Information: Hunter-gatherers vs. farmers
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Forbes: Top 10 interview myths
- The interviewer is prepared
- The interviewer asks good questions
- The interviewer really wants to get you a coffee
- The interviewer wants references
- There are “right answers”
- Keep your answers short
- The interviewer doesn’t care about attractiveness
- You should demonstrate ambition
- The job is still open
- The most qualified person gets the job
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mkl45eigk/1-the-interviewer-is-prepared/#gallerycontent
Jessica Hagy’s list of the 9 most dangerous ideas that school taught you
- The people in charge have all the answers
- Learning ends when you leave the classroom
- The best and brightest follow the rules
- What the books say is always true
- There is a very clear, single path to success
- Behaving yourself is as important as getting good marks
- Standardized tests measure your value
- Days off are always more fun than sitting in the classroom
- The purpose of your education is your future career
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jessicahagy/2012/05/02/nine-dangerous-things-you-were-taught-in-school/
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How to remember anything and everything: the memory palace
US natural gas reserves at over 100 years’ supply
Back in 2000, America had enough accessible natural gas in the ground to provide a little more than 12 years of consumption. But once the country’s shale deposits started to be tapped in earnest, reserves leaped to over a century’s supply. And because output from existing wells is not tapering off as fast as initially expected, the actual reserves could wind up being double present estimates.
The country has become so awash in the stuff since “fracking” (hydraulic fracturing of gas-bearing shale deposits) began barely five years ago that the price has plummeted from $8 per thousand cubic feet to $2.
Price premium on electric cars doesn’t yet cover gasoline savings
It all comes down to the price of the lithium-ion battery, which nowadays costs a shade under $600 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of storage capacity. As an electric car capable of travelling 75 miles or so between charges needs around 24kWh of capacity, the battery alone adds $14,000 to the price of the vehicle. The result is a car that costs way too much for what it offers in fuel savings.
A state-of-the-art electric vehicle like Ford’s forthcoming Focus EV, with a claimed range of 100 miles (say, 70 miles in real-world conditions) and an equivalent fuel economy up there with the Nissan Leaf’s 106mpg, has a base price of $39,200. The petrol-powered version of the same vehicle, which averages around 40mpg, costs just $16,500. In other words, batteries have to come down to less than $200 per kWh before electrics can go mainstream. Clearly, those who buy a plug-in electric like the Ford Focus EV or Nissan Leaf today are making some kind of statement about their green credentials.
Bleak prospects for Microsoft and Nokia smartphone partnership?
People want phones with apps, but developers want to make apps for iPhone and Android that already have a large user base. Microsoft hopes to overcome this by paying app developers to port popular applications to Windows Phone… [However,] no amount of subsidy is going to turn Windows Phone apps into a high priority for any company unless there’s a large installed user base. Dangling cash merely encourages developers to do the minimum and ship half-baked implementations to get the check.
Microsoft jumps into the publishing and e-reader businesses
Barnes & Noble should have strong prospects in the e-book market. It has a decent device, a brand people recognize and associate with books, and longstanding relationships with book publishers. Its problem is that the other two major e-book sellers—Apple and Amazon—are cash-rich, growing technology companies. Barnes & Noble, by contrast, is a big-box retailing business that’s facing structural decline in the digital era. Over the long haul, it simply wouldn’t have the resources to invest in keeping the Nook platform competitive. Microsoft is the perfect partner. While Microsoft no longer strikes fear into the hearts of men the way it did in its late ’90s heyday, selling Windows and Office to PC users continues to be a ridiculously profitable business.
Is Facebook worth $100 billion?
[Facebook has] fixed an initial price range for its shares that could value the Silicon Valley firm at between $77 billion and $96 billion in its much-awaited stockmarket flotation… The landmark deal could dwarf the IPO of Google in 2004, which valued the online giant at $23 billion.
Netherlands’ chief of defence rationalizes the state’s monopoly on violence
TV: Illusions within illusions
Microsoft invests in Barnes & Noble book chain and Nook tablet
[Microsoft] is really into partnering with companies. Look at its deals with Facebook, Nokia, and now Barnes & Noble. It’s much better than trying to build out an e-book business.
Stolen art is now the 4th most lucrative black market
Need to launder your illegal drug money? First, accept a hot painting as a down payment. Piece of cake to sell it at auction to another criminal buyer. The auction house will get a nice slice of the sale, a cool million if it is a $15 million sale, so they are going to look the other way; they can always claim they had no idea the painting was stolen. Now your hot painting has a nice, clean bill of sale from a noted auction house and has moved into the mainstream art market, destined, perhaps, for the collection of a respectable scion of the community, who can then donate it to a public institution in exchange for a fat tax writeoff. No wonder a single 2006 Quebec City drug bust turned up 25 kilos of cocaine … and more than 2,500 stolen paintings.
http://reviewcanada.ca/reviews/2011/12/01/black-market-culture/
10 biggest brand bullies
“Augmented reality” and magic
History of the pointless split infinitive rule
The split infinitive goes back in English literature at least to about the 13th century. It’s a natural part of English, which is the reason everyone does it in speech.
In 1834, according to Jack Lynch, a writer under the pseudonym “P” became the first person to proscribe split infinitives clearly. The “rule” was widely picked up, and has been inflicted on generations of English-learners ever since, despite, to reprise our rule, the fact that it is “pointless”.
Plastic surgery by country
In 2010 over 3.3m procedures were done in America, more than anywhere else… Chin implants (“chinplants”) alone rose by 71% on the previous year. But when population is accounted for, South Korea tops the list. [O]ne in five women in Seoul had gone under the knife. Beauty is beheld differently in different countries, and this is reflected in the demands made on surgeons’ scalpels. There are seven times more buttock operations in Brazil than the top-25 country average, and five times more vaginal rejuvenations. In Greece, penis enlargements are performed ten times more often than the average.
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Tagged medicine essays, plastic surgery, psychology essays, social science essays
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US best performing stock is nuts and bolts manufacturer
Fastenal is the country’s dominant distributor of nuts and bolts.
According to a recent article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the company has more than 11,000 sales people in 2,600 stores along with an online catalogue that extends for 10,700 pages. It also has more than 5,500 “fully customized and automated Fastenal stores” on job sites and at customer locations — essentially, vending machines for nuts and bolts. The result of this overwhelming reach is truly overwhelming business performance. According to BusinessWeek, the company’s share price is up 38,565 percent since October 1987. Microsoft, by contrast, is up less than 10,000 percent over that same period (still not bad!), and Apple is up by 5,500 percent.
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Tagged best stock, business essays, fastenal, nuts and bolts
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How to work with a despised colleague
[I]f there is someone who is annoying or abrasive, don’t think about how the person acts, think about how you react. It’s far more productive to focus on your own behavior because you can control it.
China no longer cheap
China is the world’s largest manufacturing power. Its output of televisions, smartphones, steel pipes and other things you can drop on your foot surpassed America’s in 2010. China now accounts for a fifth of global manufacturing. Its factories have made so much, so cheaply that they have curbed inflation in many of its trading partners. But the era of cheap China may be drawing to a close.
Costs are soaring, starting in the coastal provinces where factories have historically clustered (see map). Increases in land prices, environmental and safety regulations and taxes all play a part. The biggest factor, though, is labour.
http://www.economist.com/node/21549956?fsrc=nlw|pub|4-25-2012|1503018|37893505|NA
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Tagged business essays, cheap china, china manufacturing, china prices
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3D printing – The 3rd industrial revolution
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Tagged 3rd printing, essay ideas, industrial revolution, writing ideas
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Dressing for the role makes you better at performing that role
A new study from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University shows that when people dress up for a role, they actually become better at it.
In an experiment, a number of people were given a series of cognitive tests to perform. A small group of subjects were given medical lab coats to wear over their clothes. This group made only half as many mistakes on the tests as the subjects wearing their street clothes.
Researchers conclude that clothing “systematically influences wearers’ psychological processes.” That is to say that if you feel like you are dressed smarter and more professionally, you will actually act smarter and more professionally. The subjects in the lab coats took a more methodical and scientific approach to problem solving, and cut their errors in half.
http://www.workopolis.com/content/advice/article/2013-study-it-s-not-who-you-are-it-s-how-you-dress
Why you have “insomnia”: The eight hour sleep is a modern development
[R]eferences to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.
By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
David S. Rose on pitching to venture capitalists
The career ladder is long gone
Career ladders died out during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when over 85% of Fortune 1000 American companies downsized their white-collar workforce. Downsizing has only escalated from there, however in the 80s and 90s the lost jobs were not in manufacturing but white-collar jobs, including management jobs. As companies thinned out, those leadership positions disappeared — and most haven’t come back since.
Daniel Willingham on three “myths” of brain-based learning
Popular Myth 1: School Is Designed for Left-Brained Students
Popular Myth 2: Schools Are Designed to Suit Girls’ Brains
Popular Myth 3: Young Children’s Brains Must Have Lots of Sensory Stimulation—and Classical Music Is Especially Important
http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/fall2006/willingham.cfm
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Daniel Willingham on improving memory
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter0809/willingham.pdf
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How do you stand out from the crowd?
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What great presentations have in common: from Martin Luther King to Steve Jobs
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Many of your Facebook friends secretly hate you
The more you value Facebook as a social outlet, the more your Facebook friends probably just wish you’d shut up. A study on confidence, emotional expression, and Facebook curation found that people likely to see Zuckerberg’s virtual community as a haven are also more likely to annoy their contacts.
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Is Internet dating a good approach to finding love? Research suggests that it isn’t
Dating sites match people based on similarities in personality. However, there are three problems with this approach: 1) Research shows that couples with similar personalities are only 0.5% happier than couples with different personalities. 2) We don’t know what we want. What we say would make us happy changes upon presentation of different choices. 3) Choosing becomes more difficult when one is presented with too many choices.
http://www.economist.com/node/21547217?fsrc=nlw|hig|2-9-2012|editors_highlights
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The problems with SOPA
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