Author: Brian

The two problems by Seth Godin

The first problem is the problem.

The second problem is your inability to admit the problem, talk about the problem and ask for help in solving the problem.

The first problem is that your customer service is lousy, you are an alcoholic, your products are boring, you don’t treat your employees well.

None of those problems are going to go away.

None will go away, that is, if you don’t acknowledge them, clearly and loudly and often. And ask for help.

If you don’t measure the first problem, then you have a second problem.

If you don’t measure the first problem, it’s not going to go away, is it?

“We have a technology, a gene, that gives you a plant that’s drought resistant.

“The system that we’ve developed switches on only during drought.

“During normal growth, if a plant’s got water, the system is switched off, as if the gene wasn’t there.” The technology improves the efficiency of water use under all conditions, says Performance Plants, a leading Canadian plant biotechnology firm.

Agnet

In the United States up to 61 percent of farmers use biotech corn seeds while up to 89 percent use biotech soybeans.

I’ll take the wine & swine, marinara with an olive back.

A new ability to increase the Omega-3 content in pork beyond what you find typically is probably somewhere between 100 to 1,000 thousand times greater than you would find in typical pork.

In the spring of 2005 Winnipeg based Prairie Orchard farms received approval from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to label its pork as being high a good source of Omega-3 fatty acids, a compound recognized having positive effects in terms of eye, brain and cardiovascular health, and approximately one year later the product received similar approval from the U. S. Food and Drug Administration.

Prairie Orchard president Willie Hoffman explains the high Omega-3 content is the result of feeding and, being in western Canada, a typical wheat, barley, soy diet is used supplemented with flax, as the source of Omega-3, and vitamins and minerals selected to stabilize the product and improve taste, color and texture.

via farmscape

A functional food is a food or food ingredient that has been shown to affect specific functions or systems in the body. Functional foods play an important role in disease prevention. The FDA has approved health claims on labels for only four functional foods. I think it’s tomato, whole wheat, omega-3 and olive oil and ingredients. Am I right?

“It’s called the American Dream, because you’ve got to be asleep to believe it.” George Carlin

A new study from the British Economic and Social Research Council and reported today in the Washington Post finds that fear and guilt are actually poor motivators when it comes to getting people to change unhealthy habits.

The idea seems to be that fear and guilt may do nothing more than produce more fear and guilt — and, worse, defeatism. A far more effective approach, the researchers say, is to give people concrete suggestions on how to change their behavior and confidence that they can do things like quit smoking or start a daily exercise program.

read more

Poverty a key determinant of ill health.

We stand accused of ignoring the poor among us — with horrendous potential for dramatically increased healthcare costs not too far down the road. Full Story

Data from 140,000 patients suggests that some common pain killers double the rate for a heart attack.

Dr. Joe and bookofjoe says,

“One thing that has confounded me ever since I was in medical school is how easily doctors — people whom you’d think would know better — are bamboozled into prescribing and using, not only for their patients but for themselves and their families, new drugs.

Motrin, Advil, Vioxx, Celebrex, the parade never ends.

They cost many times what the old stand-bys do and don’t work as well, yet because of powerful advertising they somehow insinuate themselves into the medicine chest.

I’ve never taken anything but aspirin and/or Tylenol for the aches and pains of everyday life, nor do I believe anyone else should.

Here’s my foolproof remedy for almost anything that hurts, be it a headache, sore muscles, joints, you name it:

Three (3) regular aspirin tablets and two (2) extra-strength (500 mg apiece) Tylenol.

Repeat every 3-4 hours as needed.

It’s that cheap and easy.

Don’t be fooled into believing newer is better — in this case, it’s not even as good.”

I saw this headline and remembered that when America was booming during the Industrial Revolution, cocaine was legal and popular. As Asia booms,

Gucci

Jackie O
Princess Di
Peter Sellers
Madonna

Profit in the first half of 2006 was up 39 percent. The recent increases are also due to the buzzing American market where…”our customers are pretty immune to gas prices.” There is a strong aspirational aspect … waz goin’ on?

An online service set for launch early 2007 will perpetually mine the Internet for gems useful to sophisticated financial investors.

“Monitor110” promises to continually sift and sort information from nearly 40 million online sources to uncover business trends or developments before word reaches mainstream media.

It can monitor alternative news websites, government websites, regulatory sites, blogs, union websites, local newspapers. It looks at the type of people linking to the blog and the people that link to the people that link to the blog. [story]

Eric Schmidt Warns Politicians That Elections Will Forever Change
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, warned politicians at a Tory party conference in Bournemouth that the outcome of general elections will be changed “within five years” by what Eric Schmidt calls “truth predictor” software.

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world’s need of work. With it, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this—with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need—this life is hell. —W.E.B. Du Bois

Pick a brick.

One day you’ll be able to point your mobile phone at a train station, click and download a timetable, or point it at a museum to download a list of exhibits, researchers say.

Next?

Trend in healthcare?

Our website is our vision for seeking out medical care at affordable cost in countries where price is minimal and care is abiding.

Our Patient Escort Service is an attempt to cut costs and save lives. We will liaise with the patients in the United States looking for cost effective medical care and refer them to hospitals in India.

Not limiting ourselves to a particular place, we also link ourselves to agents who refer patients to different destinations so that the best dental care can be obtained in Hungary, cosmetic surgery in Malaysia, cardiac treatment in Singapore and knee surgery in India.

Research from Penn’s School of Medicine on how the human eye communicates with the brain.

Earlier studies on vision have focused on what kind of information is sent from eye to brain. The Penn team wondered how fast and how much of that information is transmitted. Recording ‘spikes’ of electrical impulses, the human retina can transmit data at 10 million bits per second—Ethernet speeds, which reach 10 to 100 million bits per second.

Children learn their native language, says this UPenn linguist, by unlearning every other language.

Children do say the darnedest things. But the next time you chuckle at a toddler insisting “I weared my jacket,” consider the possibility that her grammar is perfect, just in another language.

In his new book, “The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World” Charles Yang argues that children learn their native language through a process of trial and error, searching for the correct grammar by trying out other grammatical systems and discarding the ones that don’t fit. Double negatives, for example, while not commonly used in English, are de rigueur in Greek and Spanish, not to mention Chaucerian Middle English.

Short Sufi tale:

A lover came to the dwelling of the Beloved and asked to be admitted. “Who is there?” the Beloved asked. “I am here,” the lover answered. The Beloved refused to admit the lover. After wandering in grief and longing for years, the lover returned to the Beloved and begged to be admitted. “Who is there?” The lover responded, “You alone are there.” The door opened.

Is Washington’s strategy successfully killing or capturing terrorists faster than new enemies are being created? DailyKos

I didn’t write the Amazon review in the sidebar although it looks as if I did. It was originally posted by an Amazon staffer before Amazon brought in Alexa. It later reverted to my account — and I haven’t any idea why.

But it’s true. I use the One Stop Thought Shop to “provide education and insight about breakthrough science, technology and our modern world.”

And this is true: “This is a good site for learning new things.”

I am human.
My blog is edited.
This is a human edited blog.
Putting some healthy bran in the brain to help filter information congestion, I post what I think is important, interesting and good for you.

Humans and algorithms and humans
Geeking with Greg, a blog that is’exploring the future of personalized information’, brings us a link to John Battelle’s interview with Googler Matt Cutts. Some interesting excerpts from Matt on algorithms based on user data:

When savvy people think about Google, they think about algorithms, and algorithms are an important part of Google. But algorithms aren’t magic … quite often … [they] are based on human contributions in some way.

The simplest example is that hyperlinks on the web are created by people … Google News ranks based on which stories human editors around the web choose to highlight. Most of the successful web companies benefit from human input, from eBay’s trust ratings to Amazon’s product reviews and usage data. Or take Netflix’s star ratings … [they] are done by people, and they converge to pretty trustworthy values after only a few votes.

Findory is similar in that its recommendations are based on what humans find and discover. The knowledge of what is good and what is not comes from readers; it is people sharing what they found with each other.

Most of my posts point to further information outside my blog, so generating inbound links can be tough.

I’d appreciate your help.

Would you take a moment to give me a link?

Thanks,
Brian

Definition: Walk-working is using a treadmill with a work station.

Over the years, Angela Leitner’s lower-back pain got so bad she could sit for only 30 minutes at a time. She had tried everything from steroid injections to physical therapy, but nothing worked. Her doctor told her she could have spinal fusion, but it would mean the end of an active lifestyle that once included running.

Leitner, 29, had another idea. She went for a walk.

Tomorrow’s Trends points out that product placements can now be purchased and inserted into scenes after the show has been produced, using technology.

When a scene from the CBS TV show “Numbers” was filmed there was nothing on the table. In post-production, presto, a steaming cup of Campbell’s soup is added.

Same with an episode of “Still Standing.” Originally nothing in the shot, and afterwards a box of Cheeze-Its appears.

The process is called digital brand integration and it is the newest form of product placement developed by a company called Marathon Ventures.

“We can place a product, virtually any size, in almost any location. It really depends on what the program and the video in each individual episode provides in terms of a logical or contextual background,” said the company’s president, David Brenner.

Product placement goes digital, gets lucrative – CNBC TV – MSNBC.com

1911: Jack Daniel, founder of the famous Tennessee whiskey distillery, died of blood poisoning from a toe injury he received after kicking his safe in anger when he could not remember its combination code.

1953: Frank Hayes, jockey, suffered a heart attack during a horse race. The horse, Sweet Kiss, went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.

1978: Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was assassinated by poisoning in London by an unknown assailant who jabbed him in the calf with a specially modified umbrella that fired a metal pellet with a small cavity full of ricin poison.

1981: A 19-year-old man named Jeff Bailey died of a heart attack after scoring 16,660 on the arcade game Berzerk. This was the first known instance of a video game-related death.

Other unusual ways to die at this Wiki

The phrase “easy on the eyes” may hit closer to the mark than we suspected. Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.”

“Critically, the less time it took participants to classify a pattern, the more attractive they judged it.”

“This accounts for cultural differences in beauty – and historical differences in beauty as well – because beauty basically depends on what you’ve been exposed to and what is therefore easy on your mind.”

Full article at the Science blog

Dogs like sports celebrities too. They watch other dogs ‘play fight’ then hang out with the winners.

Dogs seem to enjoy watching other dogs compete against each other and gravitate towards the winners at the end of the game. The UK researchers, who publish their research in the journal Animal Behaviour, believe their discovery is the first demonstration of any animal eavesdropping play.

In this case, dogs appear to gain information about another dog or human’s social status and ability just by watching that individual compete.

Pooches excitedly rush toward victors when games finish, not unlike enthusiastic human sports fans at a stadium. abc.net.au

Recent research reveals an animals’ perspective. The aim is to allow owners and vets to make objective decisions on how to care for them, free of subjective human assumptions.

It could also help vets find more appropriate ways to treat animals and relieve suffering. For instance, some medical therapies can interfere with how an animal interacts with others, says John Bradshaw of the University of Bristol, UK. Treat a dog with antibiotics, and you risk killing the bacteria that live in its anal sac and produce the individual scent by which it is recognizable to other dogs. “We don’t think of dogs losing their identities as a result of medical treatment,” he says. Our failure to see life from a dog’s perspective means that vets will too freely prescribe antibiotics without considering the consequences for the animal.

Your dog falls ill, so you take him to the vet. After a quick consultation you take him home, and soon he appears to be better. But he is not. You and the vet have failed to realise that he is still in severe pain, and the drugs the vet has prescribed will turn him into a social outcast, a dog that may be shunned or even attacked by others.

Such mistakes can happen, say animal behaviour specialists, because our understanding of animal welfare is inadequate, and at times misguided. The human tendency to anthropomorphise means we miss out on animals’ real feelings and needs…

Researchers gathered at a conference held at the Royal Society in London to hear the latest evidence on how animals interpret the world. One thing is clear: they do not see it the same way we do, and only by accepting that can we learn to care for them better.

Article at New Scientist

Taking the fear out of selling
The next time you walk into a chamber mixer and get that woozy feeling in the pit of your stomach consider these techniques and fresh perspectives on selling: Listen. Share. Take a deep breath.

Twenty conditions account for 80% of healthcare expenditure and 70% of personal healthcare expenditure is on those with chronic disabilities. Yet our health services were designed for episodic interventions not chronic conditions. [link]

From the Science blog:
Day after day examples pile up of a government gone wild with incompetence and fraud — from drug safety, to voting machines, to using political hacks to set up democracy in Iraq.

Well, if you want to destroy government, first you have to make people lose confidence in it.

It’s working.

Nearly a third of hospital emergency visits are alcohol-related, and after midnight this figure can be more than two thirds.

Why not an “Alcohol Health Worker”?
Why are doctors not trained to notice the signals and to intervene?

In England, about £217 million is currently spent per year on specialist alcohol treatment, compared with the £20 billion estimated cost of alcohol misuse.