The lost art of finance: ‘Back in the days when “money” meant sacks of gold coins, artists had something tangible to paint’; the power of art is that it can make us see the world afresh – there can be beauty in the unseen details of daily life

March 14, 2014 1:22 pm

The lost art of finance

By Gillian Tett

‘Back in the days when “money” meant sacks of gold coins, artists had something tangible to paint’

Last month I received a striking request from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was not an invitation to a trendy exhibition opening or an appeal for funds. Instead, MoMA curators were seeking blog posts from writers on pieces of art in its collection linked to exploitation and violence. Read more of this post

All roads lead back to Cézanne: From unmissable watercolours to the turbulence of Van Gogh, the Pearlman Collection – now in Europe for the first time – offers a fresh vision of modern painting

March 14, 2014 6:32 pm

All roads lead back to Cézanne

By Jackie Wullschlager

One wintry wartime day in 1945, businessman Henry Pearlman was walking down New York’s Park Avenue when a painting by Chaim Soutine hanging in the window at Parke-Bernet auction house caught his eye. He bid $825 and took home “View of Céret”. Read more of this post

A New Way to Learn Chinese: Entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh aims to bridge the gap between East and West by teaching Westerners how to read Chinese

A New Way to Learn Chinese

Entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh aims to bridge the gap between East and West by teaching Westerners how to read Chinese

ALEXANDRA WOLFE

March 14, 2014 8:37 p.m. ET

Entrepreneur and author ShaoLan Hsueh aims to teach English speakers how to start reading Chinese in under 10 minutes. See an excerpt for the video that was produced for her Kickstarter campaign. Read more of this post

The Future of Brain Implants: How soon can we expect to see brain implants for perfect memory, enhanced vision, hypernormal focus or an expert golf swing?

The Future of Brain Implants

How soon can we expect to see brain implants for perfect memory, enhanced vision, hypernormal focus or an expert golf swing?

GARY MARCUS and CHRISTOF KOCH

March 14, 2014 7:30 p.m. ET

Brain implants today are where laser eye surgery was several decades ago, fraught with risk, applicable only to a narrowly defined set of patients – but a sign of things to come. NYU Professor of Psychology Gary Marcus discusses on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty. Read more of this post

Big money in kuay teow

Updated: Saturday March 15, 2014 MYT 8:31:40 AM

Big money in kuay teow

The kuay teow production lines at Ipoh Kueh Teow and Noodles.

IN January 2014, the selling price of 100g of kuay teow in a leading hypermarket in Kelana Jaya was recorded at RM1.45. Read more of this post

Why Nothing Is Truly Alive: Life is a concept, not a reality, says Ferris Jabr, who suggests distinguishing between mental models and pure concepts

Why Nothing Is Truly Alive

Life is a concept, not a reality, says Ferris Jabr, who explains why nothing is truly alive and suggests distinguishing between mental models and pure concepts

By FERRIS JABR

MARCH 12, 2014

On a windy day in Ypenburg, the Netherlands, you can sometimes see sculptures the size of buses scuttling across a sandy hill. Made mostly from intricately conjoined plastic tubes, wood and sails, the many-legged skeletons move so fluidly and autonomously that it’s tempting to think of them as alive. Their maker, the Dutch artist Theo Jansen, certainly does. “Since 1990, I have been occupied creating new forms of life,” he says on his website. He calls them Strandbeest. “Eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.” Read more of this post

10 Great Books on American Economic History

10 Great Books on American Economic History

By John Reeves | More Articles
March 8, 2014 | Comments (7)

The attempt to create a colony in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 got off to a catastrophic start. After just the first year, only 38 of the original 108 colonists remained alive. And death rates over the first two decades continued to be staggeringly high. Read more of this post

Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner shows how he discovered Middleby, which has delivered 30 times his original investment

The Untold Story Behind Our CEO’s Single Greatest Investment

By Tom Gardner | More Articles
March 13, 2014 | Comments (6)

Dear Fools, I’d like to make two important corrections to this article after reading the comments below. The first is that, as a matter of policy back in the Hidden Gems days, I never bought my investment recommendations. This has changed in the Everlasting Portfolio in Motley Fool One. The systems now exist for me to purchase all of my investment recommendations. And, of course, all of my purchases come after The Motley Fool buys which, of course, come after all of our members are given a chance to buy first. Read more of this post

Whitney Tilson On Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter And Omaha Events

Whitney Tilson On Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter And Omaha Events

by VW StaffMarch 14, 2014, 11:50 am

Whitney Tilson extends an invitation to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) (NYSE:BRK.B) events in Omaha as the Warren Buffett-led company releases its annual letter. Read more of this post

Happy Pi Day! It’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday

Happy Pi Day! It’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday.

By Andrea Peterson, Updated: March 14 at 10:15 am

Today is March 14th, or 3/14. And that makes it Pi Day — the day where math nerds across the country gather to eat pie and discuss the importance of numbers. But did you know it’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday? The theoretical physicist whose name has become synonymous with genius was born on March 14, 1879, in what was then the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire. Read more of this post

TED has revolutionised the ideas industry, in part by putting old wine in new bottles

TED has revolutionised the ideas industry, in part by putting old wine in new bottles

Mar 15th 2014 | From the print edition

THE first TED conference in 1984 was such a damp squib that the organisers did not hold a second one for six years. Today TED (which for the uninitiated stands for Technology, Education, Design) is the Goliath of the ideas industry. The heart of the enterprise is TED’s twice-yearly conference at which big ideas are presented in short, punchy talks. On March 17th-21st around 1,200 TEDsters will gather in Vancouver to listen to the likes of Bill Gates and Nicholas Negroponte celebrating TED’s 30th birthday and thinking great thoughts. The conference has also spawned an array of businesses, albeit not-for-profit ones. Read more of this post

Why Good Managers Are So Rare

Why Good Managers Are So Rare

by Randall Beck and James Harter  |   8:00 AM March 13, 2014

Gallup has found that one of the most important decisions companies make is simply whom they name manager. Yet our analysis suggests that they usually get it wrong. In fact, Gallup finds that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time. Read more of this post

Should You Automate Your Life So that You Can Work Harder?

Should You Automate Your Life So that You Can Work Harder?

by Sarah Green  |   10:56 AM March 13, 2014

Would you pay someone in the Philippines to answer your email for you — even your personal messages? Or hire strangers on the internet to plan your spouse’s big birthday party? Or throw meat, vegetables, and butter into a blender and call it dinner? Read more of this post

How to Deal with Unfamiliar Situations

How to Deal with Unfamiliar Situations

by Srini Pillay  |   10:00 AM March 13, 2014

Have you recently switched jobs or positions and wondered “What’s going on here?” Have you been given a new task or a new technology that’s completely unfamiliar? Are you working with people who come from different backgrounds and not really sure if you’re all on the same page? Dealing with unfamiliar situations and people is challenging, of course, because we don’t yet have everything figured out. Over time, we adjust. But how can we get better at dealing with the new and unfamiliar—from the start? Read more of this post

10 Rejection Letters Sent to Famous People

10 Rejection Letters Sent to Famous People

Jennifer M Wood

We’ve all heard that the road to success is paved with failure. But that doesn’t make rejection any easier to swallow. What does help? Knowing that the world’s most talented people have been there, too. Here are 10 actual rejection letters that prove it.

1. U2 Read more of this post

Bill Gates: The Rolling Stone Interview; “In his view, the world is a giant operating system that just needs to be debugged”

Bill Gates: The Rolling Stone Interview

The richest man in the world explains how to save the planet

by JEFF GOODELL

MARCH 13, 2014

At 58, Bill Gates is not only the richest man in the world, with a fortune that now exceeds $76 billion, but he may also be the most optimistic. In his view, the world is a giant operating system that just needs to be debugged. Gates’ driving idea – the idea that animates his life, that guides his philanthropy, that keeps him late in his sleek book-lined office overlooking Lake Washington, outside Seattle – is the hacker’s notion that the code for these problems can be rewritten, that errors can be fixed, that huge systems – whether it’s Windows 8, global poverty or climate change – can be improved if you have the right tools and the right skills. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic organization with a $36 billion endowment that he runs with his wife, is like a giant startup whose target market is human civilization. Read more of this post

Lessons From Pixar President Ed Catmull: Your Ideas Are “Ugly Babies,” You Are Their Champion

LESSONS FROM PIXAR PRESIDENT ED CATMULL: YOUR IDEAS ARE “UGLY BABIES,” YOU ARE THEIR CHAMPION

PIXAR PRESIDENT ED CATMULL INSISTS THAT EVERY MOVIE THE COMPANY MAKES STARTS OUT “UGLY”–AND THAT EARLY, ILL-DEFINED IDEAS NEED PROTECTION THE MOST, LEST THEY DIE TOO YOUNG.

BY ED CATMULL

After the original leaders of animation left Disney in the 1990s, the new people running things were from production. And they brought their values, which were to keep the production people busy and productive with one movie after another. So story development was organized in the same way they organized production. As a consequence of this “feed the beast” mentality, a balance was lost at Disney. Read more of this post

The Only 8 Numbers You Need To Do Math

The Only 8 Numbers You Need To Do Math

ANDY KIERSZ MARKETS  MAR. 14, 2014, 6:25 PM

Happy Pi Day!

It’s March 13, or 3/14. Those are the first three digits of Pi, the ratio that enables us to compute the circumference of a circle. Read more of this post

March 14, 2015 Will Be A Once-In-A-Century Thrill For Math Geeks

March 14, 2015 Will Be A Once-In-A-Century Thrill For Math Geeks

SAM RO FINANCE  MAR. 14, 2014, 6:00 AM

Anyone who remembers middle school geometry knows at least a little bit about Pi, the ratio that allows us to compute the circumference, area, and volume of round things. Read more of this post

People make commitments – to a nation, faith, calling or loved ones – and endure the sacrifices those commitments demand. Often this depth is built by fighting against natural evolutionary predispositions

The Deepest Self

MARCH 13, 2014

David Brooks

There is, by now, a large literature on the chemistry and biology of love and sex. If you dive into that literature, you learn pretty quickly that our love lives are biased by all sorts of deep unconscious processes. When men become fathers, their testosterone levels drop, thus reducing their sex drive. There’s some evidence that it’s the smell of their own infants (but not other people’s infants) that sets this off. Read more of this post

Pick gene pool with care on family concerns; Sir Henry Keswick maintains that shares in Jardine Matheson have outperformed those in Berkshire Hathaway

March 14, 2014 8:12 am

Pick gene pool with care on family concerns

By Neil Collins

While Keswicks nurture, newer families piggy-bank raid

Sir Henry Keswick maintains that shares in Jardine Matheson have outperformed those in Berkshire Hathaway, the stock widely considered about the best long-term investment on the planet. Well, it depends where you start, but Jardine shares have multiplied 10 times in 12 years, never mind the dividends. Read more of this post

“Rocky,” directed with immense panache and soaring physicality, is an unpretentious slice of honest entertainment that will set the snobbiest of theatergoers to cheering in spite of themselves

Yo, Broadway, It’s Rocky!

TERRY TEACHOUT

March 13, 2014 10:00 p.m. ET

Rocky

Winter Garden Theatre, 1634 Broadway ($79-$143)

212-239-6200/800-432-7250

New York

It’s been four decades since Sylvester Stallone turned himself into the unlikeliest of screen superstars by playing a small-time Philadelphia boxer who longs to be a contender. Now “Rocky,” a no-budget quickie that grossed $225 million, won the best-picture Oscar and spawned five sequels, has become a big-budget Broadway musical with a score by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (“Ragtime”) and a book co-written by Mr. Stallone and Thomas Meehan (“Annie,” “The Producers”). That’s a high-toned pedigree, especially for a musical based on a movie that the cognoscenti long ago wrote off as a lowbrow joke. Read more of this post

Robert Rickel, who along with two brothers founded a chain of home improvement stores that were precursors to retail giants like Home Depot and Lowe’s, died at 90

Robert Rickel, a Founder of Hardware Supermarkets, Dies at 90

By KATIE THOMASMARCH 13, 2014

Robert Rickel, who along with two brothers founded a chain of home improvement stores that were precursors to retail giants like Home Depot and Lowe’s, died on Sunday at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 90. Read more of this post

What do ancient cave dwellers, Pablo Picasso and Eric Clapton have in common? And how will the answer help you build your business.

Understanding your clients: The last competitive advantage

What do ancient cave dwellers, Pablo Picasso and Eric Clapton have in common? And how will the answer help you build your business.

By Daniel Crosby

Mar 12, 2014 @ 8:59 am (Updated 9:22 am) EST

What do ancient cave dwellers, Pablo Picasso and Eric Clapton have in common. you ask? OK, so you’d never ask such a strange question, but the answer is, “More than you think.” Read more of this post

Another Trader Commits Suicide, Brings Total Recent Banker Deaths To 10

Another Trader Commits Suicide, Brings Total Recent Banker Deaths To 10

Tyler Durden on 03/13/2014 08:05 -0400

For a market that is flirting with all time highs on a daily basis, the recent banker and trader suicide epidemic seems oddly out of place. And yet, it continues to claim even more victims, with the latest casuality being Edmund Reilly, 47, a trader at Midtown’s Vertical Group, who as the Post reported, jumped in front of an LIRR train station yesterday at 6 am near the Syosset train station and was pronounced dead at the scene. Read more of this post

10 Ways to Get Smarter, Be More Productive, and Do Everything with Zero Effort

10 Ways to Get Smarter, Be More Productive, and Do Everything with Zero Effort

March 9, 2014 by Shane Parrish

Why did you click? Was is for the promise of being awesome? Was it the ten ways to get smarter? Was it for the image that has nothing to do with the post? Read more of this post

The colourful business career of the late rich lister Len Buckeridge

The colourful business career of the late rich lister Len Buckeridge

Published 12 March 2014 12:17, Updated 12 March 2014 13:22

Jonathan Barrett

Len Buckeridge on the phone – he always said he wanted to “work until he dropped”. Photo: John Mokrzycki

Len Buckeridge was so incensed that he picked up a union official’s car with a forklift and dropped it over a cyclone fence. Read more of this post

How Thankyou Group cracked the hand wash market with the most expensive product in the supermarket

Caitlin Fitzsimmons Online editor

How Thankyou Group cracked the hand wash market with the most expensive product in the supermarket

Published 13 March 2014 10:33, Updated 13 March 2014 12:32

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Thankyou Group co-founder Daniel Flynn shows off the social enterprise’s product range. Photo: Luis Enrique Ascui

When Thankyou Group co-founder Daniel Flynn told Coles and Woolworths he wanted to expand beyond food and water into bodycare products, he was received with some scepticism. Read more of this post

Family business leaders who think they “know best” and adopt a paternalistic leadership style can lead to unsuccessful succession transitions, by leading to feelings of dissatisfaction and inertia in the next generation

FAMILY BUSINESS LEADERS WHO THINK THEY “KNOW BEST” HINDER SUCCESSION PROCESS

ARTICLE | 12 MARCH, 2014 12:39 PM | BY JESSICA TASMAN-JONES

Family business leaders who think they “know best” and adopt a paternalistic leadership style can lead to unsuccessful succession transitions, according to new research, by leading to feelings of dissatisfaction and inertia in the next generation.

According to Paternalistic leadership in family firms: Types and implications for intergenerational succession, there are three types of paternalistic leadership styles – authoritarian, benevolent and moral – and some can be more detrimental to leadership transitions than others. Read more of this post

How One Of Google’s Finest Fosters The Big Ideas

HOW ONE OF GOOGLE’S FINEST FOSTERS THE BIG IDEAS

AS CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER FOR GOOGLE CREATIVE LABS, IT’S ROBERT WONG’S JOB TO LIVE AND BREATH INSPIRATION. FROM HOW HE FINDS HIS TO HOW HE ENCOURAGES HIS PEOPLE TO ATTAIN THEIRS, HE TELLS US THE BEST WAYS TO FEED CREATIVITY.

BY SAMANTHA COLE

The “poetry of a moment,” says Robert Wong, is often in the restraint.

Whether he’s giving his team near-impossible puzzles to solve in no time or hosting endless brainstorming sessions, boxing in a creative mind is his best innovation catalyst. Read more of this post