Overcoming Bias : Opinion Warning Signs

Overcoming Bias : Opinion Warning Signs: "Signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth:

1. You find it hard to be enthusiastic for something until you know that others oppose it.
2. You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.
3. Realizing that a topic is important and neglected doesn’t make you much interested."

Mark Hyman, MD: 5 Steps to Kill Hidden Bugs in Your Gut That Make You Sick

Mark Hyman, MD: 5 Steps to Kill Hidden Bugs in Your Gut That Make You Sick: "Five Steps to a Healthy Gut (and a Healthy Body!)

Follow these five simple steps to begin rebalancing your gut flora.

1. Eat a fiber-rich, whole foods diet--it should be rich in beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables--all of which feed good bugs.

2. Limit sugar, processed foods, animal fats, and animal protein--these provide food for unhealthy bugs.

3. Avoid the use of antibiotics, acid blockers, and anti-inflammatories--they change gut flora for the worse."

Is David Simon a genius? Creator of 'The Wire' talks about winning a MacArthur Fellowship | Show Tracker | Los Angeles Times

Is David Simon a genius? Creator of 'The Wire' talks about winning a MacArthur Fellowship | Show Tracker | Los Angeles Times: "Put it this way: One thing we were explicit about with 'The Wire' was that the drug war was a total amoral fraud that mutated into an abusive campaign against America’s underclass, and that it needed to end. Now, the drug war is no closer to ending than it was when we started the series. And I don’t expect that we’re ever going to get there. But you can’t go into it thinking you’re going to change anything; you have to go into it based on the story itself. I don’t know if I have the power to change things. I think that’s above my pay grade. Or below it, as the case may be."

Dealbook Column - The Value of a Donation of Facebook Shares to Newark - NYTimes.com

Dealbook Column - The Value of a Donation of Facebook Shares to Newark - NYTimes.com: "During Allen & Company’s annual mogul-fest in the Idaho mountains in July, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, devised a plan with Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark to donate a $100 million challenge grant for the city’s troubled schools."

Exposing Assemblages: Unlikely Communities of Digital Scholarship, Video, and Social Networks | Enculturation

Exposing Assemblages: Unlikely Communities of Digital Scholarship, Video, and Social Networks | Enculturation: "Unfortunately, this conception of exposure to the exteriority of relations is largely absent from both mainstream and academic conversations regarding social media, and it certainly does not appear to play a role in our discussions of digital scholarship. Despite the discipline’s fluency with various theoretical critiques of authorship, as scholarly authors we continue to view our own writerly identities in very traditional ways. Student writers are seen in the same terms. As Diane Davis notes, “Even radical writing pedagogies, that is, which presume that identity is constituted and plural, have a tendency to reproduce the myth of immanence by encouraging students to consider themselves presentable” (121)."

Atheists Outdo Some Believers in Survey on Religion - NYTimes.com

Atheists Outdo Some Believers in Survey on Religion - NYTimes.com: "“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew."

Harvard professor found guilty of scientific misconduct

Harvard professor found guilty of scientific misconduct: "Since the investigation began in 2007, several papers coauthored by Hauser have been called into question. The first was a study published in the journal Cognition in 2002 that asserted that cotton-top tamarins can identify changes in syllable patterns; this paper was retracted when the investigation found that 'the data do not support the reported findings.' A 1995 PNAS paper reported that cotton-top tamarins can recognize themselves in a mirror, a result that is surprising because this new world monkey species is not known to have advanced cognitive abilities. When questions were raised about the findings, Hauser repeated the experiment and found that the results held: the monkeys again aced the mirror test, indicating self-recognition."

Amazon.com: Patrick J. McGovern "...'s review of Uranium Ore

Amazon.com: Patrick J. McGovern "...'s review of Uranium Ore: "I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty."

From a review of Uranium Ore at Amazon.com

Science Strikes Again. | MetaFilter

Science Strikes Again. | MetaFilter: "The Best American Science Writing has a diverse set of offerings for this year, including five articles already featured here on the blue. Starting off with Benedict Carey - Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk (The New York Times)

Continuing with

Jonah Lehrer - The Truth About Grit (The Boston Globe)
Steven Pinker - My Genome, My Self (New York Times)
Pam Belluck - Test Subjects Who Call the Scientist Mom or Dad (The New York Times)
Julia Scott - Pesticides Indicted in Bee Deaths (Salon)
Rivka Galchen - Disaster Aversion (Harper's Magazine)
Kathleen McAuliffe - Are We Still Evolving? (Discover)
Susan Milius - A Most Private Evolution (Science News)
Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum - Unpopular Science (The Nation)
Steven Weinberg - The Missions of Astronomy (The New York Review of Books)
Tony Freeth - Decoding an Ancient Computer (Scientific American)
Cornelia Dean - So Much to Learn About the Oceans from Sand (New York Times)"

jwz - The XX

jwz - The XX: "You know, when I first discovered Massive Attack in the early 90s, I used to proclaim that those guys were going to be the next Pixies -- the band that seems very niche at the time, and not apparently that successful, but then every single person who bought the album was going to start a band, and in fifteen years everyone was going to sound like them."

Using Text-Expansion Software to Respond to Student Writing - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Using Text-Expansion Software to Respond to Student Writing - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education: "I also use rubrics, macros and voice recognition software (Dragon 11). Macros can address recurring themes and the VR software allows me to respond faster than I type (140 words a minute, adjusted for errors). Every one is a time saver, but none of them is very satisfying. I know it makes me a better teacher, but I don't know if it makes students better writers.

Unless there is evidence that students actually USE this feedback, I think the innovation is useless. Thousands of instructors have offered variations of 'here's where to look it up' and hundreds of thousands of students have ignored this advice. While I like innovation a lot, we NEED EVIDENCE of LEARNING, not just faster marking."

Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter of The Social Network, talks to Lynn Hirschberg about the film

Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter of The Social Network, talks to Lynn Hirschberg about the film: "“When I first got sober, my biggest fear was, Am I going to be able to write without cocaine? In the past my dealer would come over, and I’d do drugs all night long and I’d write high. I was worried that I couldn’t write with the sun out.” After rehab, to test himself, he took a two-week job polishing dialogue for a Michael Bay movie called The Rock. “I was just writing quips for Sean Connery and Nic Cage, but the first time I wrote in the daytime, I was so proud. Now my firewall is Roxy. I’d let her down if I relapsed.”"

Historian Orlando Figes admits posting Amazon reviews that trashed rivals | Books | The Guardian

Historian Orlando Figes admits posting Amazon reviews that trashed rivals | Books | The Guardian: "Rival historian Robert Service, whose work on the history of communism Figes described as 'awful' in the Amazon posts, said he and his wife had been through hell. 'I am pleased and mightily relieved that this contaminant slime has been exposed to the light and begun to be scrubbed clean,' said Service, who is professor of Russian history at St Antony's College Oxford. 'I have been made acutely aware that a solitary malpractitioner, if he has an abundance of money and malice, can intimidate all and sundry – and that includes both scholars and journalists.'"

Using Text-Expansion Software to Respond to Student Writing - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Using Text-Expansion Software to Respond to Student Writing - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education: "In my experience—and in the experience of most of us who read student writing—students tend to run into trouble with the same relatively limited set of problems. They need a nudge here and there with issues ranging from proper academic formatting of the document to using punctuation correctly to getting the syntax of a sentence right to incorporating transitional elements that improve the coherence of a given essay. This is, of course, why there are such things as writing handbooks: writers of all levels—but especially beginners—need a user-friendly reference book to look up the rules for various elements of writing."

Type 2 Diabetes -- Are You at Risk?

Type 2 Diabetes -- Are You at Risk?: "The year before George approached me, he had brought in dietary educators trained by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) to counsel 400 of his more than 4,000 diabetic patients. These patients dutifully followed the recommendations outlined in their personalized meal plans provided by these ADA educators. After a year, George found that his costs for these 400 patients had increased by another $1 million."

I put my list of applications in a spreadsheet and rated each one on usefulness. I didn't include the stock apps like Iphoto, which are indispensable, or Microsoft Office, a necessary evil. Here is the list, with a few comments.

• Dropbox: sync your files among multiple machines seamlessly


• Openoffice.org: A free version of Word. Feels a wee bit sluggish, and I prefer Iwork.
  


• Terminal: learning a few simple commands, like how to kill hung programs, or copy everything on your desktop into a folder, has saved me hours and hours of tedium.
  


• VLC: watch any video format


• HandBrake: convert dvds to Ipod format


• Jomic: comic viewer


• Jumpcut: Copy something. Copy something else. Go back and paste the first thing you copied. Awesome.


• KompoZer:
  Free web page creation tool. I use this instead of Dreamweaver because I hate how Adobe products install extra gunk all over your machine and eat up resources. It has some minor bugs but no dealbreakers.


• MacTheRipper: Copies DVDs to your hard drive for later viewing on the plane.
  


• Tex-Edit Plus 4.9.8: I've been using this for over a decade. Great for cleaning up mangled email and other texts. Has a great command called "copy lines containing" so you can copy every line with a particular phrase in it, for example.
  


• Textwrangler: snappier than Tex-edit, better with large files, but a little harder to use.
  


• Gimp: Basically, it's photoshop, and it's free.
  


• Audacity audio editor and mixer
  


• Colloquy: Irc client. I've heard you can use #bookz to find e-text versions of books you own for the aforementioned plane flight.
  


• Cyberduck: ftp client. Honestly, I just use the command line in Terminal.
  


• Notational Velocity: Nifty, no frills note-taking app with lots of keystroke commands. Syncs with the Iphone app simplenote.
  


• RapidWeaver: Relatively cheap alternative to Dreamweaver. Bazillions of templates and plugins.
  


• Zoom: For playing those old text adventure games.
  


• Vitamin-R: Task reminder tool. You may not need this. I do. Slightly buggy.
  


• Amazon MP3 Downloader: Amazon throws up free music all the time, and some of it is good.
  


• FreeMind: One of many mind mapping tools. I like Graphviz too, but haven't used it lately.
• Anki is an intelligent flash card system that quizzes you on content that you are on the verge of forgetting. Basically a free version of the popular Supermemo.
  

March to Keep Fear Alive

March to Keep Fear Alive: "America, the Greatest Country God ever gave Man, was built on three bedrock principles: Freedom. Liberty. And Fear -- that someone might take our Freedom and Liberty. But now, there are dark, optimistic forces trying to take away our Fear -- forces with salt and pepper hair and way more Emmys than they need. They want to replace our Fear with reason. But never forget -- 'Reason' is just one letter away from 'Treason.' Coincidence? Reasonable people would say it is, but America can't afford to take that chance."

Rally to Restore Sanity

Rally to Restore Sanity: "Think of our event as Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement; the Million Man March, only a lot smaller, and a bit less of a sausage fest; or the Gathering of the Juggalos, but instead of throwing our feces at Tila Tequila, we'll be actively *not* throwing our feces at Tila Tequila. Join us in the shadow of the Washington Monument. And bring your indoor voice. Or don't. If you'd rather stay home, go to work, or drive your kids to soccer practice... Actually, please come anyway. Ask the sitter if she can stay a few extra hours, just this once. We'll make it worth your while."

I am able to move small objects with my mind.

I am able to move small objects with my mind.: "Also, if you happen to see Seb eating anything over the next few weeks, please remove the food from him immediately. He forgot to feed his turtle last week and I feel a month without food will help him understand both the importance of being a responsible pet owner and the effects of malnutrition.
Regards, David."

In Professor-Dominatrix Scandal, U. of New Mexico Feels the Pain - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education

In Professor-Dominatrix Scandal, U. of New Mexico Feels the Pain - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Life has become extremely complex in the University of New Mexico's English department in the three years since Lisa D. Ch�vez, a tenured associate professor, was discovered moonlighting as the phone-sex dominatrix 'Mistress Jade,' and posing in promotional pictures sexually dominating one of her own graduate students."

The Ultimate Media Server

The Ultimate Media Server: "The Ultimate Media Server"

Court Papers: Biederman Told J&J Study Results Would Be Positive - Health Blog - WSJ

Court Papers: Biederman Told J&J Study Results Would Be Positive - Health Blog - WSJ: "According to court documents, Biederman made a presentation to J&J execs in which he displayed a slide that referred to a proposed study of the company’s antipsychotic Risperdal, known generically as risperidone, in preschool children, the New York Times reports. The trial “will support the safety and effectiveness of risperidone in this age group,” as NYT quotes the slide."

Joseph Biederman News - The New York Times

Joseph Biederman News - The New York Times: "He is in the middle of two controversies: one involves the use of antipsychotic drugs in children, and the other relates to conflicts of interest in medicine.


An inquiry by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, revealed last year that Dr. Biederman earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but failed to report all but about $200,000 of this income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators."

Sugata Mitra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sugata Mitra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Prof. Sugata Mitra is currently, as of 2009, Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK. He is also Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at NIIT. He is the instigator of the Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiment, where in the year 1999 a computer was placed in a kiosk created within a wall in an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Delhi and children were allowed to freely use it [1]. The experiment aimed at proving that kids could be taught by computers very easily without any formal training. Sugata termed this as Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The experiment has since been repeated at many places, HIW has more than 23 kiosks in rural India. In 2004 the experiment was also carried on in Cambodia[2]. His interests include Education, Remote Presence, Self-organising systems, Cognitive Systems, Physics and Consciousness."

I just successfully paired my bluetooth keyboard with my new Ipod Touch. There is a little bit of lag as I type this into Blogger, but overall I'm pretty excited about the possibility of carrying something this portable and using it for some types of writing.

I just received my 4th generation Ipod Touch after using an Ipad for about a month, and I've had to remind myself how to use a small device again--it's great having something with me all the time for notes, music and the occasional game of Samurai. I really like the experience of *not* having to pull the Ipad out of a backpack, but just reaching into my shirt pocket. I know that sounds trivial, but it seems to make a difference, just like having the "blog this!" bookmarklet in my browser changed the frequency and manner in which I bookmarked and sometimes wrote about websites. I never listened to music on the Ipad, even though it was relatively easy to do so.

On-the-Go RPGs: Hike, Ramble, Game - Treasure Tables

On-the-Go RPGs: Hike, Ramble, Game - Treasure Tables: "In the comments to Have You Ever Run a Game Outdoors, Frank Filz and Scott M. linked up two RPGs with a twist.

Sherpa (by Stephan O’Sullivan, creator of Bunnies & Burrows) is designed to be played while hiking. In Stephan’s words, it “uses a digital watch with a stopwatch feature as a randomizer and a character sheet fits on the back of a business card.” Cooool."

How to self-publish an ebook | Fully Equipped - CNET Reviews

How to self-publish an ebook | Fully Equipped - CNET Reviews

John McPhee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John McPhee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "While being interviewed on the 27 August 2009 edition of Radio West (KUER, Salt Lake City, Utah), writer Christopher Cokinos said that he has a sign above his desk which says Too tired to write? John McPhee isn't."

Princeton Ignores Strauss, Makes Sensible Decisions | Freedom to Tinker

Princeton Ignores Strauss, Makes Sensible Decisions | Freedom to Tinker: "The Office of Information Technology (OIT) here at Princeton has taken the unusual step of issuing a statement distancing itself from the views expressed by one of its employees, Howard Strauss, in a column in Syllabus magazine."

Princeton University - Strauss earns EDUCAUSE leadership award

Princeton University - Strauss earns EDUCAUSE leadership award: "The late Howard Strauss, former manager of academic outreach in Princeton's Office of Information Technology, has been named the recipient of an EDUCAUSE Leadership Award for Distinguished Performance and Outstanding Service.

Strauss, who worked at the University from 1971 to 2005, died in September 2005 at age 62. The award is the highest individual recognition offered by EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. It recognizes prominent professionals whose work has had significant positive impact on the contributions of information technology to higher education."

Wired 7.01: The Wired Diaries

Wired 7.01: The Wired Diaries: "John McPhee: I don't use WordPerfect or Word. I have Howard. Howard Strauss. He wrote a program - an editor, created for IBM mainframe programmers to use at home on their PCs - to imitate what I do when organizing my work. And if Howard Strauss leaves Princeton, I do too. I used to type up my notes, and I'd have 150 pages of notes and the only organization they'd have is the order through time in which I scribbled them. I would make a Xerox of the whole set, code them all, then assign each note to one or more sections in the structure of my story. I would then literally cut the notes apart with scissors and put the whole thing in 36 separate manila folders. Then when I'd pick up envelope number one, I could forget the other 35. The purpose of all this mechanistic monkeying around was that it freed me to write. Now, I still type up my notes myself. But what Howard did was write a program where the machine chews it all up and reassembles it automatically. One file becomes 36 files, each with its own new name."

The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men | The Art of Manliness

The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men | The Art of Manliness: "“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”"

The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men | The Art of Manliness

The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men | The Art of Manliness

ExifRenamer for Mac - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com

ExifRenamer for Mac - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com

Rename photos based on their exif data.

AmoK Exif Sorter 2.56 | Download (Official Website)

AmoK Exif Sorter 2.56 | Download (Official Website)

Wired 11.11: The Two Faces of Takashi Murakami

Wired 11.11: The Two Faces of Takashi Murakami: "Each creation begins as a sketch in one of numerous pocket-sized notebooks. Full-size drawings are then scanned into the computer. From there, Murakami 'paints' his works in Adobe Illustrator, tweaking the composition and cycling through thousands of colors until at last he hands the finished versions off to his assistants. His staff then prints out the work on paper, silk-screens the outline onto canvas, and commences painting. Without this embrace of technology, Murakami says, 'I could have never produced this many works this efficiently, and the work wouldn't be as intense.'"

Just Asking - Magazine - The Atlantic

Just Asking - Magazine - The Atlantic: "What are the effects on the American idea of Guant�namo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?"

Just Asking - Magazine - The Atlantic

Just Asking - Magazine - The Atlantic: "Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?"

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-people-like/

The Last Story of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre - NYTimes.com

The Last Story of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre - NYTimes.com: "In a dramatic farewell that could have come from Froggy’s pen, Mr. MacIntyre, according to fire officials, methodically set ablaze the contents of the apartment in Bensonhurst where he had lived for a quarter-century. First the flames consumed a lifetime of possessions; then they feasted on his weary flesh, ending his painful 59-year earthly existence. Born in Scotland, raised in Australia — or so he said, in his impeccable British regional accent — he now lies unclaimed in a Brooklyn morgue."

FirsttotheFinish.com - Cross Country Shoes and Spikes

FirsttotheFinish.com - Cross Country Shoes and Spikes

shoes

EmacsWiki: La Te XAquamacs

EmacsWiki: La Te XAquamacs

Why am I so drawn to cults?

FarmVillains - Page 1 - News - San Francisco - SF Weekly

FarmVillains - Page 1 - News - San Francisco - SF Weekly: "'Zynga's motto is 'Do Evil,'' he says. 'I would venture to say it is one of the most evil places I've run into, from a culture perspective and in its business approach. I've tried my best to make sure that friends don't let friends work at Zynga.'"

XP: Limit Login Access to Specific Times and Days | Windows security | Tech-Recipes

XP: Limit Login Access to Specific Times and Days | Windows security | Tech-Recipes

this will make my kids sad, but ultimately happier.

Moodle 2.0 release notes - MoodleDocs

Moodle 2.0 release notes - MoodleDocs

Moodle 2.0 is the happy happy fun ball of LMS's.

Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don't Let The Bedbugs ... : NPR

Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don't Let The Bedbugs ... : NPR: "On how Potter inspects his hotel rooms before spending a night

'First thing I do before I unpack is I remove the bed sheets and the blankets and I examine the upper and lower seams of the mattress at the two corners by the pillow area and along the seam that runs along the headboard. The reason I look there first is because bedbugs tend to be drawn to heat and carbon dioxide as a person sleeps so if they're on the mattress, you're more likely to see them in that location. ... If I can see the upper seam of the box spring, I'll take a look at that as well, looking for the little brown bugs themselves as well as the black speckling which are the droppings of the bedbugs.'"

Scooter safety vs. motorcycles | Ask MetaFilter

Scooter safety vs. motorcycles | Ask MetaFilter: "It's pretty hard to resist winding out a bike, no matter 15hp or 150hp, and the more HP, the faster you're going to get to 100KpH. As for the thrill, I know of at least a couple of riders that gave up crotch rockets for 100cc 2-stroke vespas because they provided a similar flowing feeling without the insane power. Within the city, that means you hit maybe 60Kph (instead of 100 ) between lights when you're having fun winding it up."

Croozer Cargo Trailer - Normal Shipping Groung

Croozer Cargo Trailer - Normal Shipping Groung

Sweet cargo trailer.

Fend For Yourself

Fend For Yourself

Need to fender up the recumbent.

Choose Your Own Adventure with Choice of Games' Library of Interactive Fiction | Touch Arcade

Choose Your Own Adventure with Choice of Games' Library of Interactive Fiction | Touch Arcade

Choose Your Own Adventure Stories that can be sold as Ipod Touch apps.

Wired 1.03: Battletech's New Beachheads

Wired 1.03: Battletech's New Beachheads: "The affable dreamer Jordan and the analytical Ross created the 'BattleTech' storyline about a futuristic military zone. In Chicago, after leaving the Academy, the two 19-year-olds founded Environmental Simulation Projects (ESP) to create a BattleTech simulation game system. They tried to raise money, failed repeatedly, and so decided to get rich and build BattleTech themselves. With $150, they launched another company, FASA (for Fredonian Aeronautics & Space Administration, a name meaningful to Marx Brothers' Duck Soup fans). FASA published BattleTech as a board game. By 1987 FASA was the world's second largest role- playing game company."

Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains in Last Economic Expansion — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains in Last Economic Expansion — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.[1]"

Op-Ed Contributor - How to End the Great Recession - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor - How to End the Great Recession - NYTimes.com: "Eventually, of course, the debt bubble burst — and with it, the last coping mechanism. Now we’re left to deal with the underlying problem that we’ve avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income."

Op-Ed Contributor - How to End the Great Recession - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor - How to End the Great Recession - NYTimes.com: "But for years American families kept spending as if their incomes were keeping pace with overall economic growth. And their spending fueled continued growth. How did families manage this trick? First, women streamed into the paid work force. By the late 1990s, more than 60 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home (in 1966, only 24 percent did).

Second, everyone put in more hours. What families didn’t receive in wage increases they made up for in work increases. By the mid-2000s, the typical male worker was putting in roughly 100 hours more each year than two decades before, and the typical female worker about 200 hours more."

Daily fish oils could save lives of 10,000 heart patients | The Vigilant Citizen

Daily fish oils could save lives of 10,000 heart patients | The Vigilant Citizen: "Prof Martin Cowie, of Imperial College London and the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, reviewed the study of almost 7,000 people with chronic heart failure and randomly assigned them to take 1 gram of fish oil capsules per day on top of their usual medication or a dummy pill.

There was a nine per cent reduction in deaths among those taking the fish oil after two years. There was also a cut in hospital admissions for the condition."

Game Design, Psychology, Flow, and Mastery - Blog - MIGS: Brenda�Brathwaite

Game Design, Psychology, Flow, and Mastery - Blog - MIGS: Brenda�Brathwaite: "Brenda devised some simple rules about making the ocean journey. It takes 10 turns to get to the other side, there are some certain number of food-units, each person needs X food units or they die, there was some dice mechanic somewhere in there to make it less deterministic and a bit harder to figure out.

Half-way through, the daughter said, 'Mom, we aren't going to make it.' Brenda said that maybe it would be possible to make if farther if we 'put some of them in the water' (so there's more food for the rest). Brenda reports that her daughter had a look of understanding on her face, the same look she should have had when talking about the Middle Passage earlier. Her daughter cried, and Brenda did not continue the game any further. Brenda cried too."

Game Design, Psychology, Flow, and Mastery - Blog - MIGS: Brenda�Brathwaite

Game Design, Psychology, Flow, and Mastery - Blog - MIGS: Brenda�Brathwaite

Games that teach and horrify.

deviantART muro

deviantART muro

Oh, this is a nifty painting toy.

Philip H. Howard | Soft Drink Industry Structure

Philip H. Howard | Soft Drink Industry Structure

Very nifty infographic

Dietary Advice for Patients with Nasal Polyps

Dietary Advice for Patients with Nasal Polyps: "What got me onto food was reading The Complete Guide to Hayfever by Professor Jonathan Brostoff and Linda Gamlin and Asthma Epidemic by Dr John Mansfield (these titles are available from many public libraries). The most methodical way to identify food intolerance is by using an elimination diet - go on to a restricted diet for a period and then introduce one food at a time. Unfortunately the restricted diet in Hayfever includes soya to which I am highly allergic. Brostoff states that patients with asthma and nasal polyps are often allergic to yeast and dairy products and in my case this was true, but including soya in the restricted diet could cause a worsening of symptoms."

Microsoft Compiled HTML Help - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Microsoft Compiled HTML Help - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "In 2002, Microsoft announced some security risks associated with the .CHM format, as well as some security bulletins and patches.[4] They have since announced their intentions not to develop the .CHM format further[5], and will be moving to a new generation of Windows Help called Microsoft Assistance Markup Language in the Windows Vista operating system."

Amazon.com: DR McKenzie's review of Epson Perfection v600 Photo Color Scanner ...

Amazon.com: DR McKenzie's review of Epson Perfection v600 Photo Color Scanner ...: "After some frustration, I hit on method for using the Epson software effectively:

1) Don't use 'Unsharp mask' when scanning. Use Photoshop's version later.
2) Select all the pictures and apply 'Auto Exposure'. This fixes the colors, but does a lot of high and low clipping.
3) The images will now look much more like real pictures, but need a bit of work."

An Un-'Common' Take On Copyright Law : NPR

An Un-'Common' Take On Copyright Law : NPR

Tea Party Rocks Primaries -- RollingStone.com

Tea Party Rocks Primaries -- RollingStone.com: "In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts “warning” Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in “self-defense.” A sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen and heard on the air this year:"

Vibram Five Fingers Alternatives: Cheap, Practical Barefoot Shoes - Shack Attack

Vibram Five Fingers Alternatives: Cheap, Practical Barefoot Shoes - Shack Attack

Tea Party Rocks Primaries -- RollingStone.com

Tea Party Rocks Primaries -- RollingStone.com: "A lot of Tea Party anger is driven by real local issues -- where I live in central Jersey, for instance, there are a lot of pissed-off white people crowing over a nutty state supreme court case in which a Central American drunk driver got off because cops didn't explain the consequences of refusing a breathalyzer in his native Spanish. But without the constant reinforcement of national 24-hour media, which has taken these isolated cases and presented them as a coast-to-coast massive conspiracy, the rage over stories like this would never reach the levels we're seeing."

share individual posts on facebook - Blogger Help

share individual posts on facebook - Blogger Help: "I;m not sure if this is your problem, but hope it helps.
WRONG WAY TO DO IT: When I publish my blog of the day, I was going to the “View Blog” link at the top of the page next to the tabs Posting, Settings, Layout, and Monetize. In doing this, I was viewing my entire blog with all the postings. So when I shared with Facebook, no individual post title was selected.
RIGHT WAY TO DO IT: When you are done writing, click on publish post. On the page that says “your blog post published successfully” click on the “view post” link underneath the “your blog post published successfully” statement. This will open the blog you just published. From there you can select the “Share” link and select Facebook or whatever other choice you want. I am so happy I figured out what I was doing wrong as it was driving me crazy. Hope this helps someone else."

Could a Peanut Paste Called Plumpy'nut End Malnutrition? - NYTimes.com: "Elsewhere, local producers are simply ignoring the patent. In Haiti, two manufacturers are making products similar to Plumpy’nut independently of Nutriset: one is Partners in Health, the charity co-founded by the prominent global-health activist Paul Farmer. Partners in Health harvests peanuts from a 30-acre farm or buys them from a cooperative of 200 smallholders. It’s planning to build a larger factory, but for now the nuts are taken to the main hospital in Cange, where women sort them in straw baskets, roast them over an outside gas burner, run them through a hand grinder and mix all the ingredients into a paste that is poured into reusable plastic canisters. Peanuts in Haiti and throughout the developing world have a high incidence of aflatoxin, a fungus that can sicken children, especially fragile ones. But Partners in Health says the product, which it calls Nourimanba, is safe."

How do you patent fortified peanut butter?

Phys Ed: Does Stretching Before Running Prevent Injuries? - NYTimes.com

Phys Ed: Does Stretching Before Running Prevent Injuries? - NYTimes.com: "Predictably, since running, as a sport, has a high injury rate, quite a few became injured during the three months. About 16 percent of the group that didn’t stretch were hobbled badly enough to miss training for at least three days (the researchers’ definition of a running injury), while about 16 percent of the group that did stretch were laid up for the same amount of time. The percentages, in other words, were virtually identical. Static stretching had proved to be a wash in terms of protecting against injury. It “neither prevented nor induced injury when compared with not stretching before running,” the study’s authors concluded, raising the obvious corollary, so why in the world do so many of us still stretch?"

Op-Ed Contributor - Google’s Earth - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor - Google’s Earth - NYTimes.com: "We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google."