amazing technicolor dream machine

“[…] What the image appears to suggest at face value is that brain activity is increased after a short bout of exercise (a 20-minute walk). Sounds reasonable, right? We know that exercise has various effects on brain function, and exercise in general is definitely a good thing, now that the Western world is suffering from massive rates of obesity, diabetes, etc. I really don’t have a problem with the message here, more in the way that it’s presented.
     The brain images are clearly from an EEG, but beyond that, there’s very little information in the images about what it actually represents. […]
     People who do this kind of work are very clued-in to these kinds of issues, and would always look for a colour-scale on these kinds of images in research papers. Clearly though the general public aren’t that conversant with statistical issues in brain imaging, because why would they be? […]
     As something of an aside, is an increase in brain activity necessarily a positive thing? Oxidative stress can potentially occur as the result of an increase in brain metabolism, and oxidative stress has been implicated as a potential causal factor in a huge variety of problems, from cancer to Alzheimer’s. One could even argue that lower brain activity is better because it indicates a more efficient use of cognitive resources; performing the same task, with less activity, equals greater efficiency. Although using the concept of ‘efficiency’ in this way is currently fairly controversial.”
— NeuroBollocks
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the last shall be first

Photo: Widnes, England, circa 1880. From: libertygibbert

I have often thought that the traditional pay scale should be turned on it’s head. Pay the people at the bottom the big bucks, then let the pay rate fall off according to some sort of  formula the farther “up” the organizational ladder you go. The best people would would be tasked with the most productive, "heftable" work on the front lines. The less talented would fill the menial rolls of manager, data collector, chart producer, meeting organizer, smiler, glad-hander… all the way up (down) to the person who plays a lot of golf, makes public service announcements, leans on a glossy chrome shovel for a second or two… cuts ribbons, gets a tan from photo flash… the figurehead.
     The model we have now comes out of the Industrial Revolution. The aristocracy (with the help of newfangled steam power and cheap fossil fuel) decided to transform cottage industries that had worked just fine for thousands of years into feudal slave camps (see William Blake’s “Dark Satanic Mills). The management model came out of a military or prison hierarchy, a structure whose function was based on control, rather than results.
     It transformed how children learned from adults, too—but that's a story for another day.

“The Container Store pays its 6,000 employees an average of $48,000 a year, according to CEO Kip Tindell’s new book Uncontainable.
     As he told Business Insider, 'That’s a lot of money for a retail sales clerk.' In fact, median pay for retail sales workers is just $21,410 a year. The company also gives 'big' raises each year, he said, from 0 percent for low performers to as much as 8 percent. The company still performs well while paying more than double what’s typical for the industry. It has annual sales of nearly $800 million. And Tindell credits at least some of that performance with the higher pay. His theory is 'one equals three,' he told the Wall Street Journal: “one great person can easily do the business productivity of three good people,' which means a company can pay that one high performer '50% to 100% above industry average.'
     And that brings returns back to the company. He told Business Insider that the company gets three times the productivity even while paying two times as much in wages. '[Y]ou save money, the customers win, and all the employees win because they get to work with someone great,' he said. Plus the company has a 10 percent turnover rate, while the rate for the entire industry is about 75 percent, and turnover is very costly. Tindell credits high wages for the low rate, saying, “[P]ay is more important than most people realize, particularly if you’re trying to attract and keep really great people.”
— Bryce Covert, ThinkProgress
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"A definite shift in the traditional career arc is taking place. In addition to careers of advancement there are now increasingly careers of achievement. If a person is happy in what they're doing, they should be able to earn more power/credibility/compensation/etc for continued contributions instead of having to get promoted--often into a job they don't really want to do and may not even be great at.
     We try to reflect that in our compensation. As long as you continue to contribute, voice your opinions, make things happen. You can continue to build a reputation and a career without having to change jobs. That's a really important framework a lot of people in traditional enterprises don't get.
     I'm not sure every employee gets that either. Promotion is recognition. You always hear from older, traditional managers, 'These kids all want to get promoted in six months, they all want to be CEOs in six months.' What's really happening is people say they want to be heard, want to be listened to, want to be recognized, and in a traditional organization the only way for that to happen is to get promoted.
     If you let people build influence without moving up the ladder, they aren't dissatisfied. With many ambitious people the outlet for their ambition is having more influence on the company and being a great contributor and building a followership. Contributing, influencing, leading: those are incredibly fulfilling in a way a job title can never be.”
— Jim Whitehurst in conversation with Jeff Haden, Inc.
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“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” ― Marie Curie

"The Baptism of Christ," 1710, Aert de Gelder (from: Wikimedia)

“[…] At 14.30 on 27 October 1954 in the writing of the newspaper came the call for an engineering student, Alfredo Jacopozzi that held the view, along with others, several discs flying in the sky of Florence. At one stretch between the object and the dome of the cathedral there was another ‘white balloon,’ faster than an airplane, then another ‘disc’ and another still. Six objects left their strange passage of the 'flakes' white like ‘cotton-like.’ Then came the most glaring whose memory is still fresh in the minds of many witnesses who see the phenomenon.
     The substance was quick to disintegrate if held in the hand. Alfrede Jacopozzi, a student, was the only one who managed to pick up a few threads of it and sealed them in a hermetic test tube. Jacopozzi then handed the tube to Professor Giovanni Canneri, a director of the Chemical Analysis Institute under the University of Florence. Professor Danilo Cozzi, a colleague of Prof. Canneri’s, carried out a series of tests of the mysteries find. “It’s a fibrous material, which is highly resistant to tension and torsion. Once subjected to heat action, the material grows dark and evaporates, leaving transparent sediment that melts away. The sediment was found to contain boron, silicon, and magnesium. Hypothetically speaking, the substance may be some kind of ‘boron-silicon glass,’ said Prof. Cozzi.”

—reddit Read more…

“[James] McGaha, who never met a UFO he couldn’t explain, said his first take on the case was that the Italians had actually been startled by a daytime meteor. But then he began to focus on another bizarre phenomenon involving the autumn migration of young web-spinning spiders. […]
     But for those who actually pay attention to inconvenient details, strap on your hip-waders. This is the same guy who dispensed with the meticulously researched 2008 Stephenville UFO incident — reconstructed through federal radar records — as the work of agenda-driven conspiracy freaks cherry-picking skin-paint pingback patterns. Their agenda, for as-yet-unexplained reasons, was apparently to obfuscate a military flare-dropping exercise over rural Texas back in January 08. Never mind that the eyewitnesses were evidently so stupid they couldn’t tell the difference between a solid, aircraft carrier-sized UFO cruising slowly over their town and F-16s with afterburners. Never mind how the radar data confirmed the direction in which these stupid eyewitnesses claimed the UFO was flying. Never mind that the USAF, which refused to release its own radar results and initially denied it had planes in the air that night, was forced to admit these stupid eyewitnesses actually got it right about seeing its F-16s in the sky that evening. Never mind that McGaha never produced any military confirmation of his flare-drop pronouncement. Never mind that McGaha’s single eyewitness to his flare-drop pronouncement is unnamed.”
— Billy Cox, De Void
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bot from god

Photo: a scene from Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R.

“The word robot was introduced to the public by the Czech interwar writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920. The play begins in a factory that uses a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people called robots. The play does not focus in detail on the technology behind the creation of these living creatures, but in their appearance they prefigure modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans.”
— Wikipedia
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“The play [R.U.R] begins in a factory that makes artificial people, called roboti (robots), out of synthetic organic matter. They are not exactly robots by the current definition of the term; these creatures are closer to the modern idea of cyborgs, androids or even clones, as they may be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves. They seem happy to work for humans at first, but that changes, and a hostile robot rebellion leads to the extinction of the human race.
     Čapek later took a different approach to the same theme in War with the Newts, in which non-humans become a servant class in human society. R.U.R is dark but not without hope, and was successful in its day in both Europe and the United States.”
— Wikipedia
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“There's a lot of bots on twitter. Many of them are spambots that we all just try to ignore. Some of them are funny in an unobtrusive way, like @Horse_ebooks which tweets odd, not entirely incoherent blurbs. Some of them are funny in a somewhat more aggressive way, as in the case of @DBZNappa which finds tweets with the phrase “over 9000” and replies “WHAT?! OVER NINE THOUSAND?!” This uninvited interjection is, depending on whether the recipient grew up watching DBZ, either a funny reminder of childhood, or a flustering narrow pop culture reference.
     But some bots are driven by somewhat more trolly motives. A prime example is @StealthMountain, which searches for people using the phrase “sneak peak” and replies with “I think you mean 'sneak peek'". Effectively, a coder somehwere has used twitter to greatly leverage his ability to be a grammar Nazi. But worse, it appears that the bot exists just to rile people. While most people seem to take this correction in stride, @StealthMountain's favorites list (which is linked from his bio line) is populated with some of the recipients' more colorful reactions. You too, dear reader, can laugh at those victims, and their absurd, futile anger towards the machine.”
— import me.tastable._
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peach complex

From: Bloomilicious

“Earlier this year, organizers fanned out across nearly every one of Georgia’s 159 counties and registered nearly 90 thousand people who have never voted in their lives, most of them people of color, many of them under 25 years old. But when the groups checked back in late August, comparing their registration database to the state’s public one, they noticed about 50,000 of the registrations had vanished, nearly all of them belonging to people of color in the Democratic-leaning regions around Atlanta, Savannah and Columbus. […]
     The legal battle comes at a pivotal time for the state of Georgia. The state’s African-American, Latino, Asian and Native American populations have grown extensively, as has their share of the electorate. The growth is dramatic enough that many political analysts predict the state’s political identity could swing from red to blue over the next few years.
     At the same time these changes were taking place, the state enacted measures courts have found to disproportionately impact voters of color. In 2006, Georgia enacted a 'strict' voter ID law. Five years later the state cut the number of days of early voting. In 2012, the Secretary of State purged thousands of voters from the rolls a few months before the presidential election. Just last month, the same Secretary of State lamented before an audience of Republican activists that the registration of more voters of color would mean a win for Democrats.”
— Alice Ollstein, ThinkProgress
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"[...] he can't live without the 'The White Album'"

“A good chef can make a memorable meal from the most modest of ingredients. A good writer can do something of the same sort. "A Fold in the Tent of the Sky" demonstrates Michael Hale is a good writer.
     The ingredients of the story seem improbable at best, and downright silly at worst. He starts with a batch of psychics. He adds a dash of intrigue and a generous portion of questionable motivations. He lets them simmer in an exotic setting. The result is a delectable book that is, for want of a better term, truly novel.
     Hearing a description of the plot for "A Fold in the Tent of the Sky" might be less satisfying than reading the recipe for an exquisite dessert. Suffice it to say that the psychics are hired to be a sort of remote control intelligence agency. During the course of their employment, it becomes apparent that they can observe events happening far away. In space and in time. One of them realizes that manipulation of time can be quite profitable, and goes to great lengths to prevent his colleagues from finding out.
     Hale suggests a way to commit the perfect crime: commit it in the past. If you prevent a rival from being born, you never have to worry about him (or her) causing you trouble later in life. Of course, tampering with the past can have unintended consequences in the present.
     The psychic named Simon doesn't mind that, at least not until one of the manipulations erases all traces of The Beatles. He can live with wiping out his colleagues. But he can't live without ‘The White Album.’”
— L. D. Meagher, CNN
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Paperback Edition: coming in January 2015
ISBN: 9780062385222; ISBN 10: 0062385224
On Sale: 01/20/2015
William Morrow - Harper Collins

“Confidence is ignorance. If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know.” ― Eoin Colfer

Source images: photosinbox; Wikimedia Commons
(Portrait of Ben Franklin by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis)

The fear of Ebola is routed in America's chronic isolationist stance. "If bad stuff ain't hurtin' Americans, it ain't news..." — which is how it played out in the media’s early response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa: not much, not soon enough...

“The warnings began days after the first Ebola case was confirmed in West Africa. As more bodies piled up, the alarms grew louder, clearer and more urgent. March 31: ‘We are facing an epidemic of a magnitude never before seen …’
     Two weeks later: ‘(Our) teams are facing an unprecedented phenomenon …’
     Another month passed. ‘The epidemic is out of control.’ This last warning came in late June, when Ebola had already infected more than 600 people in three of the world’s poorest countries.”
— Jennifer Yang, The Star
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“Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan has criticised the international community for its response to the Ebola crisis, as a [UK] Royal Navy ship prepares to leave for Sierra Leone to help tackle the outbreak. Speaking on BBC Newsnight Mr Annan said he had been 'bitterly disappointed' that developed countries had not moved faster on the issue. 'If the crisis had hit some other region it probably would have been handled very differently,' he said. 'In fact when you look at the evolution of the crisis, the international community really woke up when the disease got to America and Europe. And yet we should have known that in this interconnected world it was only a matter of time.'”
— Western Daily Press
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... but as soon as Ebola landed in Texas, it took centre stage, leapfrogging even the likes of Isis.
    Now look at the other side of the isolationist coin: "If good stuff don't come out of America, it ain't news either." Take the news that Canada has sent 800 samples of their new Ebola vaccine to WHO for human trials, for example — not a peep out of CNN, or any other US news organization, as far as I can tell.
    But this isolationism is about more than geography, even ego; it's a world view that fosters anti-intellectualism and paranoia.

“In the mind of conservative pundit George Will, climate change and Ebola have one very important thing in common: we shouldn’t believe anything the experts are telling us about either of them. […]
     Will’s comments, in other words, were a complete misrepresentation of the researcher [Lisa Brosseau]s’ work.
     But for the anti-science minded, his was a completely logical line of thought to follow. ‘Once you’ve decided that scientists routinely make shit up in order to advance a nefarious bureaucratic progressive agenda,’ notes Jonathan Chait, ‘there’s no end to the number of new conspiracies you’re going to discover.’
     When confronted with the facts by Fox host Chris Wallace — yes, some have speculated about the ability of Ebola to become airborne, but there’s no reason to believe, at this point, that such a thing has happened — Will himself drew the comparison to climate science, the basic facts of which he also believes we should continue to 'debate.'”
— Lindsay Abrams, Salon
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