Author: Brian

The 5% sickest people in our country make up HALF of our costs.
The HALF of us that are the healthiest make up 3.4% of our costs.

And the sickest people aren’t generally people that you see and think “Wow, they look ill.” They’re 10 times sicker. They’re people that spend months—MONTHS—in an ICU. They get admitted for something serious, and then they get a hospital infection. Or they have something else bad happen to them. They’re incredibly, incredibly sick. They’re on 20+ medications. They’re probably at least 50, if not 60, 70, 80, or 90. They probably have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol.

So see? When all the Talking Heads talk about “Health Savings Accounts” and being in control of your health care dollars, they’re focusing on a leaking faucet when there’s a Niagara Falls right next door.

Forty-seven percent of your most productive, most creative, most valuable workers are mailing out resumes, going on job interviews, even contemplating other offers.

Even worse, many managers are actually accelerating those departures by how they treat those employees, said Mark Murphy, chief executive of Leadership IQ and co-author of The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention: Cutting Edge Strategies for Keeping Your Best People.

“Frankly, we treat our high performers worse than any other employee,” he said.

more from Hugh MacLeod

Designed to inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists, The Honeywell – Nobel Initiative establishes a forum for students worldwide to learn directly from Nobel Laureates in Chemistry and Physics through a combination of live on-campus events, interactive content and broadcast programs that expand upon Nobelprize.org’s educational outreach efforts.

http://www.honeywellscience.com

A patient with depression, writes a heart-felt analysis of society’s attitudes toward cancer patients compared to society’s attitude to patients with depression.

Depression’s not sexy. It’s common as dirt and every bit as dull. Depression’s boring, both for the patient and for everyone else in the vicinity. For one thing, there aren’t visible battle lines. Depression isn’t an invasion by foreign or mutated cells. If anybody’s come up with a sexy metaphor for neurotransmitter imbalances, I haven’t heard it yet.

via doctoranonymous

Look at the top dogs: Google was co-founded by Russian-born Sergey Mikhailovich Brin; Yahoo’s Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang was born in Taiwan; eBay’s co-founder Pierre Omidyar was born in Paris to Iranian parents; and Intel’s Andy Grove came to the U.S. from Hungary.

The public policy study, entitled American Made, reported that over the past 15 years immigrants have started one-quarter of venture-backed U.S. public companies, equaling a market capitalization of $500 billion US. In the high-tech sector, the amount of immigrant-led U.S. companies rises to 40 per cent.

link

The study seems to be a promo to Congress to expand the H1-B visa program. This comment says a lot to counterbalance the hype:

The study counts the number of companies that had at least one founder who was an immigrant. If you have 100 companies, each with 5 founders – one of whom is an immigratn, this study claims all of those firms are “founded by immigrants”. If you take that one immigrant out of the equation, would these companies still have been founded?

Probably most.

In any event, this method of creating a bias sample is found in Chapter 1 of “How to Lie With Statistics”.

Note that none of the people metioned above came here on a guestworker visa. This propaganda piece says we have a lot of companies that had at least one founder who was an immigrant — therefore we need more guestworkers.

That is the classic “Does not follow’ logical fallacy – Non sequitur.

If Mr. Anderson had come up with a list of prominant companies founded by guestworkers, then he might have had a point. His lack of guestworkers founders is more telling.

How do thoughts and emotions interact in everyday life and in therapeutic processes like cognitive behavioural therapy? Do we really have any control over our emotions or are they things that just happen to us?

“A thought comes when it will, not when I will.” – Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s quote raises an important question about both thoughts and, implicitly, about emotions. Many people would say their emotions only come when they will and not when they want.

Robert Solomon has long been a proponent of the idea that emotions are not just things that happen to us. As existentialist philosophers like Sartre point out, we have a responsibility to take ownership of our emotions. They do not own us, we own them. To say otherwise is to cede control of a fundamental part of ourselves to…well to who?

Emotions are, in fact, strategies.

As if John Lennon would also say,
“Imagine if the people…”

My sister Isabelle sent this pic
from her friend’s home in Banff, Alberta.

Totally wonderful.

To convert language into new content is a challenging art. The words tossed about in science, politics and business to promote ideas or the sale of products are usually copy/paste words or hastily rearranged words. Only a handful of words are constructed entirely for the reader and fewer words are built for the author. Most words lay on space, perhaps only to squeeze them into a website or advertisement. The convenience of engineering the internet is only one chapter. There is much more required.

Ask a storyteller how they create and polish their work. The draft material arrives in many different forms. Some drafts will fail in the first sentence or two. Others will flow like water but make no sense or have no impact. But in the end, a body of work begins. The work of writing original material will start to produce assets that companies around the world will want to copy/paste. Thus, the SEO professional builds commercial assets.

Can internet managers and entrepreneurs understand the complex elements in langauge assets? Will most engineers only see the organization’s structure or its transaction rates or whether they can exercise their power and influence? Will content be impatiently hurried along merely to fill the blank spaces of a screen?

If there are 10,000 vendors of a health supplement, it doesn’t take too long to see that there are only a few sources of the language used in descriptions and promotional material. Perhaps this explains why only a few dozen supplement vendors are truly profitable on the internet.

Words are the assets that fill the screen. Is there something other than words used by the search engines? Is there something other than words displayed for the reader?

Stories are the assets that fill the mind. Shrinking a company’s business plan into mere site engineering, rather than encouraging the art of the writer and designer, is similar to filling a bucket with dirt while leaving the gold on the ground.

I see what I know. I am what I hope.

Just wait until this comes to YOUR neighborhood!

knover.com
The Ultimate Place to Learn About People
Covering 16347 of the Web’s Most Mentioned

Knowledge Rover
relationships between noted personalities and organizations – a patent!

In response to growing alarm at the increase in dental fluorosis, the ADA issued interim guidance on 9th Nov 2006, advising parents to reduce fluoride intake from infant formula.

The American Dental Association, in a recently published position statement, says that mothers should be careful not to prepare baby foods with fluoridated water from the tap, as the fluoride contained in it could be bad for developing babies’ teeth:

“Recent studies cited in the report of the National Research Council (NRC), Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA’s Standards, have raised the possibility that infants could receive a greater than optimal amount of fluoride through liquid concentrate or powdered baby formula that has been mixed with water containing fluoride during a time that their developing teeth may be susceptible to enamel fluorosis.”

62% of Americans are exposed to fluoridated drinking water, Europe is almost wholly fluoridation-free. via Sepp

Chicken without the egg.

Meat Can be Grown in a Lab

Scientists know that a single muscle cell from a cow or chicken can be isolated and divided into thousands of new muscle cells.

…two techniques that have potential for large scale meat production.

One is to grow the cells in large flat sheets on thin membranes. The sheets of meat would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked on top of one another to increase thickness.

The other method would be to grow the muscle cells on small three-dimensional beads that stretch with small changes in temperature. The mature cells could then be harvested and turned into a processed meat, like nuggets or hamburgers.

via gizmag

And wood without the trees…

A number of scientists in the UK have started a program called “Walking with Robots” that is intended to engage people from all ages and walks of life to learn about and ask questions about robots and robotics.

The public must prepare for a technological “revolution” which could soon see robots occupying every area of human life, from space explorers to gardeners and lovers, scientists said today.

via Alice’s RealTechNews

Elton John says his solution [to hatred] would be to “ban religion completely, even though there are some wonderful things about it”.

He added: “I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book.

“But the reality is that organised religion doesn’t seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it’s not really compassionate.”

And he called on the leaders of major religions to hold a “conclave” to discuss the fate of the world – which he said was “near escalating to World War Three”.

“I said this after 9/11 and people thought I was nuts,” he said. “It’s all got to be dialogue – that’s the only way. Get everybody from each religion together and say ‘Listen, this can’t go on. Why do we have all this hatred?’

“We are all God’s people; we have to get along and the [religious leaders] have to lead the way. If they don’t do it, who else is going to do it? They’re not going to do it and it’s left to musicians or to someone else to deal with it.”

He also said he would continue to campaign for gay rights.

“I’m going to fight for them, whether I do it silently behind the scenes or so vocally that I get locked up.”

A recent Gallup poll concluded that nearly 50% of the American public believes the universe is less than 10,000 years old. Nearly half the population, in other words, believes that the entire universe, the sun and solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, and all the billions of other galaxies, all began after the domestication of the dog. Richard Dawkins

Dehumanising the lowest of the low. Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science, 17, 847-853.

… the brains of ten Princeton university students while they viewed pictures of people from different social groups.

Seeing others as less than human

Hitler could persuade you, he could do anything.
Churchill would persuade you, you could do anything.

Remembering, and Flander’s Fields.

And Celia Sandys, Churchill’s grand daughter, who reminds us that Churchill would spend hours rehearsing impromptu speeches in front of a mirror such as rehearsing his famous mistake when he cited the “infernal combustion engine”.

CNN maps the troops.
Not a decent mashup.

The real measure of your wealth is
how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.
Anonymous

US semiconductor giant Intel said Friday it would invest a billion dollars in Vietnam and employ 4,000 people in what will be its largest assembly and test facility in the world.

Hang-on, not Han-oi. Can’t you spell?

Ho-Chi-Mintel City?

Sydney Morning Herald

Deborah Lines, Windsor Downs, Australia, writes to ask, “Can we put a stop to this right now?”

Today on my apple there were two stickers. One was the apple label…. I’ve learned to live with those annoying little things. The second one was an ad for a new release on DVD. Imagine? All that potential advertising space wasted until now.

Researchers at the University of Rochester may have answered one of neuroscience’s most vexing questions—how can it be that our neurons, which are responsible for our crystal-clear thoughts, seem to fire in utterly random ways? In the November issue of Nature Neuroscience, the Rochester study shows that the brain’s cortex uses seemingly chaotic, or “noisy,” signals to represent the ambiguities of the real world—and that this noise dramatically enhances the brain’s processing, enabling us to make decisions in an uncertain world.

read more

My maxim for this?

“information overload equals information retrieval”

There is a 30 year old study lost somewhere showing that the brain restrains blood flow to the lower body during the period when a particularly challenging thought is being formulated.

The brain is reserving energy for itself for a short period. This often makes people feel tired, nauseated or slightly dizzy, thus causing them to turn away from their thinking. I’ve often recommended that this is when it’s best to try a little harder; take a deep breath and finish the task.

It’s very likely that the “feeling” of information overload is precisely the period when information retrieval is taking place.

Speaking of his effort in art, Winston Churchill noted, “I know of nothing that while invigorating the mind more thoroughly exhausts the body. ”

A long time before breaking down plant fibers to produce ethanol was linked to energy independence and national security, researchers at Iowa State University watched a wooden stick falling apart and sinking into a beaker of liquid. Forty years ago.

But the University isn’t identifying the compound until they explore the potential for patents.

Breaking down the tough cellulose that forms the structure of a plant’s cell walls can release the simple sugars that are fermented into ethanol. Many additional crops, weeds and waste products can be used in the fuel matrix, removing production pressure from food and feed crops.

Oklahoma Energy Secretary David Fleischaker said, “If we took every stick of corn that we grow and turn it into fuel and eat none of it, we’re talking about producing about 12 percent of the 140 billion gallons of gasoline that we burn annually.”

via agnet: Iowa State University, John Verkade

“Synthetic Biologists” [?] re-engineer bacteria to give them novel functions.

Techniques called experimental evolution rapidly track changes in DNA, attempting genetically engineer bacteria to churn out high concentrations of ethanol and other useful chemicals such as new antibiotis.

Bacteria such as E. coli evolve relatively quickly: they divide rapidly and sloppily, passing on error-filled copies of their genetic information to the next generation. For example:

When E. coli was provided only glycerol for nutrition, which the microbes do not metabolize very well, the cells grew slowly at first. But after 20 days, they grew 150 percent faster, and at 44 days they were thriving. Those that were more fit for the environment took over the culture…

agnet via MIT

Five unique sources of motivation exist:

Intrinsic process – motivated by FUN
Instrumental – motivated by REWARDS
Self-Concept-External – motivated by REPUTATION
Self-Concept-Internal – motivated by CHALLENGE
Goal Internalization – motivated by the cause or PURPOSE

Each of the five sources requires different organizational and leadership characteristics to tap into them.

Researchers from the University of Georgia and San Diego State University report for the first time that social exclusion actually causes changes in a person’s brain function and can lead to poor decision-making and a diminished learning ability.

“Our findings indicate that social rejection can be a powerful influence on how people act…”