if it’s inflated. But a variable charge causes anxiety, even if it’s affordable — it’s irrational, but a line item that “flashes” on the monthly household bills scares people away. Removing that factor also removes a psychological barrier, leading to unfettered usage.

It’s still a work in progress. For me, an unlimited plan doesn’t make much sense, as I never get even remotely close to my base-package of monthly minutes right now. I would counterbalance that with extremely heavy data use, mainly plain old Web access; but doing so on the existing handset interfaces doesn’t appeal to me. There’s always the iPhone option, but probably not for another couple of years.

What’s the longer-term prospects of this industry shift? Will players like Blackberry become superfluous when everyone’s personal communications hub meets all accessing needs? Will everyone obsessively check their email, MySpace/Facebook pages, etc. on the go? Would this lead to a more-rapid phasing out of all wired Web setups (at least in residential settings)? For now, price predictability means usage unpredictability.

Appropriately enough for a gambling mecca, Las Vegas is taking a double-down approach to urban revitalization: Instead of rehabbing its existing downtown, it’s building a sparkling-new replacement, right next door.

[T]he city will formally inaugurate a new urban core on a 61-acre, undeveloped parcel of land — a project that some experts say is unprecedented in city planning. Called Union Park, its supporters hope it will revive the historic downtown just to the east, where the region’s courthouses, government offices and oldest casinos are clustered…

“It’s quite unusual that there’s a big swath of downtown ground just sitting there without having to go through a whole rigmarole to acquire,” said Bill Hudnut, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington. Mr. Hudnut, the former mayor of Indianapolis, recalled that acquiring just three blocks of that city “involved some legal fights and eminent domain, the demolition of buildings, numerous deals with numerous owners.” In Las Vegas, he added, “they’re just building new stuff.”

And I suppose if Union Park fizzles out after it goes up, they can just pick up another several adjacent acres and take a third stab at it. All that desert terrain is just a blank slate anyway, right?

Wouldn’t it be nice to shoot your physician an email when you have a non-critical medical concern, instead of sacrificing the better part of a day with phonetag or an office visit? Good luck getting a response to such an inquiry: Only about a third of U.S. doctors say they respond to patients’ emails, with the rest offering up basically an “I-don’t-wanna” excuse.

Doctors have their reasons for not hitting the reply button more often. Some worry it will increase their workload, and most physicians don’t get reimbursed for it by insurance companies. Others fear hackers could compromise patient privacy — even though doctors who do e-mail generally do it through password-protected Web sites…

Dr. Daniel Z. Sands, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, is among the early adopters who doesn’t get paid for e-visits. He sees communicating with patients online as no different from phoning them, a practice that also is not billable.

How hard would it be for physician offices and hospitals to set up an auto-response message that delivers the usual disclaimers, e.g. disavowing email communication for time-sensitive and critical conditions and such? It’s not brain surgery — presumably one of the conditions that these docs wouldn’t want to diagnose via their Outlook inbox…

Many’s the time during my college career when I’d walk all over campus barefoot. I wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t just the granola contingent, either — lots of students took advantage of the Florida climate and terrain to regularly feel the ground against their soles. No harm done, and in fact, it probably helped keep the feet strong and healthy.

But that was college. These days, the idea that the human foot is more harmed than aided by footwear is a little hard to swallow, despite the alleged historical background:

[New York Magazine write Adam] Sternbergh calls the ubiquity of footwear a “conspiracy of idiocy.” He points out the probability that at no point did any shoemaker say, “Let’s design something that works with your foot.” In the Middle Ages, for example, people began wearing shoes with higher heels to avoid stepping in other people’s excrement. Today, high heels are considered sexy. Whatever their reasons for wearing the shoes they wear, people don’t usually consider whether a shoe actually works with their foot, he says.

Given the daily barrage of ground-level threats in the big city — various debris, unforgiving surfaces, elements, other people — I’d say the mere protective covering provided constitutes a shoe that “works with your foot”. Preventing damage to the footsies makes human mobility that much more efficient. After that, you can worry about details like gait and support (which is what ends up happening with orthopedic obsessing like this anyway).

Besides, from the glance-through I gave Sternbergh’s article, “You Walk Wrong”, it comes off more as an advocacy for yet another more-perfect ergonomic shoe line, this time some sort of Kevlar-soled slipper. Basically an advertorial filled with claptrap, which is the general consensus from the Bryant Park Project peanut gallery.

Can we live without our shoes? I wouldn’t mind it — after I retire to some warm-weather beach somewhere near the equator (or on the Moon, by midcentury). Until then, my feet will be losing their “war” with the shoes in my closet.

Something very off-kilter is going on in Milwaukee’s public-service advertising scene. Witness:

- A billboard on I-94 that warns against the hazards of driving the highway while distracted is itself criticized as being too distracting:

“When I tried reading every word on that sign, I started leaving my lane,” says one driver, in a report from the local TV station.

- This is in the wake of February’s anti-pedophilia ads for the Family Violence Partnership of Milwaukee, made unintentionally creepy with Photoshopped depictions of little girls with D-cup breasts.

Is the professional advertising community in Wisconsin really this inept at messaging? I can’t tell who did the highway ad; if it was Serve, who did the Family Violence Partnership pieces, that would actually be reassuring, because then at least the ineptness can be isolated. Otherwise, you’d have to conclude that Milwaukee’s got a serious dearth of qualified ad shops.

This shouldn’t be too surprising: In order to get out from under in the face of foreclosures/repossessions, people are putting the torch to their no-longer-affordable houses and cars:

Last week, a Sacramento-area couple were arrested on allegations that they burned their Jeep and drove their Nissan pickup into a river, then filed fraudulent insurance claims. According to investigators, the wife admitted she was trying to escape her $600 monthly car payment.

On April 1, police arrested a woman in Easley, S.C., accused of deliberately setting fire to her home just three days after the bank hung a foreclosure notice on her door. And in January, an Omaha man was arrested on suspicion of arranging to have his three-bedroom house burned down as he was facing foreclosure.

So this sort of turns the traditional rite of passage in burning a paid-off mortgage on its head. Although I’d argue it’s just as a much a rite of passage, albeit not as satisfying of one.

I’m on vacation in Florida, and thus won’t be near the action during Pope Benedict’s papal visit to NYC.

But, if I choose to immerse myself in the experience, I can via WatchThePope.com, which itself is an outgrowth of Brooklyn’s own The Prayer Channel. This combined online/offline presence boasts an advertising and marketing message of “pray-by-pray coverage”.

Alas, the spirit does not move me. Maybe I’ll catch the sure-to-come “big Popein’” retrospective when I get back to town.

The legendary quick-and-easy “Mexican divorce” is no longer around. But Spain has filled the void, sort of: Parents there are staging separations under the country’s lax divorce laws, for the purposes of boosting their kids’ chances of getting into preferred state schools.

Family courts have noticed that the numbers of official separation rose by 50 percent right before the deadline for school registration. In Spain, spouses can secure a divorce in only five weeks. After school placement is over, officials claim that many couples are back in court seeking reconciliation.

When the stigma of divorce in the U.S. started fading in the 1970s, may fretted over a resultant “children of divorce” syndrome. I guess the awarding of bonus points on Spanish school entrance applications for kids from “broken homes” follows this mindset; then again, the gaming of Madrid’s system also reflects how inconsequential a breakup is in.

Regardless, I think it’s funny how a divorce — particularly a temporary one — is suddenly cast as a benefit to the child’s well-being. It’s guaranteed to breed a fresh crop of super-cynical Spaniards in the coming generations.

American retail isn’t accustomed to having most in-store customers dicker over the number on an item’s pricetag. But now that both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times have reported on Web-researching consumers attempting (and succeeding) in talking down the price on in-store items ranging from HDTVs to jeans, I’m sure the trend will only accelerate.

A big part of it is stigma: The past couple of generations equated the art of haggling with the art of being cheap. Generally, it’s been the marked price, take it or leave it. The leveling power of ecommerce (notably eBay’s auction system, although I think it’s more the overall volume discounting that Amazon and others have perfected) have gone a long way toward erasing the negative association. A softening economy is the other ingredient.

I’m not sure I’ve got the gumption or the patience to partake. Part of the convenience of going to a brick-and-mortar outlet is the ability to purchase the item and walk out with it — no delays due to shipping or bidding action. Standing around trying to talk down some semi-interested salesperson only prolongs the process. If it’s a big-ticket item (let’s say nearly a grand and up), then maybe. Otherwise, I don’t see doing it.

A hallmark of Generation X is its deep-rooted cynicism. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the majority of this demographic anticipates a bleak retirement-years scenario, based upon low levels of savings now and the likely shortfall of social programs in the future.

Key future shortfall would be that of Social Security:

This concern is largely the result of a barrage of negative media coverage about the entitlement system as a demographic time-bomb that will become more difficult to fund as older folks begin to outnumber the young.

There is vast disagreement even among economists on just how solvent Social Security will remain, and until when. Those who favor privatization-type reforms argue that an entitlement crisis is imminent. Others champion the system, saying funding troubles will not arise until at least 35 years from now.

Whatever the case, Scottrade and BetterInvesting found that Generation X doesn’t appear to be counting on the money.

“It’s a black hole to them,” said [Scottrade chief marketing officer Chris] Moloney.

Speaking as a member of the X squad, I don’t think this “black hole” mentality should come as a surprise. Inflation took out Social Security as a practical means of old-age support starting in the 1970s — right when we were being born. We saw firsthand how measly those government checks were back then, so the prospect of working for 50 years and looking forward to these devalued pittances as a reward was laughable.

And that’s not even considering the ever-marching conservative efforts to eventually eliminate even this incomplete social safety net. I think today’s 30-somethings have accepted that they’ll easily outlive Social Security, and thus aren’t counting on seeing it in any (recognizable, at least) form by the time 65 rolls around.

The alternative? Assuming we can’t move back in with Mom and Dad circa 2030, we’ll just have to get around to building that Web 2-point-3-point-0 million-dollar killer website. That’s the ticket.

A well-recognized scenario from the subprime lending meltdown: The property owner rents out the acquired residence, looking at this income to wholly or partially cover the mortgage payments. But when that doesn’t work out and the bank forecloses, the renters left behind can linger for years before the eviction notice arrives.

Foreclosures can have an impact on tenants in lots of ways, but there are two sets of problems that most will face. The first and most daunting is eviction. The second is a loss of services, which can mean anything from having to fix your own clogged pipes to losing heat in the winter.

Luis Matute moved into a two-bedroom railroad apartment at the top of a walk-up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, 13 years ago. Five years later, Nelva Muy joined him when they were married. Now, the couple, who are from Ecuador, and their 6-year-old son, Jinson, live in the same apartment, which has become plagued with cracks and leaks.

Two years ago, the person who collected the rent every month stopped showing up. Mr. Matute and Ms. Muy have not paid rent since, though they have been saving their rent money of $575 a month.

I’m no legal expert, but the situations described in the article — where landlords disappear and the tenants wind up living rent-free for years — make me wonder if a case for squatters rights doesn’t apply.

It can be pretty hard to establish those rights, as they have to be based upon “adverse possession” criteria, and technically a tenant agreement precludes that. But when the residents wind up being responsible for the upkeep on the property — making significant structural repairs — that indicates a shift in responsibility for an abandoned property. Indeed, it’s preferable for neighborhoods and cities to have these houses occupied by actual residents, versus having them cleared out and then vulnerable to transients and crackheads breaking in (which has happened in other foreclosure-hit areas of the U.S.).

True, the foreclosing bank gets ownership when the landlord bails, so such properties technically don’t slide into a legal limbo. But banks are notorious for neglecting their foreclosed houses — they generally don’t want the headache, they just want a monetary return on their bad investments. I’d imagine they would sign off on a squatter solution if they were given a minimal payment to simply walk away; that’s something that governmental assistance could facilitate.

The missing ingredient here is tenure. Most adverse possession laws, including that for New York, set a lengthy time period for squatters rights to kick in — something like 12 years. It’s highly unlikely that real estate of even minimal value would sit that long without the titleholder expressing the token efforts it would require (or more) to keep a stake in defensible ownership rights.