Getting people on and off an airplane quickly is so complicated that even an astrophysicist couldn’t figure it out

Mysteries of boarding bedevil airlines

BY DAVID KOENIG AP

AUG 1, 2013

DALLAS – Getting people on and off an airplane quickly is so complicated that even an astrophysicist couldn’t figure it out. The astrophysicist, Jason Steffen of Northwestern University, normally contemplates things such as axionlike particles. But after waiting in one boarding line too many, he turned to the mysteries of airline seating. “I thought there had to be a better way,” he says. So, after a series of calculations, he deduced that the best system would be a combination of filling window seats first, then middle and aisle ones, while spacing the boarding passengers two rows apart. There was just one problem — passengers would have to board in precise order. Good luck with that. “Well,” Steffen observes, “I understand why airline people aren’t calling me.” But the search for the perfect boarding process goes on. Read more of this post

Our Hotter, Wetter, More Violent Future

Our Hotter, Wetter, More Violent Future

Earth’s atmosphere seems to have found a way to get back at the human race. For almost three centuries, we humans have been filling the air with carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. Now, it turns out, the climate change these emissions have wrought is turning people against one another. So says a review, published today, of 60 studies on how climate change helps spark conflict throughout the world. The researchers found a surprisingly close link between climate change and civil wars, riots, invasions and even personal violence such as murder, assault and rape. Rising temperatures are especially provocative. A shift toward greater warmth of one standard deviation caused personal violence to increase by 2.5 percent and intergroup conflict by 24 percent. (One standard deviation varies from place to place; in an African country, for example, it could amount to a warming of 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit for a year.) Read more of this post

N.Y. Resort Owners Charged With $96 Million Ponzi Fraud

N.Y. Resort Owners Charged With $96 Million Ponzi Fraud

A money manager and a real estate developer already facing a regulator’s fraud lawsuit were charged with running a $96 million Ponzi scheme and diverting the proceeds to their New York beachfront resort. Brian R. Callahan, 43, and his brother-in-law Adam J. Manson, 41, were charged in a 24-count indictment unsealed today in federal court in Central Islip, New York. They pleaded not guilty and were released on bond. The men are accused of telling investors that their money was going into hedge funds and other investment vehicles while actually much of it was going to the unprofitable 117-unit Panoramic View Resort & Residences in Montauk. Read more of this post

Nicotine-addicted turtle smokes half a pack of cigarettes a day

Nicotine-addicted turtle smokes half a pack of cigarettes a day

Thursday, August 1, 2013 – 16:39

AsiaOne

Several Chinese news programmes ran reports of a turtle in Changchun who smokes ten cigarettes a day. The reptile picked up the dirty habit when its owner flipped the animal to remove a thorn from the animal’s underbelly. To prevent the turtle from snapping his jaws, the man – who is a chef – put his cigarette in the turtle’s mouth. From then on it was hooked. The turtle makes chirping noises when it wants smokes or walks over to its owner when he’s puffing away. The owner said he’s trying to get his pet to quit, not due to concern for the turtle’s health but because he’s shelling out too much on tobacco.

Education: You can’t improve by sticking with what works

Education: You can’t improve by sticking with what works

In a book, What’s the Use of Lectures?, Mr Donald Bligh notes that lectures have been compared to reading and independent study, projects, discussion and audio and video learning. None of the comparators have been shown to be more effective in transmitting information.

5 HOURS 34 MIN AGO

In a book, What’s the Use of Lectures?, Mr Donald Bligh notes that lectures have been compared to reading and independent study, projects, discussion and audio and video learning. None of the comparators have been shown to be more effective in transmitting information. In other words, reading and independent study are just as good as listening to a lecture. Video delivery of content is just as good as a live lecture. Numerous studies have not shown that lectures are better than any of the other forms of education, but the converse is also the case. Read more of this post

Can something be so uncool that it’s actually cool? ‘Uncool’ Cool Japan Video Goes Viral

August 2, 2013, 8:29 AM

‘Uncool’ Cool Japan Video Goes Viral

By Joelle Metcalfe

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has never been known as a particularly hip place — even though it’s in charge of the government’s “Cool Japan” push to promote trendy industries like anime, fashion, and Japanese cuisine overseas. But a home-made Cool Japan video shot by two ministry officials and uploaded to YouTube last month has attracted so much criticism that it’s gone viral, prompting Japan’s online community to ask: Can something be so uncool that it’s actually cool? Read more of this post

Buddhism v Islam in Asia: Fears of a new religious strife; Fuelled by a dangerous brew of faith, ethnicity and politics, a tit-for-tat conflict is escalating between two of Asia’s biggest religions

Buddhism v Islam in Asia: Fears of a new religious strife; Fuelled by a dangerous brew of faith, ethnicity and politics, a tit-for-tat conflict is escalating between two of Asia’s biggest religions

Jul 27th 2013 | BANGKOK, COLOMBO, JAKARTA AND SITTWE |From the print edition

Wirathu, Buddhism’s new face

THE total segregation of Buddhist Arakanese from Muslim Rohingyas is now a fact of life in the western Myanmar port-city of Sittwe. Until June last year both communities lived side by side in the capital of Rakhine state, but following several rounds of frenzied violence, the Buddhist majority emptied the city of its Muslim population. The Rohingya victims now scrape by in squalid refugee camps beyond the city boundaries. The best that most of them can hope for is to escape on an overloaded fishing boat to Malaysia. Many of them die trying. Read more of this post

The unkindness of strangers: A soul-searching debate rages about apathy towards those in need

The unkindness of strangers: A soul-searching debate rages about apathy towards those in need

Jul 27th 2013 | SHANGHAI |From the print edition

EIGHTY years ago Lu Xun, now enshrined as the father of modern Chinese literature, observed that when others needed help his countrymen seemed to be stricken by apathy. “In China,” he wrote, “especially in the cities, if someone collapses from sudden illness, or if someone is hit by a car, lots of people will gather around, some will even take delight, but very few will be willing to extend a helping hand.” Read more of this post

Julie Taymor and other creative minds share how they start their incredibly unique works

Julie Taymor and other creative minds share how they start their incredibly unique works

Posted by: Kate Torgovnick
July 31, 2013 at 1:32 pm EDT

Julie Taymor, the director behind Frida, Across the Universe and the Broadway reimagining of The Lion King, creates productions that tickle the senses. Filled with saturated colors, offbeat imagery, stacatto movement and big sound — each of her productions shares her unique style, yet manages to be completely distinct. In today’s talk, Taymor shares with raw honesty the creative struggle that goes into each of her works, including the super-sized Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Given just before Taymor split from the production over creative direction, she reveals what she was hoping to achieve with the play — a “comic book coming alive” in three dimensions all around the audience. But perhaps even more interestingly for any creative person, Taymordescribes in this talk how she begins each project. “I start with the notion of the ideograph,” she explains. “An ideograph is a Japanese brush painting — three strokes and you get the whole bamboo forest,” she says. “I go to the concept of The Lion King and say, ‘What is the essence of it? What is the abstraction? If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be?’ The circle. It’s so obvious.” For The Tempest, her big screen adaptation began with the image of a sandcastle, the thing we build that always fades. So much is made in the creative world of “finding your voice.” But just as hard is figuring out your process — how you work, and the way you like to begin a project. Below, read illuminating quotes from some filmmakers, writers, artists, musicians and designers who, like Taymor, have given insight into the way that they like to work. Read more of this post

Berthold Beitz, who has died at the age of 99, was one of Germany’s most influential industrialists for nearly three decades after the second world war.

July 31, 2013 8:19 pm

Influential industrialist personified Germany’s postwar recovery

By Chris Bryant and Peter Norman

Berthold Beitz, who has died at the age of 99, was one of Germany’s most influential industrialists for nearly three decades after the second world war. He was prominent again late in life, when in 1997 and 1998 he helped initiate and guide negotiations on the merger of the Essen-based Krupp industrial group with its larger rival, Thyssen, to form Germany’s largest heavy engineering concern. Beitz was instrumental in rebuilding the Krupp industrial group from the ruins of war. He was later to survive serious financial difficulties at Krupp that were partly of his own making. He also played a key role in reopening trade and political links between the young west German republic and its deeply suspicious communist neighbours to the east.

Read more of this post

Mandela’s lessons in how to negotiate; You don’t need to be friends with the other side but you do need to keep talking

July 31, 2013 3:22 pm

Mandela’s lessons in how to negotiate

By Michael Skapinker

You don’t need to be friends with the other side but you do need to keep talking

Assessments of Nelson Mandela’s achievements rightly focus on his talent for the conciliatory gesture and South Africa’s relative post-apartheid peace and institutional stability. (If you contest the last two, compare the country with Syria,Egypt or even Russia.) Less often discussed are the long negotiations that produced a political settlement. They are worth recalling as Israelis and Palestinians return to tentative talks. And, although similarities between politics and business should not be overdone, anyone involved in negotiations, whether between unions and management, or over a corporate merger, or even an office desk reshuffle, should consider the lessons ofSouth Africa’s transition. What are they?  Read more of this post

Tocqueville’s Francois Sicart: Chinese entrepreneurs asked why, when we hold large cash balances and effect few transactions, they should still pay us. I answered that periods like this are when we work the hardest to uncover the next winning idea.

What is the Contrary of Tepid? Investing in a Market that Lacks Conviction

François Sicart

The problem with the contrarian approach to investing is that it works best when investor sentiment reaches extreme levels, such as panic or euphoria.  It is not as useful when the majority of investors are somewhat worried or complacent, as they are today. This is why, to fine-tune our discipline, we try to use both a contrarian and a value approach, a combination that we have creatively labeled “contrarian value.”  Most of the time the two approaches should go pretty well hand-in hand:  The nature of a market is that when investors become excessively pessimistic, the price of assets like stocks should become excessively cheap.  When investors become excessively optimistic, asset prices should become excessively expensive.  The problem lies in defining “excessively.” Read more of this post

Got a New Strategy? Don’t Forget the Execution Part

Got a New Strategy? Don’t Forget the Execution Part

Published: July 31, 2013 in Knowledge@Wharton

When it comes to executing strategy, the old saying “the devil is in the details” holds true for many companies, according to Wharton emeritus management professor Lawrence G. Hrebiniak. While executives may readily participate in the development of new strategies, execution tends to get short shrift, because it is often viewed as a lower-level task or concern, he notes. In the following interview, Hrebiniak — who just published the second edition of his book, Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change — explains why it’s critical for firms to create a “culture of execution” in order to succeed. Read more of this post

Seven dirty, gritty, real startup lessons that cost me $2 million

Seven dirty, gritty, real startup lessons that cost me $2 million

BY PABLO FUENTES 
ON JULY 31, 2013

As CEO and founder of a company that makes an app that helps people apply to jobs from their mobile phones, I am happy to report that we’ve sucked a lot since launching in 2009. We’ve pivoted four times, a fact the press won’t let me forget. I’ll spare you the details, but it involved multiple layoffs, a founder split, brief homelessness, extended brokenness, multiple bridge rounds, a broken engagement, and other personal and professional obstacles. Along the way, we iterated our way to product-market fit, have solid growth in both users and engagement, and recently raised more funding. But getting here has been brutal. Read more of this post

How powerful were caught by own cover-up

How powerful were caught by own cover-up

PUBLISHED: 16 HOURS 30 MINUTES AGO | UPDATE: 2 HOURS 14 MINUTES AGO

Businessman and BRW Rich List member Travers Duncan of White Energy is one of five men who ICAC has found lied and misled to cover up former NSW Labor minister Eddie’s Obeid’s actions. All have been referred to the NSW prosecutor. Photo: Nic Walker

NEIL CHENOWETH

Independent Commission Against Corruption commissioner David Ipp QC has handed down the most important corruption report in nearly three decades. Some of the richest men in the country face possible criminal charges for a cover-up. Ipp found they lied and misled in order to hide the corrupt involvement of Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid in a coal deal, to protect their own payout of more than $500 million. Read more of this post

A team of Chinese scientists have discovered that urine can be used to grow new teeth

Extracting the urine: Chinese scientists find new way to grow teeth

Staff Reporter

2013-07-31

A team of Chinese scientists have discovered that urine can be used to grow new teeth. The results published in the Cell Regeneration Journal revealed that urine may be used as a source of stem cells that could in turn be grown into tiny tooth-like tissue. The scientists at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health hope that the technique could be developed into a way of replacing lost teeth. The research team said they used urine as a starting point and harvested cells that are normally passed from the body before coaxing the collected cells into stem cells. A mix of these stem cells and other cells from a mouse was then implanted into test animals and after three weeks the bundle of cells began resembling a tooth. Read more of this post

People like Facebook because it’s like gambling; “It’s Not About Winning, It’s About Getting Into the Zone. A sense of monetary value, time, space, even a sense of self is annihilated in the extreme form of this zone that you enter.”

People like Facebook because it’s like gambling

By Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic 10 hours ago

“People love Facebook. They really love it,” Biz Stone wrote earlier this month. “My mother-in-law looks hypnotized when she decides to put in some Facebook time.” She is not the only one. ComScore estimates Facebook eats up 11 percent of all the time spent online in the United States. Its users have been known to spend an average of 400 minutes a month on the site. I know the hypnosis, as I’m sure you do, too. You start clicking through photos of your friends of friends and next thing you know an hour has gone by. It’s oddly soothing, but unsatisfying. Once the spell is broken, I feel like I’ve just wasted a bunch of time. But while it’s happening, I’m caught inside the machine, a human animated GIF: I. Just. Cannot. Stop. Or maybe it’ll come on when I’m scrolling through tweets at night before bed. I’m not even clicking the links or responding to people. I’m just scrolling down, or worse, pulling down with my thumb, reloading, reloading. Read more of this post

A Dog’s Facial Expression Shows Its Mood

A Dog’s Facial Expression Shows Its Mood

Dogs use specific facial expressions to show how happy they are to see their owners, scientists have found.

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

3:39PM BST 30 Jul 2013

While most dog owners will recognise their pet’s wagging tail as a sign of joy, they may also want to pay more attention to their animal’s face the next time they walk in through the front door. Animal behaviour experts have found the animals’ emotions are betrayed by specific facial movements that can reveal whether your dog really is pleased to see you. Using high-speed cameras, the researchers tracked the changes in the faces of dogs in the moments they were reunited with their owners or when meeting a stranger for the first time. They found that the dogs tended to move their left eyebrow upwards around half a second after seeing their owner. Read more of this post

This One Tweet Reveals What’s Wrong With American Business Culture And The Economy

This One Tweet Reveals What’s Wrong With American Business Culture And The Economy

HENRY BLODGET JUL. 31, 2013, 12:18 PM 23,960 175

If you watch TV, you’ll be led to believe that the problem with the U.S. economy is that one political team or the other is ruining the country. A sharp drop in government spending this year is, in fact, temporarily hurting economic growth, but that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that American corporations, which are richer and more profitable than they have ever been in history, have become so obsessed with “maximizing short-term profits” that they are no longer investing in their future, their people, and the country.

This short-term corporate greed can be seen in many aspects of corporate behavior, from scrimping on investment to obsessing about quarterly earnings to fretting about daily fluctuations in stock prices. But it is most visible in the general cultural attitude toward average employees. Employees are human beings. They are people who devote their days to creating value for two other groups of people: customers and shareholders.  And, in return, at least in theory, they are people who share in the rewards of the value created by their team. In theory. In practice, American business culture has become so obsessed with maximizing short-term profits that employees aren’t regarded as people who are members of a team.  Rather, they are regarded as “costs.” Read more of this post

Steve Sinofsky, Microsoft’s former Windows chief, was one of the people who warned Bill Gates in the 1990s about the potential impact of the internet on Microsoft’s software-based business

Microsoft Is Paying Steven Sinofsky $10 Million Not To Work For Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Or Google

CHARLES ARTHUR, THE GUARDIAN JUL. 31, 2013, 7:57 AM 3,642 5

Steve Sinofsky, Microsoft’s former Windows chief who was dramatically ousted last November, is banned from joining former rivals including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, database giant Oracle, storage company EMC or virtualisation company VMWare before 2014, new documents reveal. Sinofsky is in line for a payoff that will earn him more than $10m (£6.6m) according to calculations by the Guardian, covering 418,000 share options that were due to vest through to mid-2016. The agreement also bans him from trying to persuade a list of companies including IBM, Dell, Intel and Nokia from ceasing to be Microsoft customers. Read more of this post

Mother of Song Dynasty patriot General Yue Fei (岳飞): “Loyalty is not to one single emperor but to an ideology.” 为什么不能把这个忠字扩大一点？忠于的不在再是一个皇帝，而是仁义之念，仁义之事，仁义之功，仁义之战。为仁义而忠，为仁义而弘道，甚至为仁义而杀身。

岳飞母亲：“你有没有想过，娘为什么会提这“尽——忠——报——国”四个字?

你不在的时候，娘琢磨着，‘忠’、‘国’这两个字，真是越想越觉得有意思，有学问。

一般来说，这个忠字是忠于君父，那娘在想，为什么不能把这个字扩大一点？

忠于的不在再是一个皇帝，而是仁义之念，仁义之事，仁义之功，仁义之战。为仁义而忠，为仁义而弘道，甚至为仁义而杀身。

这报国的国字，那不单单是指大宋而言，指的是四海之内皆兄弟之国，指的是人与人之间能和平相处之国。

朝廷以仁义为政，三军以仁义为师的泱泱大国。

你的忠，你的国，也许在眼前，也许在未来，

娘只盼着时机到了，你能把握你的忠，报效你的国。

把这股劲儿，这股气传给你的儿女，传给你的兄弟。”

Your Company Is Only as Good as Your Writing

Your Company Is Only as Good as Your Writing

by Kyle Wiens  |   8:00 AM July 30, 2013

Good writing: Businesses claim to practice it, support it, and value it. But more often than not, their money isn’t where their mouth is. Poor grammar and jargon-riddled writing are rampant. We’re great at inventing terms — the instruction manual for my toaster refers to the lever that pops up the toast as the ‘Extra-Lift Carriage Control Lever’ — but poor at communicating what we actually mean. We could learn a thing or two about communication from our forefathers. One of the most effective speeches of all time, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, was only 701 words. Of those, 505 were words of one syllable and 122 had two syllables. Great leaders consider communication a core competence, so why don’t more businesses? Manufacturers spend millions on safety training to get people to wear hard hats, but spend very little to make sure their safety critical work instructions are written clearly. That’s not good enough. Effective writing must be a company-wide endeavor. Read more of this post