How Not To Worry: A 1934 Guide to Mastering Life; Many of life’s hard situations cannot be explained. They can only be endured, mastered, ad gradually forgotten

March 24, 2013 Leave a comment

How Not To Worry: A 1934 Guide to Mastering Life

“We must gain victory, not by assaulting the walls, but by accepting them.”

As far as vintage finds go, they hardly get more fortuitous than You Can Master Life (public library) – a marvelous 1934 compendium of sort-of-philosophical, sort-of-self-helpy, at times charmingly dated, other times refreshingly timeless advice on cultivating “the power to think, to create, to influence and be influenced by others, and to love,” in the spirit of the 1949 gem How To Avoid Work. Though written by a Christian pastor named James Gordon Gilkey and thus a little too God-heavy for these corners of the internet, the slim volume shares a good amount in common with Alain de Botton’s modern-day advocacy of the secular sermon.

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Big Data Is Opening Doors, but Maybe Too Many

March 24, 2013 Leave a comment

March 23, 2013

Big Data Is Opening Doors, but Maybe Too Many

By STEVE LOHR

IN the 1960s, mainframe computers posed a significant technological challenge to common notions of privacy. That’s when the federal government started putting tax returns into those giant machines, and consumer credit bureaus began building databases containing the personal financial information of millions of Americans. Many people feared that the new computerized databanks would be put in the service of an intrusive corporate or government Big Brother.

“It really freaked people out,” says Daniel J. Weitzner, a former senior Internet policy official in the Obama administration. “The people who cared about privacy were every bit as worried as we are now.”

Along with fueling privacy concerns, of course, the mainframes helped prompt the growth and innovation that we have come to associate with the computer age. Today, many experts predict that the next wave will be driven by technologies that fly under the banner of Big Data — data including Web pages, browsing habits, sensor signals, smartphone location trails and genomic information, combined with clever software to make sense of it all. Read more of this post

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World’s Best CEOs: Morris Chang, Founder/Chairman of TSMC (Market Cap $85 Billion) Rides the Train

March 24, 2013 Leave a comment

Rich Taiwanese Businessman Morris Chang Rides the Train

by Stuart Dingle on Thursday, October 11, 2012

From Yahoo Taiwan:

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Morris Chang riding the train to work? Its true. Photo spreading on internet like wildfire

TSMC chairman Morris Chang also rides the train to work? Today a photo rapidly spread around the internet, showing TSMC Chairman Morris Chang surprisingly riding the train with the general public, the big boss gave up his luxury car to ride on the general public transit system, leading to widespread discussion among netizens, who rapidly spread the news. Because a ‘big boss riding the train’ is truly too difficult to imagine, when this photo was exposed on Facebook, it was first suspected to have been photoshopped, or simply showed someone who ‘looks a lot like Morris Chang’ riding the train. However, some attentive netizens compared the photos with others, and discovered that this March, ‘Commonwealth magazine’s‘ 492nd edition featured Morris Chang on the cover page，and both the tie worn by Morris Chang on the cover，and the tie worn by Morris Chang in the photo, had an identical style and colour, meaning that the man in the photo is unmistakeably Morris Chang.

It’s understood that when Morris Chang attended this year’s TSMC shareholder meeting, he was worried about being delayed by traffic, so the punctual Morris Chang took the train before getting on the High Speed Rail to Taipei, not only reducing carbon emissions but also ensuring he won’t be delayed. The female student pictured in the photo sitting next to Morris Chang was immersed in her study on the train, with some netizens jokingly saying that if this student would just raise her head and talk to Morris Chang for ten minutes, it would be worth 10 years of study.

Filed under Innovation, Investing Process, Life

World’s Best CEOs; Profiles of the World’s Best CEOs — Many Paths to Greatness

March 24, 2013 Leave a comment

SATURDAY, MARCH 23, 2013

Profiles of the World’s Best CEOs — Many Paths to Greatness

Profiles of our 30 superstars at Google, BlackRock, BMW — and more.

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ON-BA405_CEOs03_G_20130323013605 Read more of this post

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This Young Woman Escaped From North Korea And Gave An Incredible TED Talk About It; “I saw something terrible that I can’t erase from my memory. A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother’s face. But nobody helped them, because they were so focused on taking care of themselves and their families.”

March 24, 2013 Leave a comment

This Young Woman Escaped From North Korea And Gave An Incredible TED Talk About It

Paul Szoldra | Mar. 22, 2013, 4:04 PM | 4,857 | 11

Growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee believed her life — witnessing public executions, studying the history of Kim Il-Sung with vigor — was totally normal. Lee had no idea that people were suffering, until one day when she walked past a train station.

From TED:

I saw something terrible that I can’t erase from my memory. A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother’s face. But nobody helped them, because they were so focused on taking care of themselves and their families. At the age of 14, she was able to escape and became a refugee in China. But her life there was not easy. She had no family, and at one point, she was picked up for a harsh interrogation by Chinese police — and if it was found she was North Korean, she would’ve been sent back. She gave a TED Talk about her incredible experience, which was published online March 20.

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What Extremely Successful People Were Doing At Age 25; Warren Buffett was working as an investment salesman in Omaha.

March 24, 2013 Leave a comment

What Extremely Successful People Were Doing At Age 25

Vivian Giang and Max Nisen | Mar. 22, 2013, 1:33 PM | 586,853 | 27

Some people know what they want to do from an early age and focus on it relentlessly.

Others reinvent themselves, changing careers and industries until they find something that works.

Billionaire Mark Cuban struggled when he first started, writing in “How To Win At The Sport Of Business“ that “when I got to Dallas, I was struggling — sleeping on the floor with six guys in a three-bedroom apartment.”

As a reminder that the path to success is not always linear, we’ve highlighted what Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, and 17 other fascinating and successful people were doing at age 25.

Warren Buffett was working as an investment salesman in Omaha.

In his early 20s, Buffett worked as an investment salesman for Buffett-Falk & Co. in Omaha before moving to New York to be a securities analyst at age 26. During that year, he started Buffett Partnership, Ltd., an investment partnership in Omaha.

New York just wasn’t for him, Buffett told NBC. “In some places it’s easy to lose perspective. But I think it’s very easy to keep perspective in a place like Omaha.” Read more of this post

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Experts warn of untreatable TB risk; “With ease of international travel and increased rates of MDR tuberculosis… the threat and range of the spread of untreatable tuberculosis is very real,”

March 24, 2013 Leave a comment

Experts warn of untreatable TB risk
Posted: 24 March 2013 0827 hrs

PARIS: Disease experts called on Sunday for decisive leadership and more research funding to fend off the “very real” risk of an untreatable strain of tuberculosis (TB) emerging as more people develop resistance to existing drugs.

In a series of papers in the Lancet medical journal to mark World TB Day on Sunday, they warned that health systems risked being overwhelmed by increasing numbers of drug-resistant TB patients.

Already, more than 30 percent of newly-diagnosed patients in parts of eastern Europe and central Asia have multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB, a form of the disease which does not respond to the two most potent drugs — isoniazid and rifampin.

There were believed to be about 630,000 MDR cases out of some 12 million TB cases in 2011.

Extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB, thus far reported in 84 countries, does not respond to an even wider range of drugs.

“The widespread emergence of XDR tuberculosis could lead to virtually untreatable tuberculosis,” wrote the authors of one study, led by Alimuddin Zumla, director of the Centre for Infectious Diseases and International Health at University College London Medical School.

“With ease of international travel and increased rates of MDR tuberculosis… the threat and range of the spread of untreatable tuberculosis is very real,” they said. Read more of this post

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