I’ve seen some wedding montage – they are quite slow pace for my liking. My first 2 choice are Mauja Hi Mauja and Salaam-E-Ishq. Well, I’ve to wait and see what my better-half suggests.

You can take me out from Bollywood, but you can’t take the Bollywood out of me!

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Human-flesh Search Engines in China

Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.

There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens. A Netizen called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the kitten-killer case.

Why There Is No Jewish Narnia

Although it might seem unlikely that anyone would wonder whether the author of The Lord of the Rings was Jewish, the Nazis took no chances. When the publishing firm of Ruetten & Loening was negotiating with J. R. R. Tolkien over a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938, they demanded that Tolkien provide written assurance that he was an Aryan. Tolkien chastised the publishers for “impertinent and irrelevant inquiries,” and—ever the professor of philology— lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.” As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that “I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”

Needless to say, C. S. Lewis wasn’t Jewish either, though he did marry a Jewish convert to Anglican Christianity (played by Deborah Winger in the film Shadowlands).

Eliot Spitzer: The Rules

Every day we read the headlines, feel the tensions, observe the consequences of the recent failures of market and government. Having a serious conversation about how to remedy these failures lies at the heart of current American politics. And that conversation should address three distinct questions:

• What are the parameters of government intervention in the marketplace? What rules should we use in deciding when the government should act, and when it should let the market take its course?

• Has our response to the immediate crisis been successful?

• How might we restore an effective structure for corporate governance? The failures of corporate governance account for much of our economic troubles over the past 30 years. Getting out of the current mess will require addressing these underlying failures.

Just-as-good Medicine

The rabbi’s eulogy for Sheldon Kravitz solved a minor mystery for my father: what was behind the odd shape of the juice cups he had been drinking from after morning services for the last few years? Adding a bit of levity while praising his thrift and resourcefulness, the rabbi told of how Sheldon purchased, for pennies on the dollar, hundreds of urine specimen cups from Job Lot, that legendary collection of pushcarts in lower Manhattan carrying surplus goods—leftovers, overproduced or discontinued products, unclaimed cargo. At the risk of perpetuating a pernicious cultural stereotype, for men of my father’s generation like Sheldon, raised during the Great Depression, bargain hunting was a contact sport and Job Lot was a beloved arena.

After Lisbon: The Bomb for Beginners

Building a nuclear weapon has never been easier. NATO’s Michael Rühle provides step-by-step instructions for going nuclear, from discretely collecting material to minimizing the fallout when caught. These simple steps have worked for the likes of Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea, among others. The nuclear club is open to your country, too.

Tired of being bossed around? Want your neighbors to treat you with more respect? Want to play in the majors? If so, you have to have your own nukes.

Warning: Your reality is out of date

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.

But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.

Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid.

Human Culture Plays a Role in Natural Selection

As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.

The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology. The evidence of its activity is the more surprising because culture has long seemed to play just the opposite role. Biologists have seen it as a shield that protects people from the full force of other selective pressures, since clothes and shelter dull the bite of cold and farming helps build surpluses to ride out famine.

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Today’s “Quadruple A” games, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Halo 3, and Gran Turismo 5 have stratospheric development budgets of $50 to $60 million. Grand Theft Auto 4 has even been reported as having a development budget of a $100 million. With marketing costs factored in, CoD: MW2’s budget is a reported $200 million!

Ambitious “triple A” games built to establish a new franchise, such as Bioshock or Mirror’s Edge, range in the $20 to $30 million budget. These games have the potential to grow into major new franchises, and their budget reflects that.

Historically, software development budgets have increased by an order of magnitude with each console generation. In the Super Nintendo/Genesis era, a big budget game was in the range of $300,000. By the GameCube/PS2 era, games were in the $10 million range with top-tier games like Final Fantasy warranting a $40 million budget.

Read Can Software Developers Keep Up? to see comparison between video game budget and movie budget; or read from the beginning: Opinion: AMD, Intel, And Nvidia In The Next Ten Years.

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How Social Networking Was Used To Capture Saddam Hussein? A five-part series on how the U.S. military used social networking to capture the Iraqi dictator.

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photo credit: kaibara87

First – What is MRSA?

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a bacterium responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans. MRSA is by definition any strain of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria that is resistant to a large group of antibiotics called the beta-lactams, which include the penicillins and the cephalosporins.

Second – What is antibiotic resistance?

Antibiotic resistance is the ability of bacteria to resist the effects of an antibiotic. When this occurs, medications used to treat infections caused by bacteria become less effective or not effective at all. When antibiotics are used incorrectly, such as when they are taken when not needed, bacteria can develop new ways to fight the medicine, and they become resistant to antibiotic medications.

Third – Germs are evolving

several drugs, including some approved in the last few years, that can treat MRSA. But for a combination of business reasons and scientific challenges, the pharmaceuticals industry is pursuing very few drugs for Acinetobacter and other organisms of its type, known as Gram-negative bacteria. Meanwhile, the germs are evolving and becoming ever more immune to existing antibiotics.

Fourth – And the best way to cut down on infections is to – reduce antibiotic use.

Norwegian doctors prescribe fewer antibiotics than any other country, so people do not have a chance to develop resistance to them.

Patients with MRSA are isolated and medical staff who test positive stay home.

Doctors track each case of MRSA by its individual strain, interviewing patients about where they’ve been and who they’ve been with, testing anyone who has been in contact with them.

Hence, Norway is most infection-free country in the world.

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Read: How To Sell Germ Warfare ?

HT: Reddit.

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The 12 Biggest Ripoffs in America


Many of us feel ripped off in our day to day spending, so much so that bringing up even a single rip-off story in a group of people is likely to trigger a flood of them from everyone else. Whether it’s at the movies, in restaurants or on vacation, we seldom believe we are getting as much for our money as we ought to. Of course, some rip-off stories are more debatable than others. Often times, what is called a ripoff is little more than someone’s subjective opinion of what they “really” deserve for their money, whatever that means. However, other purchases actually do appear, by all objective criteria, to be a raw deal just about all the time. Today, BillShrink analyzes some common ripoffs as mentioned recently by CNN Money, that most of our readers are likely to be well acquainted with.

100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scholars


No matter what school you attend or what field of study you are following, it is easy to learn from some of the top scholars when you watch their online lectures. From words of wisdom on business, literature, science, technology, psychology, and more, you can hear what professors and experts from prestigious colleges and universities have to say. Take some time to check out these lectures in the quest to expand your knowledge.

50 Free Career Aptitude Tests That Everyone Should Take


Figuring out what career path you should follow can be a tricky task, and one often riddled with missteps and failed attempts. No matter what you’re pursuing your college degree in, you can find out what kind of careers are best suited to your personality through these helpful online tests. While they’re not foolproof, they can give you an idea about where your interests can take you and what skills you have that will serve you well on the job.

Why Smart People Are Dumb


If there is indeed a sucker born every minute, there are at least three con artists born every 30 seconds destined to take him for a ride. We are going through an epidemic of Pigeon Fever—"Ponzimonium," one government regulator calls it, variations on the scam initiated by Charles Ponzi almost a century ago.

Of course, Bernard Madoff makes Mr. Ponzi look like a nickel-and-dime grifter. Even the mini-Madoffs, like Marc Dreier, were dealing and stealing in the hundreds of millions. The Texas financier Allen Stanford stands accused of a mere $7 billion racket. The FBI says that since the Haiti earthquake they’ve uncovered 170 “Help Haiti” charity scams.

What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory


I’m trying to understand how time works. And that’s a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg.

And we sort of understand that halfway. The arrow of time is based on ideas that go back to Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 1870s. He figured out this thing called entropy. Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And it tends to grow. That’s the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy goes up with time, things become more disorderly.

Africa Is Becoming the New China and India


China and India get all the headlines for their economic prowess, but there's another global growth story that is easily overlooked: Africa. In 2007 and 2008, southern Africa, the Great Lakes region of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and even the drought-stricken Horn of Africa had GDP growth rates on par with Asia's two powerhouses. Last year, in the depths of global recession, the continent clocked almost 2 percent growth, roughly equal to the rates in the Middle East, and outperforming everywhere else but India and China. This year and in 2011, Africa will grow by 4.8 percent—the highest rate of growth outside Asia, and higher than even the oft-buzzed-about economies of Brazil, Russia, Mexico, and Eastern Europe, according to newly revised IMF estimates. In fact, on a per capita basis, Africans are already richer than Indians, and a dozen African states have higher gross national income per capita than China.

TV Ratings Rise, Maybe With Internet’s Help


Remember when the Internet was supposed to kill off television?

That hasn’t been the case lately, judging by the record television ratings for big-ticket events. The Vancouver Olympics are shaping up to be the most-watched foreign Winter Games since 1994. This year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched program in United States history, beating out the final episode of “M*A*S*H” in 1983. Awards shows like the Grammys are attracting their biggest audiences in years.

Many television executives are crediting the Internet, in part, for the revival.

Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV.

March of the Robo Chef – Mechanized Cooks Invade the Kitchen


The culmination of two years of research and the collective expertise of 17 faculty members, undergraduates and doctoral students in the Human Robot Interaction Group, it is a robot outfitted with a $20,000 laser navigation system, sonar sensors and a Point Grey Bumblebee 2 stereo camera that functions as its eyes, which stare out from its clay-colored plastic, gender-neutral face.

With Dr. Rybski looking on like a proud parent, a bearded graduate student clacked away at a laptop on a roving service cart, and the robot rolled forward to fulfill its primary function: the delivery of one foil-wrapped Nature Valley trail-mix flavor granola bar.

Atul Gawande's 'Checklist' For Surgery Success


Speaking about dealing with unexpected challenges in medicine, Atul Gawande — a surgeon who writes for The New Yorker when he's not at his day job at Harvard Medical School — relates a story about a man who came into an emergency room with a stab wound.

Avoiding a Digital Dark Age


Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, an increasing proportion of the information we create and use has been in the form of digital data. Many (most?) of us have given up writing messages on paper, instead adopting electronic formats, and have exchanged film-based photographic cameras for digital ones. Will those precious family photographs and letters—that is, email messages—created today survive for future generations, or will they suffer a sad fate like my backup floppy disks? It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the “digital dark age.” This is the idea—or fear!—that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us.

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Email 1:

Please be pre-alerted that there is a young guy in a black Toyota Vios lurking around Egate and Tesco carpark, claiming that you have accidentally damaged his car while parking yours. After you have parked and walked away, he would approach you and made the claim that you have unknowingly bumped into the side of his car, or hit his light or his side mirror. When you inspect his car, there indeed is the damage.

This guy speaks in Chinese and he would demand for on-the-spot compensation which is a few hundred ringgit-he is known to have asked for RM550!

It has happened to 2 cases, one of which is my family member who had parked in the Egate basement carpark last night.

This guy targets single drivers. Please be careful. He may not be working alone.

Email 2:

It happend exactly to me on 24th Feb. 2010 I was driving back and a Black Toyota Vios follow me. After I went out from the car , he came to me saying that I hit his side mirror and asking compensation. I did not realize I hit his car at all. I did not pay the damage on the side mirror I “accidentally ” hit. Rather , I suggest we report to police. He is getting angry and saying dirty word and drive away. I managed to get the car no and reported  this to police already. The car no is PDJ 2584 New Black Toyota Vios.

Spread this to your friends…

Email 3:

Dear Guys…this also happened to my friend yesterday… please be aware!

Email 4:

oh dear…my daugther’s friend got into this and pay him RM800.00 where he claimed that the side mirror comes in pair and this poor young boy just being cheated.

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HT: CuddlyFamily

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