Much of the time spent discussing "ideas" in a business context is actually time spent slowly maneuvering large groups of managers into a compatible mind-space so that they can work together effectively – the results of the discussion in terms of ideas is worth nothing, whereas the result in terms of bonding, organizing, and motivating can be very valuable.

awesome – It seems what people want is a satisfying story about their place in the universe. Since characters are the most important elements of a story, the main “place” that matters to people is their social place – who they relate to and how. People feel they understand their place when they have a story saying how they can relate well to important social entities.

Central to any social relation is whether the related person supports or opposes you in your conflicts. In fact, it seems enough to give your life meaning to just know who are your main natural allies and enemies among the important actors around, and what you can do to keep your allies supporting you, to give you high enough status.

google searches, linkedin, zoominfo, company-site specific searches. also doing a whois search on their personal website sometimes works

And it seemed to be remarkably effective: a 2007 clinical study funded by Shaw’s company and conducted by the independent SGS Laboratories found the device prevented germs from being transferred to catheters nearly 100 percent of the time.

Given these facts, you might expect that hospitals would be lining up to buy Shaw’s product. But that is not the case, even though his company is offering to match whatever price medical facilities are paying for their current, infection-prone IV catheter syringes. In fact, since the device hit the market two years ago, Retractable has sold fewer than 20,000 units, mostly to one New York hospital. Often, the company’s sales team can’t even get in the door to show their wares to purchasing agents. “The product does exactly what it is supposed to do,” Shaw says. “But it has one fatal flaw. Right there at the bottom of the handle it says Retractable Technologies.”

Our kids are all at that age and so its a regular family joke in the car ride home that the first to fall asleep gets a prize.  It sometimes even works.   But someone will fall asleep first, and once that happens the contest is over.  The other two have no incentives.  Also, in the first-to-fall game, each child has an incentive to keep the others awake. Not good for the parents. (And this second problem persists even if you add runner-up prizes.)

So the new game in town is last-to-sleep gets a prize.  You would think that this keeps them up too long but it actually has some nice properties. Optimal play in this game has each child pretending to sleep, thereby tricking the others into thinking they can fall asleep and be the last. So there’s lots of quiet even before they fall asleep.  And there’s no better way to get a tired kid to fall asleep than to have him sit still, as if sleeping, in a quiet car.

In reality, people who are critically ill almost always look critically ill. It's not subtle. If you are in a lot of pain, or vomiting uncontrollably, or suddenly unable to move half of your body – by all means, come in. We don't expect or want people to diagnose themselves or their families. If it feels like an emergency, let us take a look at you.

But if your sick child is feeling well enough to grab every toy in the toy bin and hurl it across the room, the chance they have anything that won't wait until their PCP can see them on Monday is between small and nonexistent. And if your symptoms would have led your mother to send you to bed and made you soup when you were six, it's probably safe to send yourself to bed when you're forty. And if you show up at the ED instead, I'm not going to run a battery of tests to figure out why you have a sore throat and a fever. I'm going to send you out on your mother's plan, the only difference being the terrifying bill that will follow after.

On a recent Wednesday morning, some Post editors were frustrated that the primary election results weren't garnering many hits — despite the fact that John McCain had just won his party's nomination and Lisa Murkowski was on the verge of losing hers. What was hot, the traffic directors said, was Elin Nordegren telling People that her life had been "hell" since her husband's sex scandal, a photo of an alligator in the Chicago River, and a video posted on Gawker of a British woman throwing a feral cat into a dumpster.

most e-mailed on NYT today… vary study locations, don't study any one subject for too long (present material in a mixed background), test yourself frequently, repeat over time

In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo –has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Somebody at a book-signing:  “I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  I could write a novel.”

Me:  “Oh?  Why haven’t you?”

Person:  “I just don’t have the time.”

Me:  “Hmm.  Nobody gives me the time, either.  I have to make the time, set priorities, discipline myself to get my writing done each day, no matter how tired I am.  I worked a full-time regular job while I wrote my first novels, scraping out an hour here or there in evenings and weekends.  That’s how I’ve become a successful author.”

Even more striking is Exhibit C, the Edward Roybal Learning Center in the Westlake area, which was budgeted at $110 million until costs skyrocketed midway through construction when contractors discovered underground methane gas and a fault line. Eventual cost: $377 million.

Mr. Rubin admits that the Roybal Center project was "a tremendous screw-up" that "should have been studied closer beforehand." The project was abandoned for several years, only to be recommenced when community activists demanded that the school be built at whatever cost necessary in order to show respect for the neighborhood's Latino children, many of whom were attending an overcrowded Belmont High School.

The Roybal center now ranks in the bottom third of schools with similar demographics on state tests, while Belmont High ranks in the top third. But even though many Roybal kids can't read or do math, at least they have a dance studio with cushioned maple floors and a kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven.

My next linguistical suggestion is more rigorous. It is to fight the "if-this-guy-wants-to-talk-to-that-guy" syndrome: never refer to parts of programs or pieces of equipment in an anthropomorphic terminology, nor allow your students to do so. This linguistical improvement is much harder to implement than you might think, and your department might consider the introduction of fines for violations, say a quarter for undergraduates, two quarters for graduate students, and five dollars for faculty members.

The reason for this last suggestion is that the anthropomorphic metaphor —for whose introduction we can blame John von Neumann— is an enormous handicap for every computing community that has adopted it. I have now encountered programs wanting things, knowing things, expecting things, believing things, etc., and each time that gave rise to avoidable confusions. The analogy that underlies this personification is so shallow that it is not only misleading but also paralyzing.

It can be anything from cricket fans to stamp collectors. A social network that serves people with a shared interest is barely counts as a start-up idea at this stage. Naïvely a designer or developer starts one of these projects by gathering a feature set. How will our users communicate with each other? Will there be private communication too? Can they share details? What services will they want to integrate with? How can we get them connected as quickly as possible? Should they follow some users by default? Will we use OAuth to find their twitter friends? The list goes on.

The problem with Scott and his generation– and this is most decidedly not Scott's fault but is the fault of his dad and grandfather's generations– is that Scott just can't imagine playing without a net. "No, I'll just wait here, thank you, got myself an iced tea." This is what happens when you go through four years of college and don't at least read On The Road, let alone try it. "Start a business? From nothing? I don't know…" For him, debt should only be for a house, a school, and Polo shirts.

I’m going to steal the adage of Hanlon’s Razor, and apply it here: Never attribute to discipline that which is adequately explained by habit. (Hanlon’s Razor states: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.)

By mid-July our funds were so meager that on Friday we were down to about $5,000 in the checking account, while we needed $24,000 for the jet fuel payment… When I arrived back in Memphis on Monday morning, much to my surprise, the bank balance stood at nearly $32,000. I asked Fred where the funds had come from, and he responded, "The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000." I said, "You mean you took our last $5,000– how could you do that?" He shrugged his shoulders and said, "What difference does it make? Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldn't have flown anyway." Fred's luck held again. It was not much, but it came at a critical time and kept us in business for another week."

1 in 6 chance, so not really. I think lots of the CBO projections during the healthcare debate assumed tax rates would revert to their pre-2003 levels.

story behind popular job hunting book

"And, over the past three decades, Bolles's preferred method has remained remarkably consistent: Sending out résumés doesn't work. Neither does answering ads. Employment agencies? No way. What does work is figuring out what you like to do and what you do well — and then finding a place that needs people like you. Contact organizations that you're interested in, even if they don't have known vacancies. (Bolles actually coined the now commonplace term "informational interview.") Pester friends and family members for leads. Once you get in the door of the employer of your dreams, show how you can solve its problems."

But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who were not current drinkers, regardless of whether they used to be alcoholics, second highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

an army chaplain in afghanistan has an atheist assistant, good article.

"The chaplain was struck both by RP2 Chute's command of the Book of Revelation, and his refusal to take it seriously. "He's familiar with the Christian doctrine, but he chooses not to believe it," says the chaplain, a slender-faced, soft-spoken man with a fringe of gray in his black hair. "That's what I find puzzling."

discussion of some of the issues involved with peak oil. given the shocks that have accompanied increasing oil production, shocks in decline likely instead of smooth decline. large potential for economic collapse, need to prepare

tutorial, will implement this soon on cardboardsmile

pretty cool, steps through program online

The equal-odds rule says that the average publication of any particular scientist does not have any statistically different chance of having more of an impact than any other scientist’s average publication. In other words, those scientists who create publications with the most impact, also create publications with the least impact, and when great publications that make a huge impact are created, it is just a result of “trying” enough times. This is an indication that chance plays a larger role in scientific creativity than previously theorized.

So I read that, and I’m like – whoa. You know Neo in the Matrix? Whoa.

If you want to make excellent stuff, you need to make a lot of stuff.

If you want to make a lot of stuff, you’ll make a lot of crap.

If you want to make excellent stuff, you need to make a lot of crap.

And my personal opinion here -

And that’s okay, because you get judged by your best work, not your bad work.

IS a website down for everyone or is it a local problem

cool google tools

The question Pan and co try to answer at each point in these discussions is: who is going to speak next. Humans listening to these discussions get this right about half the time. Presumably, they are able to use various cues such as the topic of conversation and the inferred emotional state of each speaker.

Pan and co's algorithm does significantly better than this, correctly predicting the next speaker between 55 and 67 per cent of the time. And get this: it does it using nothing but the volume of speech to determine the patterns of influence between individuals.

web server for beginners

awesome article on a german reinsurer, who computes the probabilities of everything. would like to work at that place just to know what the odds are

GiveWell analysis of microfinance charities

Three forces trying to pull the Internet apart: Governments want more access to browsing history, email messages. IT companies might fragment into digital territories they can control, limit access to other parts of internet (the "cloud," I think). Network owners might try to segregate traffic, sending some traffic faster and some traffic slower

I wouldn’t have recognized him on the street and I didn’t know his name, but I knew him, or at least knew his body, and knew this odd habit of his. To put it in social-media terms, it was as if @weirdneighbor were tweeting, “I like playing piano in the nude. Whatever.” Because of the slant of the sun and the size of my windows, I don’t think he could see me, so our relationship, as it were, was less like Facebook, where the exchange is mutual, and more like Twitter: in other words, I was “following” him, but he wasn’t following me.

8. Tyler Cowen, The Age of the Infovore. This would replace Landsburg in the category I think of as "economists outside the box." Many alternatives here, none exactly right. What I really want is The Best of Robin Hanson, a collection of six essays (any more and the students' heads would explode), but that book doesn't exist.

The school also plans to enroll students who may have suffered from bullying, young athletes who spend a lot of time traveling, children from military families who tend to move often and students who don't feel challenged at traditional schools.

The school is being funded as any other public school in the state. School districts that have students attending the school will have to pay Greenfield up to $5,000 per student.

how to add google shopping cart to your site

Such ecosystems normally develop over million of years through a slow process of co-evolution. By contrast, the Green Mountain cloud forest was cobbled together by the Royal Navy in a matter of decades.

Dr Wilkinson exclaimed: "This is really exciting!"

"What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error."

Dr. Redelmeier’s unusual approach goes hand in hand with some pronounced personality quirks. His e-mails, which are legendary among their recipients, are written as lists, with a number assigned to each thought. Dr. Redelmeier does this, he said, in order to focus on the content of a message rather than get distracted by grammar, punctuation and syntax.

Adopt a growth mindset, sleep well, nap lying down for < 30 mins, forgive yourself for procrastinating, test yourself (not immediately following studying), pace your studies (review frequently in short bursts), beware vivid examples, get handouts prior to the lecture, believe in yourself

List of things people call "ironic" that are actually bad luck, coincidence, sarcastic, or hypocritical – in other words not ironic.

How much data gets sent between your computer and Youtube when you request a video, and how fast

n both books we observed that payroll and wins in baseball do not have a strong correlation. Specifically, a team’s payroll only explains about 20% of a team’s wins. This means that it takes more than dollars to win in baseball. And this means that simply taking money from the rich teams and giving it to the poor teams is not going to transform baseball’s lower classes into winners. The Pirates appear to be agreeing with this observation. Rather than spend all the revenue sharing money – which may or may not lead to many more wins – the Pirates have decided to just keep part of this money as profits.

Libertarians are an increasingly vocal ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they are understudied compared to liberals and conservatives. Much of what is known about libertarians is based on the writing of libertarian intellectuals and political leaders, rather than surveying libertarians in the general population. Across three studies, 15 measures, and a large web-based sample (N = 152,239), we sought to understand the morality of selfdescribed libertarians. We found that, compared to liberals and conservatives, libertarians show 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of psychological predispositions in the organization of political attitudes.

excellent, will blog soon: "Most academic efforts to understand morality and ideology come from theorists who constrain the moral domain to issues of harm and fairness. For such theorists, conservative beliefs are puzzles requiring non-moral explanations. In contrast, we present the "five foundations theory of intuitive ethics," which broadens the moral domain to match the anthropological literature on morality. We extend the theory by integrating it with a review of the sociological constructs of community, authority, and sacredness, as formulated by Emile Durkheim and others. We present data supporting the theory, which also shows that liberals may have a special difficulty in understanding the morality of conservatives. We suggest that what liberals see as a non-moral motivation for system justification may be better described as a moral motivation to protect society, groups, and the structures and constraints that are often (though not always) beneficial for individuals."

The conservative conception of American identity is so selective and so specific that it tends to suggest to its adherents that many (maybe even most!) Americans aren’t real Americans, or are Americans who betray real American ideals.

devastating palin takedown. too bad the audience we need to persuade doesn't read vanity fair

After starting her new career as a national figure, Palin disengaged from the community. When in Wasilla, she rarely leaves the house. At her favorite coffee shop, Mocha Moose, Palin has been seen only once in the past three months. On those occasions when she goes to Church on the Rock, she usually arrives late, leaves early, and sits in the back. For runs to Target, she waits until it’s almost closing time. She has never darkened the doorway of Wasilla’s one independent bookstore, Pandemonium Booksellers, which took part in her Going Rogue book signing at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center. Sarah’s mother, Sally Heath, is a charter member of the Valley Republican Women’s Club, which sells a batch of Palin-family recipes for $5, but Palin has not been to any of their meetings since resigning as governor.

Any company where the value's in the network – focus on one specific area and then expand. Example – Facebook at Harvard

when there are problems in the third world, whites in shining armor come to the rescue. Local charities and NGO's get no coverage

Promotional video for luxury clothing company in the US. Great example of how to show, not tell, quality – show the tools, the care, the attention to detail, instead of just showing great suits

This article explores the dilemma of choosing talent using NBA data from 1987 to 2003. We find there is much uncertainty in selecting talent. If superstars are found, they are usually identified early. However, more false positives exist than correct decisions with high draft picks. Our results suggest the dilemma of choosing talent is not so much a winner's curse but more like a purchase of a lottery ticket. Most times you lose, but, if you are going to win, you must buy a ticket.

Plays a random song to unfix songs from your head. Need a mobile version though, if I'm on my computer i can find another song

Build your focus like an endurance athlete. He uses interval training – slowly building the length of focused time. Recommends ditching second monitor, use Spaces to filter distracting things. Sets up Chrome to have no more than 5 tabs open at one time (oldest one closes if you open a 6th tab). Ditches the mouse (i'm getting close to this point as well).

$5 month, unlimited, almost got bought last week. Looks cool – like the FAQ on the frontpage