Month: April 2007

Quoting a former emergency room nurse:

“It was about 10:30 p.m. The room was a mess. I was finishing up some work on the chart before going home. The doctor with whom I loved working was debriefing a new doctor, who had done a very respectable, competent job, telling him what he’d done well and what he could have done differently.

Then he put his hand on the young doctor’s shoulder and said, ‘When you finished, did you notice the young man from housekeeping who came in to clean the room?’ There was a completely blank look on the young doctor’s face.

“The older doctor said, ‘His name is Carlos. He’s been here for three years. He does a fabulous job. When he comes in he gets the room turned around so fast that you and I can get our next patients in quickly. His wife’s name is Maria. They have four children.’ Then he named each of the four children and gave each child’s age. The older doctor went on to say, ‘He lives in a rented house about three blocks from here, in Santa Ana. They’ve been up from Mexico for about five years. His name is Carlos,’ he repeated.

Then he said, ‘Next week I would like you to tell me something about Carlos that I don’t already know. Okay? Now, let’s go check on the rest of the patients.'”

Leadership, found at LunchOverIP

living in such a world

less conducive to compassion

disease that makes you whine

pitched down that hole

love that would sustain

condition of general amnesty

Meanwhile, I got you,
Your tender words and all the little good they do.
Meanwhile, you got me.
Ain’t no great prize, but at least it comes for free.
It’s an act of conviction, baby, simply holding on,
Keeping forward motion, pretending to be strong.
Listening with all my heart for voices in the wind
That will be singing for us, Baby, when the song begins again.

killing off keyboard players

Google is building a 411 service to get the data.

All of a sudden there were millions of voices, millions of accents to train…

Goodle is teaching its machines.

Automated Translation via Battelle

Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chief of Naval Operations is the top ranking Naval officer and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He has been advocating the idea of a “1,000 Ship Navy”, a pooling of the resources among nations, a community of trust that includes the sharing of information among navies of countries that may otherwise be untrusting of each other for political or economic reasons. A “…free-form, self-organizing network of maritime partners…” via Dan Bricklin

“The Navy is setting out a series of strategic plans to guide its way ahead in the 21st Century. The Maritime Strategy is one element of a larger four-part structure. … The development process will pass through five phases” during 2006 and 2007. more

In many countries a journalism student covering a demonstration of school children would be commended for his initiative.

In Syria, student Mesud Hamid posted photos on the net of Kurdish pupils demanding equal rights. He was arrested while taking an exam at university.

“I was tortured,” he said. “For one year and three months I was held in a cell measuring one metre by two. I didn’t see the sun or sky for all that time.”

Mr Hamid has since fled to France.

So what do you do if you want to escape detection from authorities who might not like your work as much as you do?

The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents is pretty technical but it also contains some simple tips, so you can say what you think without having to worry the censors or cyber-police too much.

The mere mention of Tiananmen Square would be enough to get you noticed. But you may, however, be able to fox the filters.

“If you want to put the words June 4th, you put a comma or a period in between June and 4th, so they are not one phrase and that enables this word to evade detection through the filter, because the filter works by phrases: June 4th or 1989,” explained Xiaorong Li.

“If you put some kind of punctuation between the words they become not a phrase but readers can perfectly understand what you are saying.”

There is no sure-fire way of staying anonymous on the web and avoiding detection.
story at the BBC

Kevin Wen points to a recent interview with Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt talking about innovation strategy inside Google.

“We prefer them to run rampant,” said Schmidt. “The most clever ideas don’t come from the leaders, but rather from the leaders listening and encouraging and kind of creating a discussion,” he said. “Wander around … and try to find the new ideas.”

Google encourages its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on “something of the engineer’s own choosing,” with the idea that focusing resources on activities that are not directly related to the company’s core business will ultimately lead to new discoveries

The open source community has been particularly adept at attracting some of the “best and brightest of new talent,” in part because it is an international phenomenon, Schmidt said. “I know this is a shock, but not all the best programmers are sitting here in California,” he said.

A growing number of inventors are patenting strategies that could save you money on your taxes. And if you use one without permission? Well, that’s called patent infringement.

Be Careful Not To Use Any Patented Tax Shelters This Tax Season

What would Thomas Jefferson say?

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.”

Ideas are never property.*
A new expression of an idea may be a copyright.
An object or a method based on an original new idea may be a patent.

And only if granted by the people.
Never taken, only given.
Not inalienable.

psssst:
* Ideas may be a property if kept as secrets but only for the purpose of trade.

Pressed by ethanol demand,
the 2007 ingredient cost of feeding pigs has gone up by an estimated 25 to 30 percent but prices paid to farms have remained constant and or have softened creating a cost price squeeze.

Farmers are studying the ingredients that are in a typical pig diet and re-examining the reason that they’re in the diet, i. e. are they there primarily to supply energy or are they there primarily to supply amino acids or vitamins or minerals.

Feed costs to supply energy is the largest. Supplying energy i. e. wheat, barley, field peas and oil typically represent 60 to 65 percent of the total cost of the diet.

“…if I formulate a diet where I only have an energy spec and no amino acid, vitamin or mineral specifications and then compare that to a fully balanced diet, about 50 to 55 percent of the cost is required just to meet the energy specifications, so we’re looking at a very substantial portion of the cost of the diet being attributed to the energy component and that’s the component that has gone up the most in the past six months.”

via farmscape

There are about 100 government and association “standards for organic produce” around the world.

In Australia, for instance, there is one government standard for exported organic produce and a number of different industry standards covering domestic organic produce. Several researchers are looking for new and simple testing methods. Because organic foods bring higher Iriprofits, fraud is increasingly common.

It seems there is much work to be done.

---

Update:
From Irish Farmers Journal:

“…the wholesome image of ‘organic’ has also been adopted by advertisers to sell many other products such as cosmetics and ‘organic pure water‘ (go figure!).

‘Organic’ is becoming a debased cliché’ – rather like ‘executive’, ‘designer’ and ‘de-tox’ before it.”

mindhacks points to a Salon interview with Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, author of a new book on midlife memory loss. She turned herself into a medical guinea pig to research her own failing memory. ” Suddenly there were sinkholes, as if the information had just been sucked down the drain.”

More than 70 percent of seniors over the age of 65 live alone.
The brain needs social interaction and without it begins to fail.
Isolation contributes heavily to Alzheimer’s disease.

…social interaction is very important. The more isolated you are the more likely you are to have your brain and memory start to fade. Memory is everything. Memory is who we are. When it goes, there is nothing left there. It’s what we know about our lives. When it goes — as it does in Alzheimer’s disease — people don’t necessarily lose the ability to get up or eat a meal or go for a walk or sit in a chair. They lose themselves.

Does age offer anything positive from our brains?

We can make certain valid assumptions based on previous experience that younger people cannot. You can look at your daughter’s boyfriend and realize in about 20 seconds that this is not going to work. But it will take her about two years.

Who Collects It?

Marketers. More and more advanced techniques have been developed to compile extremely targeted marketing lists about consumers. A quick search on the Internet for “marketing lists” will show you just how many are available.

Websites. When you visit a website, information can be gathered about you in a variety of ways — either by information you provide voluntarily or using techniques to indirectly detect information about your usage. Generally, personally identifiable information isn’t gathered in a widespread way.

Store clerks. Can you remember a time when you were asked your zip code or phone number when you made a purchase? They didn’t really need that information. But it helped the store compile a profile of your purchasing habits to be used for marketing purposes — and it may have been sold to others. Be careful when giving out your personal information. Only give what is absolutely necessary.

Warranty cards. Information obtained from warranty cards may be used for marketing purposes.

Grocery store loyalty cards. Many claim that the personal data and shopping information collected by supermarket companies from loyalty cards violates privacy rights and doesn’t even save consumers money.

New identification systems. Numerous institutions, including several airlines, have begun working on plans for identification systems that would rely on background checks, fingerprints, iris scans, and high-tech IDs to verify individuals’ identities and speed security screening at places such as airports.

Along the way

 our dreams appear.

Along the way

 love comes near.

Each is lost

 but will not part.

This our myst’ry

 and this our heart

I walk here

 unfinished roads.

Just the strength

 to carry loads.

And they make war

 go round and round.

Finished when

 they count the ground.

Each day appear

 and then

We walk

 these tears again.

Paul Wolfowitz might be fired as head of the World Bank.

Wolfowitz personally ordered massive pay increases for his girlfriend when she was sent from the World Bank to a project in the US State Department – paying her more than Condeleeza Rice.

He is also under fire for inserting Republican Party allies into key bank positions.

“We should use all of our energy and all of our capacities to address corruption wherever it is.” the Whitehouse replies.

McCain’s reaction was more restrained:

Try envisioning an army of human laborers attempting to pollinate an orchard…

Some farmers are hiring to do just that.

Apiculture.

There are several experiments with “local money” underway in Germany as described in the article from BBC News Germans take pride in local money where there are many new regional currencies.

This has always been a legal grey area.

But there are comparable financial schemes, like ‘air miles’.

‘Social money’
It’s quite simple. The money you spend stays in the region. Everyone who uses the regional currency develops a social network. People get to know each other.

The goal of organizers is two-fold: to boost the local economy, and to create networks of local business owners and entrepreneurs. via centralityjournal

Money is like an iron ring we’ve put through our noses.

We’ve forgotten that we designed it, and it’s now leading us around. I think it’s time to figure out where we want to go — in my opinion toward sustainability and community — and then design a money system that gets us there.

The origin of the word “community” comes from the Latin munus, which means the gift, and cum, which means together, among each other.

So community literally means to give among each other. Therefore I define my community as a group of people who welcome and honor my gifts, and from whom I can reasonably expect to receive gifts in return. -Bernard Lietaer, Beyond Greed & Scarcity at community currency

The Berliner, issued by a local environmental group, is one of around 20 local currencies that have begun circulating over the past five years in Germany. Concern about the impact of globalization and distant multinational corporations on their communities and locally owned businesses is one of the motivations behind making local money that will stay at home, community activists say.

Drain of fees
Three percent goes to local causes such as a children’s farm, a playground, and a church program for teens overcoming drugs – comparable to the slice taken by the fees bank and credit card companies charge.

‘The Regio’
The Regio is not legal tender or an “official” means of payment, which means that its acceptance is entirely voluntary. Initiators of Regional Currency believe that they can strengthen the region with its specific targets of exchange.

‘Time Dollar’ in the USA
Fourth Corner Exchange, near Seattle, are social entrepreneurs who recognize that our traditional money system creates serious social problems, which devastate our local economies by removing money from local communities.

“Freedom of speech isn’t something somebody else gives you.
That’s something you give to yourself.”
Kurt Vonnegut

“I’ve given up on it … It won’t happen. … The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people’s discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, ‘Please, I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?’ That’s what I feel right now. I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now?”

---

Update:

“It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country,” he has written “that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, something they knew all the time.” (more)

Pondering and punditry about the future:

Beyond some level of inequality the masses will demand taxes and other measures to limit the extent of inequality.

The masses probably won’t show fairness or wisdom when they demand such taxes and other restrictions on the power of wealth. But by supporting such policies they are catering to their own very deeply felt needs for higher relative status and a reduction in the feeling that wealthier people control their lives.

One of the fundamental problems I see in the world: Globalization is making people part of much larger status hierarchies. In an earlier era of much less communications technology one could only worry about one’s status vis a vis one’s local community.

Now one can develop an appreciation of what one’s status is vis a vis all the billionaires or all the national leaders or all the corporate CEOs or all the best athletes or prettiest models around the room. This inevitably gives most people a much larger group of people who seem like they have higher status.

Therefore global feelings of lower relative status might well be growing.

Based on a new and an interesting study about the willingness of people to spend their own money to lower the wealth of others.

This too shall pass.

I looked and looked for attribution of this sculpture. [seen at lystics]

I found this page at growabrain – a catalog of dozens of pics and links that will take you on an impressive journey into the grand world of sand sculptures.

In plain terms, tropical deforestation is an absolute disaster.

Droughts and extreme weather are often the result of tropical deforestation, not global warming.

Those who have made up their minds may say common sense may be of no use. Yet our world’s tropical rainforests have shrunk 60%, from 8.0 million square miles to less than 3.0 million, and our deserts have grown from 3.0 million square miles to 5.0 million, and over 10 million square miles of farmland is now conducting heat as never before due to lowered water tables. Elsewhere, another 7.0 million square miles of temperate and boreal forests have been lost. Altogether, we have altered nearly 50% of the land surface of our planet in the last 150 years – and all of these changes have made those lands hotter. And yes, there are also .5 million square miles of very, very hot urban heat islands.

Before we lose another million square miles of tropical rainforest to the biofuel barons – burning away in the name of “CO2 neutral” energy production – perhaps we should take a much, much harder look at the ”biophysical effects of land-cover change.”

Deforestation & Global Warming

---

Update:
growabrain sends:

‘Protected’ Congo forest is logged regardless
The world’s second largest forest is being traded away for a few bars of soap and bottles of beer…

A mindhacks alert:

SSRI drugs produce a dopamine deficit that interferes with relationship formation.

Attraction, desire and sexual pleasure are known to involve dopamine circuits in the brain.

This dopamine deficit affects people in a variety of ways, according to anthropologist Helen Fisher and her research partner, Virginia-based psychiatrist J. Andrew Thomson, Jr. [story at Psychology Today]

Singles using antidepressants may have a harder time meeting people, because their natural sexual response is dampened. Some researchers believe desire was designed to help people select mates who are genetically suited to them. The spark that ignites on meeting someone new is telling you something: This might be your match.

When you miss those signals, your odds of finding an appropriate mate decrease.

SSRI stands for ‘Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor’ and the group includes drugs such as Prozac (fluoxetine), Seroxat (paroxetine) and Zoloft (sertraline) which all increase the availability of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the synapse – the chemical junction between neurons.

Despite the (somewhat misleading) use of the word ‘selective’ in the title, these drugs also affect many other types of neurotransmitters to varying degrees – of which dopamine is one.

Fisher outlines her theory in a paper published with psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson in the recent book Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience. The paper is also available online as a pdf file

Will the Internet kill universities?

“Universities are far more useful as a social accreditation filter than for academic enrichment.”

via preoccupations

A common ingredient has been found to destroy skin.

Several compounds found in cosmetics are just as complex as medication—they are absorbed through the skin, flow through the bloodstream, are expelled by the kidneys, or stocked in cells or even in the liver. Yet, the laws regulating their use are far less restrictive than those regulating drugs.

2-dimethylaminoethanol, a compound commonly used in many antiwrinkle products causes a destruction of skin cells.

In vitro tests [story] revealed a quick and spectacular swelling of skin cell vacuoles called fibroblasts, which act as reservoirs and interface between the inside and the outside of the skin cell.

In the hours following the application of DMAE, the researchers observed an important slowing down of cell division—sometimes coming to a complete stop, the inhibition of certain metabolic reactions, and the death of a significant percentage of fibroblasts.

The mortality rate of fibroblasts, which varied according to DMAE concentration, was above 25% after 24 hours in the case of a concentration similar to the one resulting from normal use of an antiwrinkle cream.

The thickening of the skin induced by the pathological swelling of the fibroblasts would explain the antiwrinkle effect of DMAE, according to the researchers.

2-dimethylaminoethanol or DMAE is found in cosmetics, creams, lipsticks, shampoos, soaps, and baby lotions, although the way they work is not yet understood.

Some of the ingredients recently used in skin creams and lotions are: Alpa and Beta Hydroxy acids, Vitamin C Ester, Vitamin E, Alpha Lipoic Acid, DMAE and Idebenone.

Though in vitro testing provides only fundamental and early results, this study points to the need to reinforce adequate testing prior to over-the-counter and cosmeceutical marketing.

liquidlifehacker caught this review of a generation of males.

The changes in women’s lives — their roles, ambitions, opportunities — have been studied from every angle.

But men’s lives have changed too, in ways that are more confusing, more contradictory and often less welcome. Men did not ask to have their roles redefined.

Men have come to accept — even celebrate — their wives’ careers and paychecks while learning, step-by-step, how to bathe the baby and baste the turkey. But there is no Julia Child’s style primer on closeness, no chart with diagrams: Insert A into slot B, and there you go. Intimacy achieved. Let’s go have a cold one.

It would be funny if it weren’t so painful.

“It’s probably the real cause of half of all divorces,” according to Sam Margulies, a divorce mediator in Greensboro, North Carolina, and author of several books on the subject of marital breakups.

“Very few women could compare their lives to their mothers” and say, “We look pretty similar,” says Steven Nock, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia who has studied what marriage means to men. “Women have so many dramatically different options in their lives. But where are men taking their cues about what it means to be a husband or a father? There is much less discussion in our society about that.”

The guidelines for being a good husband used to be simple: provide, protect, maybe trim the hedges now and then. Now wives still want all that in a mate — and more.

The Emperor’s New Woes at Psychology Today

---

Update:
More big changes ahead? Impending dude shortage?
During the past thirty years, the number of male births has decreased each year in the U.S. and Japan. What’s more, an increasing proportion of fetuses that die are male.

A chart that’s worth a thousand words.

Phil Howard investigates the relationships between food, agriculture, public health and changes in the food system.

Phil is currently exploring ‘food environments’ and their potential relationships with health outcomes. He is also studying national consumer interest in ‘ecolabels’ as a potential strategy for improving the livelihoods of small- and medium-scale farms, and consolidation in the food system, particularly in the rapidly growing organic sector.

Canadian Organic Growers has consolidated much of Phil Howard’s work on corporate ownership of organic brands with several additional overview of the changing food sector, plus a web forum where Howard responds.

A lot of farmers are talking…

Here’s a link to a Who’s Who in corporate agribusiness, http://www.msu.edu/~howardp/ though a decade out of date!

Racism is not a neccesary feature of human society

People ask, ‘Professor Graves, you say biological races are not real?’ I say, ‘Yes. Biological races are not real, but socialized races are real as a heart attack, and do not confuse those two.’ There are no genetic barriers to dismantling racist ideology; it is a question of whether we want to.

Much more at “The Power of the Myth of Race“

Head coach C. Vivien Stringer at a news conference Tuesday said about comments made by radio talk show host Don Imus,

“When there is not equality for all or when there’s been denied equality for one, there’s been denied equality for all.”

---

Coleman Young became Detroit’s first black mayor and stayed for 19 years.

“Racism is something like high blood pressure — the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a goddamned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.”

---

Update:

Certain socially-skilled people learn early in life to parlay arrogance and dismissiveness into social prominence, and Imus is the poster child for these poseurs. Naked emperors all, they ply a trade even older than the so-called oldest profession (that would be “Ho”). I submit that this pose is so effective that other bullies have parlayed it into temporary dominance of the globe. — Britt Blaser, posted at Doc Searls

---

In my view, this editorial scrapes the barrel and sifts the most concise retort:
“He hurt tens of millions of people he has never met and has no reason to hate.” Edmund W. Lewis