Assorted

The Biggest of Puzzles Brought Down to Size

Skype, the Web Phone Giant, Brings Cheap Calls to Cellular

Google to Announce Venture Fund

The Choice- College Admissions for Dummies

A bit of a background on the music industry

British-Asian singer-songwriter, Jay Sean.

Freeman Dyson profile

Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics. Dyson has written more than a dozen books, including “Origins of Life” (1999), which synthesizes recent discoveries by biologists and geologists into an evaluation of the double-origin hypothesis, the possibility that life began twice; “Disturbing the Universe” (1979) tries among other things to reconcile science and humanity. “Weapons and Hope” (1984) is his meditation on the meaning and danger of nuclear weapons that won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dyson’s books display such masterly control of complex matters that smart young people read him and want to be scientists; older citizens finish his books and feel smart.

Yet even while probing and sifting, Dyson is always whimsically gazing into the beyond. As a boy he sketched plans for English rocket ships that could explore the stars, and then, in midlife, he helped design an American spacecraft to be powered by exploding atomic bombs — a secret Air Force project known as Orion. Dyson remains an armchair astronaut who speculates with glee about the coming of cheap space travel, when families can leave an overcrowded earth to homestead on asteroids and comets, swooping around the universe via solar sail craft. Dyson is convinced that our current “age of computers” will soon give way to “the age of domesticated biotechnology.” Bio-tech, he writes in his book, “Infinite in All Directions” (1988), “offers us the chance to imitate nature’s speed and flexibility,” and he imagines the furniture and art that people will “grow” for themselves, the pet dinosaurs they will “grow” for their children, along with an idiosyncratic menagerie of genetically engineered cousins of the carbon-eating tree: termites to consume derelict automobiles, a potato capable of flourishing on the dry red surfaces of Mars, a collision-avoiding car.

These ideas attract derision similar to Dyson’s essays on climate change, but he is an undeterred octogenarian futurist. “I don’t think of myself predicting things,” he says. “I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.” Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination’s ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. “You point Freeman at a problem and he’ll solve it,” Goldberger says. “He’s extraordinarily powerful.” Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate. Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

-The Civil Heretic

Weird Art

In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated.

via Boing Boing

Photo of the Day

Photo by Sigit Pamungkas

via cool photography blog from Reuters

Income of an escort in Singapore

If you have youth, glamourous looks and finesse, we want you. Join us in entertaining our world wide clientele. Do not hesitate to contact us immediately. Selected applicants can expect to earn between US$10K to US$15K per month

Our Requirements: Age: 18-23 Height: 5’5" & above.

Not bad, given that 'the average monthly earnings in Singapore in the first quarter of 2008 is $4,316'

An impressive critique of UK Prime Minister

via Stumbling and Mumbling

Juan Cole's advise to Obama

The School of Athens - History podcast of the Day

The School of Athens ;

Despite commissioning the Sistine Chapel, Pope Julius II is better known as a warrior than a scholar. But when he did put down the sword and pick up a book, he would have done so under a magnificent if slightly unexpected fresco. It is called The School of Athens, it was painted by Raphael in 1509 and it sits in a room in the Vatican that housed Julius’ private library.

The School of Athens depicts an imaginary scene in which all the philosophers of antiquity are gathered together. At their centre stand Plato and Aristotle, deep in discussion. Plato is pointing at the sky and Aristotle at the ground.

In that pairing of gestures, Raphael captured something essential about the philosophies of these two men, but he also revealed much about his own time. That such a pagan pair could be found beside a Pope in private tells of the complexity of intellectual life at the time when classical learning was reborn in what we now call the Renaissance.

Nassim Taleb on the History of Medicine

What's Taleb upto now;

History of medicine, anti-academic, anti-knowledge. Medicine: whenever we use knowledge as a driver instead of tinkering, we get in trouble. Examples: Our understanding of biological processes led to a decrease in cures. When just tinkering we did better than with directed research. Directed research gives us a strong bias and blinds us to things we don't know are there. In medicine, most medicines are used to cure something completely different from what the intention was. Side-effects dominate. Try to collect positive black swans. Hubris problem, overestimating our knowledge. Difficult to think rationally about uncertainty and risk. Trust the science part, ask the doctor, but the doctor has no idea about the probabilities. Each person, disease is different. Minimize the harm coming from theories. Empirical doctors were successful until eliminated after the rise of Arabic medicine. Western medicine was rationalistic after the Arabic tradition. Improvements after that came from the barbers, not from the doctors. Thinking has not helped us a lot. Evidence in option trading. People think that quants make option formulas, therefore the market uses them. Bogus. Supply and demand. Did a lot better before the Black and Scholes formula...

Religion and probability. Most people think that religion is about belief, but it is about practice. Greek Orthodox but Arabic-speaking. The way Arabs say is not "I don't know" is "God knows." Allows you to say you don't know, transfers from yourself to another entity. Allows you to be humble. History of medicine: accounts of giving a fortune to the Temple of Apollo: You saved me when my doctors failed me. Doctors gave negative contributions, particularly by bleeding; or more recently, delivered a baby after going to the morgue. Brought in religion. Error we have in believing religion is about belief, but it's about commitment, the system, living with something. We're not yet good with ideas. Can see from this crisis. Great Moderation turned out to be not so great. What does probability have to do with religion? Idea of true/false; degree of belief. May do something against the odds because the consequences or large or even without analyzing it. Probability is not opaque; and even if it were, we wouldn't use it because of the consequences. Pascal's wager: Since God might exist, I might as well be a religious person. Payoffs from being religious are much higher than negative payoffs if God doesn't exist. Had to also assume that God doesn't exist and also not know about gaming the system. Maybe actions are more important than beliefs--in some religious systems the actions count. Greek Orthodox, Easter; Judaism, Maimonides, not every Jewish sage lists belief in God as one of the commandments because there is a debate about whether you can mandate belief. In Arabic, the name for religion, din, is the same as the word for law in Hebrew. To be a law-abiding citizen, keep the rules. Hard to keep the rules if you do not keep the faith. Motivating people without faith. Losing patience about people who are skeptics about religion, and at the same time are not skeptical about economics or VAR. Solving our own problems. Hayek, lot of instinct, contributions part of philosophical thinking.

Nandan Nilekani and Tom Friedman

Book recommendation; Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation

Parenting Advice from Gladwell's Outliers

Parents and Society matter!

Find a Toilet anywhere in the World

SitorSquat;

Sitorsquat.com is a site that is dedicated to telling you where the closest place to relieve yourself is and whether or not that place is worth even sitting or squatting (or standing) at. We all find ourselves needing a public restroom every once in a while, whether it's walking down a city block or driving on a highway with a few whining kids in the backseat. This application is designed to be viewed either on your computer or your mobile device.* It functions worldwide as it is based on Google Maps. The toilets on Sit or Squat are submitted by anyone The site can be personalized for each member based on their needs and preferences. A member is also able to create a list of their favorite toilets as well as share them with their friends. As time goes by and more data is recorded, the site will continue to get more accurate in ratings as well as more options in places to go. We all need to relieve ourselves everyday, so the chances of it being somewhere other than your home are pretty high. So for that reason alone, we bring you sitorsuat.com.

Mindmapping for Teaching

Top 100 sites by Country

Pakistan (includes pornhub and bollywoodhungama)

India (includes Pornhub, Indian Railways, Shaadi,)

Saudi Arabia

Australia

China (includes Craiglist, Blogger.com)

Russia

United States (includes pornhub, Fox News Channel, and NYT)

Nigeria (includes EBay, Alibaba.com, )

Mind is not a blind slate

Babies 'can do' maths

HOT from Singapore

THE controversial legislation which allows reimbursement of living kidney donors was passed in Parliament yesterday after a heated debate.

Even after Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan assured the House that the new law did not seek to legalise organ trading, not all were convinced.

When the final vote on the amendments to the Human Organ Transplant Act (Hota) was taken, four MPs abstained and one said 'no'.

The four were Madam Halimah Yacob (Jurong GRC), Ms Denise Phua (Jalan Besar GRC), opposition Hougang MP Low Thia Khiang and Non-Constituency MP Sylvia Lim.

The dissenter was Mr Christopher de Souza (Holland-Bukit Timah GRC), who objected on the grounds that the Bill lacked details to ensure donations would be 'not-for-profit, transparent and devoid of abuse'.

'While I agree with the principle of reimbursement...the framework in the Bill could be the subject of abuse,' he said.

All in, a dozen MPs spoke passionately on the Bill over the past two days.

They were all for three of the four changes - lifting the age limit on cadaveric donors, allowing recipients to swop donors for a better match, and increasing penalties for organ trading. But most were uncomfortable about allowing reimbursement of living kidney donors. Their main fear was that people would exploit it to induce donors to sell their kidneys, opening the back door to organ trading.

They were also worried about an uneven playing field, with the rich finding it easier than the poor to obtain kidneys.

Questions they posed: Should there be caps on payments? Should foreign donors be excluded from receiving reimbursements? What role does the Government play to safeguard against abuses?

-Kidney payment gets nod

Related;
Legal Kidney Selling in Singapore and the International Economy

Organ Selling in Singapore: The Sad Real Story

Human Organs for Sale, Legally, in … Which Country?

Kidney Exchange

Brother, can you spare a kidney?

Political Islam 101

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Juan Cole
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole Palgrave MacMillan, 282 pages, $26.95

Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press, 308 pages, $25.95

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright, Penguin Press, 464 pages, $26.95

The Man who Produced THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Creative Defense Contractors

Photo of the Day- Timothy Geithner

via Indecision

The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America

Russell Shorto interview.

Related;

Parenting skills of Mankiw

Mankiw's favorite children's books;

Miss Rumphius
By Barbara Cooney

Cactus Hotel
By Brenda Z. Guiberson

Frindle
By Andrew Clements

Kensuke's Kingdom
By Michael Morpurgo

Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key
By Jack Gantos

Cool Blogs and other links

Joshspear

Zoomdoggle

Tasks Every Day

Wants for Sale

Urlesque

Bore Me

One more reason why you should blog

From Seth Godin;

The best measure of a blog is not how many people it reaches, it’s how much it changes what you do. Changes your posture, your writing, your transparency, your humility. What blogging has done for me is made me think. I get to think about how the outside world will understand something I’m trying to do, for example.

Not the time to be thinking of doing a PhD

Andrew Delbanco, the chairman of the American studies program at Columbia University, said that the system producing graduate students was increasingly out of sync with the system hiring them.

“It’s been obvious for some time — witness the unionization movement — that graduate students are caught between the old model of apprentice scholars and the new reality of insecure laborers with uncertain employment prospects,” Mr. Delbanco said. “Among the effects of the financial crisis will clearly be shrinkage both in graduate fellowships and in entry-level academic positions, so the prospects for aspiring Ph.D.’s are getting even bleaker.”

-Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times

The Brothers Karzai

The older brother of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, Mahmoud Karzai has major interests in the country’s only cement factory, its dominant bank, its most ambitious real estate development, its only Toyota distributorship and four coal mines.

He and a business partner run Afghanistan’s national Chamber of Commerce — which has far more clout than its American counterpart — allowing him to broker deals and lure foreign investors. For executives with problems with the Afghan government, he is the man to see. One prominent Afghan critic describes him as a “minister maker” with sway in hiring and firing top officials.

An unabashed advocate for money-making in the country his brother runs, Mr. Karzai attributes his success to having big ambitions and taking on ventures that others saw as too risky. “I’m investing in projects that require real work,” he said in an interview. “I’m in love with the idea that Afghanistan can become a Singapore, a Hong Kong.”

Mr. Karzai, though, clearly has exploited his connections, both in Washington and Kabul, to build his business empire. He has collected millions in American government loans for real estate developments in Kandahar and Kabul, capitalized on a friendship with Jack Kemp, the former Republican congressman, for introductions to American officials and international business executives, and benefited from what his rivals charge were sweetheart deals with the Afghan government.

-Another Karzai Forges Afghan Business Empire

Science Podcast of the Day

THE MEASUREMENT PROBLEM IN PHYSICS;

The most famous fruit in physics is an apple, but the most famous animal in physics is a cat. It belongs to Edwin Schrödinger, a theoretical physicist who in the early 20th century helped to develop the radical theories of Quantum Mechanics. Schrödinger’s cat does not actually exist – it is the subject of a thought experiment – in which the rules of quantum mechanics make it appear both dead and alive at the same time.

The problem of a cat that is both dead and alive illustrates the challenges of quantum physics and at the heart of this apparent absurdity is a thing called the measurement problem.

The measurement problem arises because we don’t really understand how the atoms that constitute our world behave. They are fundamentally mysterious to us, even shocking, and they defy our attempts to measure and make sense of them. Possible solutions range from the existence of multiple realities to the rather more mundane possibility of an error in our mathematics - but a solution, if found, could transform our understanding of reality.

Young Americans and Britons take the lead

in cocaine-use!

Pornography Fact of the Day

subscriptions to online pornography sites are “more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality.”

via Numbers Guy

Here's the Paper;
Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?
Benjamin Edelman

The fifth column shows that subscriptions are more prevalent in regions with higher measures of social capital. Following the Social Capital Index developed in Putnam (2000), I obtain DDB Life Style Survey data from 1991 to 1998 on
consumers in 340 metropolitan areas, and I form a social capital index based on
prevalence of people donating blood, engaging in volunteer activities, or participating in community projects. In a region where 1 percent more people participate in these activities, subscriptions to the adult entertainment service are 0.09 percent more widespread.

A fisherman turned banker, now back to Fishing

Lean and hungry-looking, wearing genuine rather than designer stubble, Alfsson still looks more like a trawler captain than a financier. He went to sea at 16, and, in the off-season, to school to study fishing. He was made captain of an Icelandic fishing trawler at the shockingly young age of 23 and was regarded, I learned from other men, as something of a fishing prodigy—which is to say he had a gift for catching his quota of cod and haddock in the least amount of time. And yet, in January 2005, at 30, he up and quit fishing to join the currency-trading department of Landsbanki. He speculated in the financial markets for nearly two years, until the great bloodbath of October 2008, when he was sacked, along with every other Icelander who called himself a “trader.” His job, he says, was to sell people, mainly his fellow fishermen, on what he took to be a can’t-miss speculation: borrow yen at 3 percent, use them to buy Icelandic kronur, and then invest those kronur at 16 percent. “I think it is easier to take someone in the fishing industry and teach him about currency trading,” he says, “than to take someone from the banking industry and teach them how to fish.”

He then explained why fishing wasn’t as simple as I thought. It’s risky, for a start, especially as practiced by the Icelandic male. “You don’t want to have some sissy boys on your crew,” he says, especially as Icelandic captains are famously manic in their fishing styles. “I had a crew of Russians once,” he says, “and it wasn’t that they were lazy, but the Russians are always at the same pace.” When a storm struck, the Russians would stop fishing, because it was too dangerous. “The Icelanders would fish in all conditions,” says Stefan, “fish until it is impossible to fish. They like to take the risks. If you go overboard, the probabilities are not in your favor. I’m 33, and I already have two friends who have died at sea.”

It took years of training for him to become a captain, and even then it happened only by a stroke of luck. When he was 23 and a first mate, the captain of his fishing boat up and quit. The boat owner went looking for a replacement and found an older fellow, retired, who was something of an Icelandic fishing legend, the wonderfully named Snorri Snorrasson. “I took two trips with this guy,” Stefan says. “I have never in my life slept so little, because I was so eager to learn. I slept two or three hours a night because I was sitting beside him, talking to him. I gave him all the respect in the world—it’s difficult to describe all he taught me. The reach of the trawler. The most efficient angle of the net. How do you act on the sea. If you have a bad day, what do you do? If you’re fishing at this depth, what do you do? If it’s not working, do you move in depth or space? In the end it’s just so much feel. In this time I learned infinitely more than I learned in school. Because how do you learn to fish in school?”

This marvelous training was as fresh in his mind as if he’d received it yesterday, and the thought of it makes his eyes mist.

“You spent seven years learning every little nuance of the fishing trade before you were granted the gift of learning from this great captain?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“And even then you had to sit at the feet of this great master for many months before you felt as if you knew what you were doing?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you think you could become a banker and speculate in financial markets, without a day of training?”

“That’s a very good question,” he says. He thinks for a minute. “For the first time this evening I lack a word.” As I often think I know exactly what I am doing even when I don’t, I find myself oddly sympathetic.

“What, exactly, was your job?” I ask, to let him off the hook, catch and release being the current humane policy in Iceland.

“I started as a … “—now he begins to laugh—“an adviser to companies on currency risk hedging. But given my aggressive nature I went more and more into plain speculative trading.” Many of his clients were other fishermen, and fishing companies, and they, like him, had learned that if you don’t take risks you don’t catch the fish. “The clients were only interested in ‘hedging’ if it meant making money,” he says.

-Wall Street on the Tundra

A unique way to catch Tuna

Catching tuna Maldivian style

Tech Headline for the Day

iFart And Pull My Finger Battle To Stink Up The App Store. Please Keep These Under Control, Apple.

The rapture of the geeks?

Truly said, 'Death makes strange even the most rational of minds';

Using technology, he plans to bring his dead father back to life. Kurzweil reveals this to me near the end of our conversation ... In a soft voice, he explains how the resurrection would work. "We can find some of his DNA around his grave site - that's a lot of information right there," he says. "The AI will send down some nanobots and get some bone or teeth and extract some DNA and put it all together. Then they'll get some information from my brain and anyone else who still remembers him."

When I ask how exactly they'll extract the knowledge from his brain, Kurzweil bristles, as if the answer should be obvious: "Just send nanobots into my brain and reconstruct my recollections and memories." The machines will capture everything: the piggyback ride to the grocery store, the bedtime reading of Tom Swift, the moment he and his father rejoiced when the letter of acceptance from MIT arrived. To provide the nanobots with even more information, Kurzweil is safeguarding the boxes of his dad's mementos, so the artificial intelligence has as much data as possible from which to reconstruct him. Father 2.0 could take many forms, he says, from a virtual-reality avatar to a fully functioning robot ... "If you can bring back life that was valuable in the past, it should be valuable in the future."

New Rules for the Sub-prime Age- Bill Maher

More Game Theory from Middle East

In early summer 1995, a few months before his assassination, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin asked Jordan's King Hussein to approach Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on his behalf and arrange a joint visit by Rabin and Hussein to Baghdad, according to Nigel Ashton, author of "King Hussein: A political Life" (Yale University Press).

Ashton, a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics who is close to the Hashemite royal family, was given rare access to Hussein's private archives. In his Hussein biography, Ashton writes that when handed a secret letter by a Jordanian official, "Saddam did not rule out direct contacts with Rabin," but was reluctant "to work through lower-level intermediaries." No further moves on the Israel-Iraq initiative were recorded before Rabin's murder that November....

Aston calls the Rabin request for Hussein's intervention with Saddam "a bold and remarkable secret initiative." Saddam, a bitter enemy of Israel, had launched some 40 surface-to-surface missiles at it in 1991, partly in retaliation for the 1981 bombing of the Osiraq nuclear reactor.

Rabin reasoned that opening up relations with Iraq would increase pressure on Syrian leader Hafez Assad, Saddam's enemy, to cut a peace deal with Israel. Perhaps even more importantly, Rabin saw Iran, Iraq's arch-rival, as posing a more dangerous threat to Israel, with Iran bent on a nuclear-weapons program and Iraq under an international-sanctions and monitoring regime after the 1991 war.

-British author: Rabin asked Jordan to arrange secret visit with Saddam

Is it religion or culture?

A 14-year-old Israeli girl has got a divorce from her 17-year-old husband, making her what media are describing as the country's youngest divorcee.

The divorce came after a rabbinical court ruled that their wedding met the major requirements of Jewish law.

The two sweethearts had exchanged vows in front of friends, exchanged a ring, and the union had been consummated.

-Israeli girl 'youngest divorcee'

The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World

Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World.

Another former dictator's Art collection

After Ceausescu visited Pyongyang in North Korea, he decided to rebuild his own capital city. The result was to wipe out much of historic Bucharest to make way for grotesque and gigantic building projects that still spoil the city center, and sycophants kept a virtual army of state-approved artists busy painting portraits of Ceausescu and his wife, thousands of them. These ended up in public buildings and in the various homes of the dictator, who loved to receive as birthday gifts pictures of himself showing how much the Romanian people loved him. Ceausescu constructed a whole building to store these portraits.

-Romania Shrugs Off Reminder of Its Past

Economic Gangsters from Paradise

The lavish lifestyle of the former head of the tiny island nation of Maldives;

Gold Plated Toilets


Over 8 million dollars!


Private island retreat with a cricket pitch


The Palace, cost unknown, staff 300

John Kay's ‘long walk’ problems

For years, I have identified what I think of as ‘long walk’ problems - knotty issues that are best tackled if you can get away from it all. I often come back with an answer, or a few paragraphs, composed in my head.

Steven Pinker with Colbert

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Steven Pinker

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Funny Political News

Christian Bale Parody
Joke of the Day

Artist of the Day

Enough About Me. Like My Portrait? ;

Donald Bachardy, the Santa Monica portraitist who is known for his drawings and paintings of celebrities like Jack Nicholson and Bette Davis, said his commissions from celebrities and Hollywood executives have increased in recent years.

In 2006, he said, he was flown to France to paint a pregnant Angelina Jolie. He contends that if a subject — famous or otherwise — is uncomfortable with a portrait, it is probably not really because of modesty, or concern about appearances, but because the subject has not picked the right painter.

“People get it backwards,” said Mr. Bachardy, 74. “They think it is the subject that is important. It is not. It’s the artist. They could get over that very easily if they chose an artist they really admired.”

Advice of the Day- Turkey's jewish business tycoon

ISHAK ALATON, a prominent member of Turkey’s tiny Jewish community, has a secret to living more intensely: He built his house next to a cemetery.

“You remember every day that you’re going to end up there,” he said.

Mr. Alaton is 81 and one of Turkey’s leading businessmen. He started with heating systems in the 1950s and expanded into construction, gyms and resorts. He has built roads in Kazakhstan, airports in Uzbekistan and a hospital in Moscow....

He also got some advice he never forgot from the father of a girlfriend at the time.

“I know you will be successful,” he recalled the man saying. “But don’t let your money muzzle you or stop you from expressing your thoughts.”...

As for worries that the current government is going to bring hard-line Islamic rule to Turkey, Mr. Alaton does not share them.

“We are too open a society for that,” he said. “They are using this to create a new scarecrow. Our history has been full of scarecrows.”

Turkey has been a democracy for years, and, unlike in Russia, which tried to erect the structures of democracy overnight after the Soviet Union’s collapse, cramming democracy down people’s throats in one painful gulp, the adjustment in Turkey has been much more gradual.

“We’ve been able to digest our democratic values,” he said. “You should be very hopeful.”

-A Businessman’s Enterprise: Cajoling Democracy Into Full Flower

Ethics for the Real World from Engineers

Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life
Ronald A. Howard is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering in Stanford University's School of Engineering, and the director of the Department's Decisions and Ethics Center. Clinton D. Korver is the founder and CEO of DecisionStreet, which provides Web-based tools to help consumers make important life decisions.

Using IT to create a post-bureaucratic organization

Bringing Change in Government Organizations: Evolution Towards Post-Bureaucracy with Web-Based IT Projects;

This paper examines the following question: How do government organizations become more “post-bureaucratic” with web-based IT projects? It draws on evolutionary thinking to conceptualize processes of change in government organizations as involving sequences of variation, selection, and retention as well as to identify various sources of change: internal ones (e.g. administrators), as well as external ones (e.g. technological innovations and institutional pressures). The paper relates findings from four in-depth qualitative case studies of web-based IT projects in different government organizations. The interpretation of these findings helps expand the evolutionary conceptualization by suggesting how different sources of change interact in the change process and variously affect different stages of the evolution.

Three quotations from the paper;

One of the things that my boss actually wanted to do is start building a knowledge management database, so that when people get phone calls, regardless of what agency does the phone call, there is a knowledge management database that they can refer to be able to better help point that customer in the right direction. That hasn't happened. Part of it was a funding issue also – those packages are very, very expensive - so we just didn't go there.”

“The fear [of government employees] of doing something in a way less than perfect primarily exists toward the outside world. Generally, the way it works in government is that when government makes a mistake, you can read about it in the papers the following day. This, in my view, is the predominant fear of government employees.”

“We see people wanting to create an online application that basically mimics the paper process […]. Take [for example] … environmental permits…. There may be paper signatures that are required right now, ink signatures, that are not mandated by any statute or regulation, it’s just that for the last hundred years we've done it this way, so they immediately think, ‘Oh my god, I need an electronic signature’. So we go back and ask, ‘Why do you think you need an electronic signature?’ ‘Because the paper is signed.’ ‘Well, where does it tell you that the paper has to be signed?’ And when they go back and they look at their regulations and statutes, they say, ‘You're right, there's nothing here that says that, so we don't need that, we need to authenticate where the paper's coming from, but we don't need a signature.”

Did you Know

Two UN agencies have declared 2009 as;

Year of the Gorilla

International Year of Natural Fibres

Cool link for the Day

Crib Candy

Obamania

Assorted at Neuroanthropology

Obama - Professor President

Obama’s Foursquare Politics, With a Dab of Dijon ;

But while Mr. Obama occasionally slips into the flabby platitudes favored by politicians, enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in “Dreams From My Father,” an elastic, personable voice that is capable of accommodating everything from dense discussions of foreign policy to streetwise reminiscences, incisive comments on constitutional law to New-Agey personal asides. The reader comes away with a feeling that Mr. Obama has not reinvented himself as he has moved from job to job (community organizer in Chicago, editor of The Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, state senator) but has instead internalized all those roles, embracing rather than shrugging off whatever contradictions they might have produced.

Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life.

For Debate

Corseting female sexuality

The whole article is pitched to support that old tired cliché of sexuality that 'women are complicated, men are simple' and it uses the differences in research findings to suggest women are enigmatic, complex, they don't know what they want, or are torn by competing sexual desires.

What do these enigmatic women want?;

Here, we know the score: Diamond arguing women want intimacy, Meana that they want a real man to take them, and Chivers that women want it all, even if they don’t realize it and contradict themselves.

The irony is that, with such a tangle, the conclusion is foreordained: women will seem enigmatic, inconsistent, and irremediably opaque. As I’ll suggest in this, I think that the conclusion is built into the way the question is being asked. If a similar question were asked about nearly any group, in nearly any domain of complex human behaviour, and then a simple single answer were demanded, the questioner would face nearly identical frustration.