The best ethical travel destinations chosen by Ethical Traveler for 2010 are: Argentina, Belize, Chile, Ghana, Lithuania, Namibia, Poland, Seychelles, South Africa and Suriname. Countries were graded across three main categories: support for ecotourism, environmental protection, and social development. Of course, as Ethical Traveler staffers point out, none of the countries named in the report are ethically "perfect."

"In drafting our report, we use scores of information sources including publicly available data — to rate each country's genuine commitment to environmental protection, social welfare and human rights." says Christy Hoover, co-author of the report.  "Data sources include the United Nations Development Program, Human Rights Watch, Columbia University, Reporters Without Borders, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and many others. Private interviews with NGO leaders are part of the process, as well."  The full report can be viewed at www.ethicaltraveler.org/destinations. In Pictures: Ethical Destinations 2010

The twelve green rules that Ethical Traveler recommends:

1) Be Aware of Where Your Money Is Going, and patronize locally-owned inns, restaurants, and shops. Try to keep your cash within the local economy, so the people you are visiting can benefit directly from your visit.

2) Never Give Gifts to Children, only to their parents or teachers. When giving gifts to local communities — from schoolbooks to balloons, from pens to pharmaceuticals — first find out what's really needed, and who can best distribute these items.

3) Before visiting any foreign land, Take the Time to Learn Basic Courtesy Phrases: greetings, "please" & "thank you," and as many numbers as you can handle (those endless hours in airport waiting lounges, or aboard trains and boats, are all opportunities for this). It's astonishing how far a little language goes toward creating a feeling of goodwill.

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Sharon Kapnick writes:  The Ecocoder technology, available in select markets, combines a hand-held scanner that releases information stored in a special layer of ink with a speaker that plays an audiofile stored in its memory card.  It shares information about the wine’s history, origin, production and flavors and suggests appropriate food pairings.

University of California Professors Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean published research and findings in a  paper entitled Why Do Investors Trade Too Much? What follows are some excerpts:

Overconfidence

Psychologists observe that most people are overconfident; they overestimate the precision of their knowledge and the level of their abilities. If, for example, you ask a group of people to rate their own driving abilities, you will find that most people consider themselves to be above average drivers. Overconfidence afflicts experts — including psychologists — as well as laymen. The overconfident investor is so sure that she is right, that she is more likely to act on her beliefs. The result: she trades too much.

Active Trading: The Real Evidence

Consider an investor making a speculative trade. She isn’t selling to realize a deliberate tax loss or to raise money to pay a debt. She sells one stock and buys another because she thinks the stock she is buying will outperform the one she’s selling. To break even on this trade, the new stock doesn’t need to merely beat the old one. It needs to do so by enough to cover trading costs. Unfortunately for most individual investors, the stocks they buy subsequently underperform the stocks they sell. In our studies of investors at a large discount brokerage in the US, the average shortfall over a one-year horizon is more than two percentage points. If you add in the costs of trading — bid-ask spreads, commissions, and taxes — the shortfall more than doubles.

The more actively investors trade, the less they earn. We divided 66,465 households into five groups on the basis of the level of turnover in their common stock portfolios. The 20 percent of investors who traded most actively earned an average net annual return 7.2 percentage points lower than that of the least active investors .

Overconfidence and Gender

Men tend to be more overconfident than women. The difference emerges most strongly in areas such as finance that are perceived by our society to lie in the male domain. If overconfidence leads to excessive trading, one might then expect men to trade more than women. They do. We find that men trade 45 percent more actively than women. Single men trade 67 percent more actively than single women. Both men and women are lousy traders; men merely trade more frequently. Both men and women reduce their returns by trading, men reduce theirs by an additional 1 percentage point annually, and single men by an additional 1.4 percentage points.

If 1 percentage point — compounded year after year — strikes you as an inconsiderable amount, consider the effort you would expend to save 1 percentage point on a home mortgage. In short, trading is a mistake made by both men and women; men simply make more mistakes than women.

Overconfidence and Diversification

Overconfident investors underdiversify. If you know you are right, what’s the point of hedging your bets? In a typical month, the median investor in our sample held three common stocks. Of course, some achieved diversification by also owning mutual funds, and others may have owned stocks at other brokerages. While overconfidence accounts for some underdiversification, it is likely that many investors simply don’t understand the advantages of holding a diversified portfolio. In 1999, the S&P 500 index returned 21 percent. Eight stocks accounted for half of that gain. At the end of 1999, 230 of the S&P 500 stocks were below their level of two years earlier. An investor who held only three S&P 500 stocks during this period had a 4.1 percent chance of holding at least one of the big eight winners and a 9.6 percent chance of holding only losers. Thus, in the midst of a bull market, an undiversified investor was more than twice as likely to be left at the starting gate as to win the sweepstakes.

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Joan L. Cannon writes: There are sadly too few who have had a chance to go where the trout are and spend the hours it takes to succeed in landing one, and then having the special pleasure of releasing it. The essentials of enjoyment for every sense are fortunately still available to almost anybody whose hands are at one end of a bamboo rod with a light reel that suspends the gossamer weight of a lure at the other.