Author: Brian

“The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. … Interesting people are good at sharing.” russell davies via Preoccupations

All modern knowledge economies are damaging their human capital to some extent.

It is a result of the pressure to be ever more productive.

In the industrial sector you can achieve that by putting in more and better machines, but in the service economy the main way to achieve this is by making people work more and more intensely. By giving workers autonomy they have to effectively self-manage and self-regulate, which is much more efficient from the firm’s perspective, but which adds substantially to the load and pressure of the worker.”

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Dancing like Buddha

Anthony Cerminaro wants to let you all know about a cool non-profit that is doing great things:

Kiva.org – Loans that change lives

Kiva.org allows individuals to make $25 loans to low-income entrepreneurs in the developing world (microfinance). By doing so, individuals like you provide affordable working capital for the poor (money to buy a sewing machine, livestock, etc.), empowering them to earn their way out of poverty.

It’s a new, direct and sustainable way to fight global poverty, and the way I see it, I get a higher return on $25 helping someone build a future than the interest my checking account pays.

What someone doesn’t want you to publish is journalism, all else is publicity.

Songbird has already attracted some birdwatchers.

Ross Notes says, “It’s like taking iTunes, ripping out the music store, and replacing it with the rest of the internet.”

via Confused Of Calcutta

From a recent talk by Google’s Co-Founder and President Larry Page:

Page spent the most time decrying the lack of standards in the hardware industry, specifically, the proliferation of incompatible plugs and cables, network “ports,” adapters, audio and video protocols, displays, indicators, storage, keyboards and input/output devices.

“I am just going to plea to you: Let’s get all these devices talking to each other and I think you will have just amazing innovation,” Page said, directing his comments to the electronics industry at large.

“Why not instead just standardize the power supply?” Page asked. “Why (are) there no standards for those keyboards and little devices? One wire should be able to do everything possible,” Page argued.

“I don’t think there is much of anything that is needed besides standards. I think standards are best done by universities,” said Page, who was a Stanford University graduate student and the son of a Michigan State computer science professor.

“I am amazed we don’t have devices like this and the reason for this is that we lack standards to do it,” he said. “If one in a thousand power adapters start to catch fire and you have one of them, it starts to become an issue,” Page joked.

“It is just silly,” he added.

Reuters reports:

Chronic fatigue syndrome, once thought by some doctors to be a psychological problem or even a excuse for malingerers, is a real disease that affects more than a million Americans, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.

And get this:

Up to 80 percent of people with chronic fatigue do not know they have it, the CDC said.

Its causes are unknown but it can cause profound exhaustion, sleep difficulties, and problems concentrating and remembering. The CDC launched an awareness campaign about chronic fatigue and published a dedicated Internet site at http://www.cdc.gov/cfs/.

And this:

There are tens of millions of people with similar fatiguing illnesses…

No one therapy works but reducing stress, dietary restrictions, gentle stretching and nutritional supplementation have all been shown to help.

The Amazon team takes the concepts of search, storage, lookup and management of data – and turns them into pay-per-fetch and pay-per-space web services.

Explanation at readwriteweb

Infant abuse may be perpetuated between generations by changes in the brain induced by early experience, research shows at the University of Chicago shows. A research team found that when baby rhesus monkeys endured high rates of maternal rejection and mild abuse in their first month of life, their brains often produced less serotonin, a chemical that transmits impulses in the brain. Low levels of serotonin are associated with anxiety and depression and impulsive aggression in both humans and monkeys.

Child abuse across generations

Future Pundit reports

A Newcastle University team in England has grown mini-livers from umbilical cord stem cells.

Scientists have grown an artificial liver that is set to revolutionise the medical world, it was revealed today.

A team based at Newcastle University have grown a tiny liver, believed to be the first of its kind in the world.

Zopa is the first lending and borrowing marketplace in the whole entire world. So we can understand if you’re a little curious about the thinking behind it.

> the Japan of 2014 will scarcely resemble
> that of today. That country will have a very low
> savings rate, significant inflation and either a
> small current account surplus or an outright
> deficit. Its reputation for frugality will be but a
> quaint memory.

> The writer is a fellow at Stanford University’s
> Asia-Pacific Research Center

http://www.mosler.org/wwwboard/messages/1539.shtml
The Coalition of Economic Policy Institutions is a non-partisan FORUM dedicated to promoting research and public discussion of issues related to macroeconomic and monetary policy.

I just realized what bugs me about porn: Everyone is posed as if enticing.

Never satiated.

What is the best sex? Coming or been?

How many wireless handsets will be sold in 2007?

The Wireless Report tells us:
“Merrill Lynch has stated that 1.067 billion handsets will be sold next year, along with global mobile subscribers reaching the 2.96 billion mark.”

Over 200,000 Enron emails in the public domain at Trampoline, using SONAR:

In October 2003 the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission placed 200,000 of Enron’s internal emails from 1999-2002 into the public domain as part of its ongoing investigations. The archive offers an extraordinary window into the lives and preoccupations of Enron’s top executives during a turbulent period. Read more about Enron’s demise on Wikipedia.

Trampoline engineers used this data as testbed during development of the company’s SONAR technology. The result was so fascinating we decided to open it up and allow anyone to dig in. The Enron Explorer lets you investigate the actions and reactions of Enron’s senior management team as the noose began to tighten. via FutureFeeder

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I took losses from Enron. Twice.
Once was investment dilution within a $200,000+ loss in the dotCom bust.
The other was just prior to a contract to install a waste management system in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A double hit: Enron owned one of the needed GE turbines and Tyco was the contract manager. Mike Yawn of Georgia brought good ideas and connections. But in the end, anyone near or related to either Enron or Tyco became instant mud.

My friend and partner in this venture, David Hurley, cited on the telephone a few days earlier, “I wonder if even Ken Lay knows what he’s doing. They are wrecking a good company. I don’t want any part of Enron these days.”

We must assure our prosperity.
We must build our society to keep us proud.

I am beginning to think that the most important thing we can do in politics and government is to insist that no elected or appointed official may have better salary or benefits than their constituents.

a state of being essentially equivalent; equally balanced; “on a par with the best” wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

a social state of affairs in which different people have the same status en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_(law)

Suddenly, very suddenly, percs, subsidies, compensation and policies in trade, health, education, and life’s good qualities would be improved. Favors and percs to rich buddies and lobbyists would be of no benefit to leaders and officials if benefits are measured across the constituent median.

How can we rope our leadership until we can trust their efforts?

Constituent Equity is one tool that I think will exercise complacent government.

But maybe I’m just frustrated and confused. Maybe I’m falling into idealism, a sorry tilt to socialism, or a hint of worry that we are becoming far too willing to accept a class system.

You have a right to know how the federal government spends its money.

Summary of Federal Spending:
Financial Assistance and Procurement in Billions of Dollars

	FY 2000	FY 2001	FY 2002	FY 2003	FY 2004	FY 2005
Contracts	$208.84	$223.73	$262.59	$294.81	$330.26	$381.93
Grants	$294.50	$330.70	$406.20	$487.70	$450.40	$272.70
Loans	$108.00	$141.80	$216.80	$210.80	$154.80	$90.60
Insurance	$379.80	$416.60	$454.20	$464.90	$492.80	$352.70
Direct Payments (e.g. Social Security)	$768.30	$839.60	$841.50	$947.40	$983.10	$770.70
Other	$2.80	$2.70	$0.20	$0.70	$0.40	$0.10
Total	$1,762.24	$1,955.13	$2,181.49	$2,406.31	$2,411.76	$1,868.73

Created by OMB Watch, fedspending.org is a free, searchable database of federal government spending.

“We hope you will explore this site. But mostly we hope you will use the data to hold our elected leaders and government agencies accountable for their actions.”

Just as vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy, nutrient deficiency in the brain may be causing of a host of mental problems from depression to aggression.

New research calls into question the very basis of criminal justice and the notion of culpability.

It suggests that individuals may not always be responsible for their aggression.

Violent behavior may be attributable at least in part to nutritional deficiencies.

A UK prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences they committed in the prison fell by 37%.

Although no one is suggesting that poor diet alone can account for complex social problems, the former chief inspector of prisons Lord Ramsbotham says that he is now “absolutely convinced that there is a direct link between diet and antisocial behaviour, both that bad diet causes bad behaviour and that good diet prevents it.”

The Dutch government is currently conducting a large trial to see if nutritional supplements have the same effect on its prison population.

In a US study, results are simply what you might predict if you understand the biochemistry of the brain and the biophysics of the brain cell membrane — industrialised diets may be changing the very architecture and functioning of the brain.

Research commander Joseph Hibbeln at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which is part of NIH, asserts, “We are suffering from widespread diseases of deficiency.”

Story, with naysayers, at the Guardian

The media tend to blame middle-class and overextended homebuyers for changes in loan rates and less available capital for mortgages, but media is about profitable headlines and not about research.

Here’s a snippet from China indicating where capital is turning:

Statistics show that capital from North America accounted for 51 percent of investments in China’s real estate.

Beijing and Shanghai remain the priority choices of foreign real estate investors. Beijing attracted 49 percent of the investment, followed by Shanghai which claimed 45 percent of the money.

The percentage of foreign investment in advanced residential buildings rose from last year’s 7 percent to 36 percent in the first half year.

Foreign capital holds the largest share of investments in advanced office buildings — 42 percent — and 12 percent of retail and hotel investments.

Foreign capital holds the largest share of investments in advanced office buildings — 42 percent — and 12 percent of retail and hotel investments.

IT SEEMS that emotional self-control really does come from within.

Previous studies have shown that people can learn to control the activity levels of specific brain regions to alter, for example, pain levels, when shown real-time “neurofeedback” from fMRI brain images. Now a similar approach may help psychopathic criminals increase their emotional fluency.

Niels Birbaumer and Ranganatha Sitaram from the University of Tübingen in Germany found that by showing healthy volunteers the activity levels of the insula, a brain region important in emotional processing, represented in real time as a thermometer bar on a screen, the volunteers could control their emotional responses.

After four training sessions they had learned to raise and lower their insula activity levels, in turn changing how they rated the emotional quality of disturbing or neutral images.

Three psychopathic prison inmates who lacked a normal insula response trained the same way. After four days, one appeared to have learned to raise his insula activity towards more normal levels. It opens a potential avenue for treating emotional disorders such as psychopathy or social phobia, the team told a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia, last week.

Tame your brain to keep your cool

I’ve forgotten the exact quote, but Marcus Aurelius wrote that no one can see inside your head so you might as well walk around and think amazing, incredible, noble things – because no one will ever know that you aren’t thinking the same as they’re thinking. It’s your mind, after all. You can think whatever you want.

“What lies behind you and what lies ahead of you
are small matters compared to what lies within you.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Open University offers free higher education.

Here’s a course in dying.
This unit will explore how knowledge and beliefs about death and encounters with death affect people’s lives. It will also examine the concept of a ‘good death’ from an individual perspective in order to enhance the quality of dying.

Intel and AMD have spent billions trying to lower the energy consumption of their chips.

Yet disk storage is responsible for consuming 30 percent of the energy in a PC and up to 50 percent of the energy in a data center.

Disk drive companies have done very little.

Until now. Using metal foil.

A $24 10-gigabyte 0.85-inch drive can spin up, read or write data, then shut down again, all in less time than it takes to perform the same task using flash.

Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Wired covers other very short stories.