July 2007
Monday, 30 July 2007
Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling
Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling: “While both men and women were penalized for negotiating, Bowles found that the negative effect for women was more than twice as large as that for men.”
Friday, 27 July 2007
$1.9 million dime’s odd, secret journey
$1.9 million dime’s odd, secret journey: “He told Feigenbaum he had bought it strictly as an investment and did not intend to spend it, as there is no longer anything to buy in New York for 10 cents.”
Thursday, 26 July 2007
Geoffrey West out West
Geoffrey West out West: “People who live in densely populated places lead environmentally friendly lives. They consume fewer resources per person and take up less space. And because efficiency scales with the size of the population, big cities are always more efficient than small cities. Bottom line: The secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our big cities bigger. We need more metropolises.”
Wednesday, 25 July 2007
Few Muslims ‘back suicide bombs’
Few Muslims ‘back suicide bombs’: “In Lebanon, Bangladesh, Jordan, Pakistan and Indonesia, the proportion of Muslims who support suicide bombing has declined by half or more since 2002. But in areas of conflict, the results are different - 70% of Palestinians said that suicide bombings against civilians were sometimes justifiable.”
Thursday, 19 July 2007
Secret Buildings You May Not Photograph, Part 643
Secret Buildings You May Not Photograph, Part 643: “DARPA’s presence at 3701 N. Fairfax is hardly a government secret–Google finds nearly 10,000 pages listing the agency’s use of the building.”
Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Do not photograph 3701 N. Fairfax Dr., Arlington, VA
Do not photograph 3701 N. Fairfax Dr., Arlington, VA: “And by ‘taking photographs in a high security area” I mean being in possession of a camera while walking down the street opposite several blocks of non-descript office buildings, less than a block from the Virginia Square-GMU Metro station.“
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
You Are What You Grow
You Are What You Grow: ” The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.“ - READ THIS
Monday, 16 July 2007
Found: the giant lion-eating chimps of the magic forest
Found: the giant lion-eating chimps of the magic forest: ”'I don’t like to paint them as being more aggressive, but maybe they prey on some of these predators and the predators kind of leave them alone.’ He is keen to point out though that they don’t howl at the moon.“
Friday, 13 July 2007
Ten Questions with Jeffrey Pfeffer
Ten Questions with Jeffrey Pfeffer: "If location was determined by cost, Silicon Valley would be empty.”
Wednesday, 11 July 2007
Poor Fractured Tantalus
Poor Fractured Tantalus: “I’ve been not playing it quite a bit lately. I grabbed the sources from CVS and built it so that I could have a Universal binary to be not playing.”
Monday, 9 July 2007
Sharp practice of melting coins
Sharp practice of melting coins: “Our one rupee coin is in fact worth 35 rupees, because we make five to seven blades out of them”
Fake bomb eludes airport test
Fake bomb eludes airport test: “We don’t discuss the results because they tend to paint an inaccurate picture of the competency of our work force” – well, they did find a water bottle.
Sunday, 8 July 2007
Why Microsoft outplays Apple long term
Why Microsoft outplays Apple long term: “Here are 300 developers who WANT to help Apple make its iPhone even better. Yet Apple’s secrecy and lack of care for developers demonstrates itself by not showing up.”
Dude. Where’s My Tail?
Dude. Where’s My Tail?: “That’s why, whenever I write a book like Days of Atonement, which was the world’s first (and, so far as I know, only) Gothic Western science fiction police procedural, a book which I fondly assumed might appeal to readers outside the normal SF audience, the publisher made sure to put Death Rays on the cover, to assure genre readers that this was a thing that looked like other things that they already liked, and to make sure that all potential new readers were discouraged from so much as glancing at the book.”
Saturday, 7 July 2007
Disk vs. RAM. Round 1.
Disk vs. RAM. Round 1.: “naive engineers love to throw 99.9% around”
Wednesday, 4 July 2007
Girls Just Want to Be Mean
Girls Just Want to Be Mean: “For years, psychologists who studied aggression among schoolchildren looked only at its physical and overt manifestations and concluded that girls were less aggressive than boys. That consensus began to change in the early 90’s, after a team of researchers led by a Finnish professor named Kaj Bjorkqvist started interviewing 11- and 12-year-old girls about their behavior toward one another. The team’s conclusion was that girls were, in fact, just as aggressive as boys, though in a different way. They were not as likely to engage in physical fights, for example, but their superior social intelligence enabled them to wage complicated battles with other girls aimed at damaging relationships or reputations – leaving nasty messages by cellphone or spreading scurrilous rumors by e-mail, making friends with one girl as revenge against another, gossiping about someone just loudly enough to be overheard.”
Monday, 2 July 2007
How the U.S. Has Kept the Productivity Playing Field Tilted to Its Advantage
How the U.S. Has Kept the Productivity Playing Field Tilted to Its Advantage: “When Americans take over a business in Britain, the business becomes significantly better at translating technology spending into productivity than a comparable business taken over by someone else. It is as if the invisible hand of the American marketplace were somehow passing along a secret handshake to these firms.”
Sunday, 1 July 2007
A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech
A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech: “The real worry for us has always been that the commercial agenda for biotech may be premature, based on what we have long known was an incomplete understanding of genetics”
Our Biotech Future
Our Biotech Future: “Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere.”
Google vs Michael Moore
Google vs Michael Moore: “Apparently there is a cure to the Sicko ailment, and it involves spending money with Google”