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20
Nov 09

Daily Links for November 18th through November 20th

All excerpts are quoted from the respective link(s).

  • How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology – The data in this report shows a consistent pattern for conservatives to trend towards “homey , familiar, comfort foods and meat-heavy options. They are more likely than liberals to indulge in fast food and enjoy splurges like cheeseburgers, hot dogs, deep dish pizza and sugar soda. Their idea of international food is a “mainstream  option such as Italian.Liberals are more likely to be adventuresome eaters, choosing international options such as Japanese or Thai. They eat fast food less frequently than conservatives, and when they do splurge on fast food they have a tendency to favor specialty, regional chains. Liberals are more likely to be vegetarians and to choose healthier options such as whole grain bread, darker greens of lettuce, and more frequent servings of fruit.
  • Hill Holliday Blog » Visualizing Daily Activities With Media Wheel – For a media planning project, we needed to find a simple way to illustrate how people in a particular segment engage with different media. After some experimentation, we came up with this “media wheel  chart that summarizes 216 data points from a media spreadsheet. It shows (zoom in) where ” at work, at home, in a restaurant, or in the car ” people are when they read newspapers, watch TV, or listen to the radio throughout a typical day. Lighter hues correspond to higher levels of activity.
  • Microsoft Office 2010 Beta Professional Plus – Free Download – With Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, your people get a wide range of powerful new ways to do their best work from more places “ whether they’re using a PC, smartphone or web browser. From insightful updates to Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook, to new server integration capabilities that make it easier for everyone to track, report and share vital information, Office Professional Plus 2010 offers the complete package through familiar, intuitive tools.
  • Designing Social Interfaces: Overview and Practical Techniques … – In essence, we control the flow of user interaction on our websites. By crafting an interface to facilitate certain behaviors, we can influence the direction in which our community goes.
  • Prioritize Your Social Media Efforts – There aren’t enough hours in the day for all the chores that social media puts in front of us. The best writing I’ve found on how to manage your time in social media is via Amber Naslund’s social media time management series. Her efforts in crafting this should become a little ebook that you hand around to everyone. If you skipped over that link, go back, click it to open a new tab/window, and then read it when you’re done with this (or skip mine and read Amber’s- it’s that good).
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16
Oct 09

Daily Links for October 14th through October 16th

All excerpts are quoted from the respective link(s).

  • Edible Geometry – In the world of cooking there are around 350 different types of pasta, and probably approximately four times as many names for them. They can be divided into few groups: long shape, flat pasta strands, short shaped and tubular pasta, small pasta for soup, stuffed shape, Asian type. Certain shapes of pasta and sizes are used for specific purposes, while others can be used in several different manners. New shapes are also being designed and named every day. Only with the mouth is it possible to distinguish between all the types of pasta, without seeing them. And only with the mouth do they develop their various characteristics that on sight can often seem to be similar.
  • Science of Scams: Derren Brown and Kat the Scientist debunk the paranormal industry – Boing Boing – The Science of Scams is a new project from Channel 4 and mentalist/magician Derren Brown that aims to debunk the paranormal industry's lucrative claims about ghosts, fortune-telling, telekinesis and other assorted woo woo. Brown and C4 produced seven videos purporting to show the kind of "paranormal" activity held up as evidence of the supernatural and released them on YouTube for several weeks, allowing people to make what they will of them. Now, they're revealing the hoax videos once per week, with accompanying videos that explain how the scam works. The show is presented by Kat the Scientist, who did postgrad research in Biological Anthropology and Pharmacology at Oxford.
  • Gary’s Social Media Count | PERSONALIZE MEDIA – Many of us who have been following social media since the early 90s are very sensitive to today’s exponential growth in usage of the sharing web. Inspired by other cool real time counters, The Goddess of Social Media Laurel Papworth, my own Rise & Rise of Social Media presentations and various ‘cool’ videos (you know the ones) I decided to put together this little Flash app (which is in constant development) showing how active & dynamic the Social Web is. More after the embed.
  • The Most Influential Management Gurus – Forbes.com – Leadership consulting firm CrainerDearlove surveyed 3,500 people and a panel of experts to determine the 2009 edition of the Thinkers 50, a biennial list of the most influential living management thinkers.
  • The Referendum – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com – The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.
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14
Mar 09

Daily Links for March 13th

  • High IQ Linked To Reduced Risk Of Death – A study of one million Swedish men has revealed a strong link between cognitive ability and the risk of death, suggesting that government initiatives to increase education opportunities may also have health benefits.
  • Visualizing One Trillion Dollars | Mint.com Blog | Personal Finance News & Advice – What DOES ONE TRILLION dollars look like?
  • 25 Ways to Jump-Start the Auto Business Index | Fast Company – We asked more than 60 people with some connection to the broader automotive economy for their best ideas, looking for both short- and long-term solutions to the crisis. These are their answers. With no further ado, and with limited commercial interruption, we present this very special episode, 25 Ways to Jump-Start the Auto Business.
  • Pew Research Center: Losing Wealth, Finding God? – Contrary to recent media reports suggesting that the country's economic troubles have led to higher levels of church attendance, a Pew Forum analysis of polls by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that while the Dow Jones Industrial Average has shed over half its value since October 2007, there has been no increase in weekly worship service attendance during the same time period.
  • Video Format Guide – Geeks.com – The various computer video formats.
  • The Pirate Pose – Executive Articles – Portfolio.com – Twenty years after The Bonfire of the Vanities, the author checks in on the new masters of the universe and finds them even coarser and ruder than their predecessors could have ever imagined being.
  • Hullabaloo: Media-Financial Complex – This financial meltdown isn't entirely due to the people who made money on the way down. But the corroded relationship between the Masters of the Universe and the subjects who cover them – the Media-Financial Complex – is absolutely a part of this tale. And the phantom stock – invented wealth that can appear and disappear – is just another of the exotic financial instruments created by people who push paper and add zeroes to their balance sheets and call it work, paper and securities that are then leveraged and bet upon and sliced and diced until nobody understands them and just doesn't want to get left holding them when the organ stops playing and the big dance ends.
  • The Social Nervous System Has More Than One Sense – O’Reilly Radar – But where do you draw the line? When we make a phone call from one location rather than another, we don't think we are contributing our location, but our phone is quietly doing so nonetheless. When we make a credit-card purchase, we don't think we are contributing, but software at the bank, the merchant, and our personal finance application is listening to that credit card reader. When we turn on a light switch in a Smart-grid connected house, we won't think we are contributing, but we will be. And the refrigerator waking up and deciding to turn on its compressor will be making exactly the same kind of contribution. The Smart Grid is in fact intended to be just such a sensing-and-responding system, connecting people and machines into a new kind of super-organism.
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15
Dec 08

Daily Links for December 14th

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10
Dec 08

Daily Links for December 9th

  • GOOD » Books Are the New Cars» – Another day, another imploding industry…
  • Economist’s View: “Capitalist Fools” – Was there any single decision which, had it been reversed, would have changed the course of history? … The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. … The embrace by America—and much of the rest of the world—of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today.
  • Google Book Search: Google Book Search Now Includes Magazines – This is awesome, although everyone is likely searching for Playboy or Honcho.
  • Two Methods to Measure Unemployment: 1948 – Nov 2008 at Visualizing Economics – Two unemployment series: U-3 the official unemployment rate in blue and U-6 the broadest definition of unemployment (includes marginally attached workers and people employed part-time for economic reasons) in orange.
  • Recession Is Shaping Up to Be the Worst Since the 1940s – NYTimes.com – This recession, which officially began in December 2007, now appears virtually certain to be the longest downturn — and possibly most severe — since the end of World War II, as evidenced last week by a demoralizing rat-a-tat of grim reports on jobs, sales and public confidence. The reports signaled that even after 11 months, more than the entire length of the last two downturns, this recession has only now entered its fiercest phase, and economists say the pain will not end soon.
  • Spectacular Christmas Lights from Around the World – Beautiful.
  • The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers – Boing Boing – By the turn of the century, anyone who didn't understand that the business model for newspapers was a wasting asset was caught up in nothing other than willful ignorance, so secure in their faith in the permanence of their business that they assumed that those glaciers would politely swerve at the last minute, which minute is looking increasingly like now.
  • My Problems Are Real to Me: Five Sexist Trends the Advertising World Just Can’t Shake – The fact that these trends are so widespread is not the fault of the advertising world–these people are paid to appeal to our ids, they are often self-aware in their tendency to make the world harder for women, that's the life they've chosen. It is mainstream companies like BMW, Mitchum, Nikon, mainstream publications that host these images, and mainstream readers who use these products despite their appalling treatment of women that are truly to blame. The advertising world reacts to client demands and consumer activity–we have control over only one of those fields.
  • Radio Shack Catalogs – Currently broken, but I'm sure it will be back…
  • Wall Street: Profiles in Panic: About Us: vanityfair.com – With Wall Street hemorrhaging jobs and assets, even many of the wealthiest players are retrenching. Others, like the Lehman Brothers bankers who borrowed against their millions in stock, have lost everything. Hedge-fund managers try to sell their luxury homes, while trophy wives are hocking their jewelry. The pain is being felt on St. Barth’s and at Sotheby’s, on benefit-gala committees and at the East Hampton Airport, as the world of the Big Rich collapses, its culture in shock and its values in question.
  • Get Your Google Profile Organized For Friend Connect | MakeUseOf.com – So in other words, Friend Connect personalises your site more. Gives it that human touch. But it also branches out further than that. If you click on someone’s icon and view their Google profile, you can potentially see their Google Reader shared articles, their favourite shared photos, their Blogger comments, their YouTube videos and much more (if they choose to share that information with you by having it on their profile). This is in direct contrast to Facebook where you have to be approved first by the person before viewing any information of theirs. Facebook is also very much “walled in” where everything is inside and can’t be taken out of the site. Friend Connect, by contrast, seems more “looser” and you can click from site to site. Nothing seems to be constrained.
  • GM may rebuild Saturn rather than kill it – Autoblog – But GM can't simply close the Saturn shop. There are 425 Saturn dealerships, and one dealer-broker figured that GM would have to shell out $3-$4 million to each dealer if Saturn gets put down. That puts GM past the billion dollar mark even before any other cost is taken into account. And Saturn can't simply be sold either, except as a brand name and blueprints – it has no engineering nor manufacturing abilities outside of GM.
  • Hullabaloo: Until He Turns Blue – Shelby is a traditional conservative — in the mode of Herbert Hoover. That tradition is one that's been out of fashion for about 80 years now and there's little reason to bring it back. If you want to relive the Hoover years, take Charleston lessons. Or read some F.Scott Fitzgerald and leave the economy to more modern thinkers.
  • Op-Ed Columnist – The Brightest Are Not Always the Best – NYTimes.com – Few seem to recall that the phrase, in its original coinage, was meant to strike a sardonic, not a flattering, note. Perhaps even Doris Kearns Goodwin would agree that it’s time for Beltway reading groups to move on from “Team of Rivals” to Halberstam.
  • Scholars and Rogues » The “dumbest generation”: sloppy thinking, maybe, but it’s put-up-or-shut-up time for Gen X – In the coming five years or so a massive number of Boomers are going to retire (the earliest Boomers hit retirement age this year, in fact) and early Xers are going to have to step in and step up. (For a lot of reasons, I don’t expect this transition to be a terribly pretty one.) The most prominent symbol of Gen X taking the reins right now is Barack Obama, who will soon become the first Xer president. Unless you’ve been off planet for a few years, you realize the massiveness and unfathomable complexity of the challenge he faces, and for better or worse it’s now time for my generation to step up and lead. You may think Xers are slackers and “the dumbest generation,” or you may prefer the Howe and Strauss narrative from 13th Gen, which credits us with a good deal of street smarts and a collective ingenuity born of necessity. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter. The time is now, and we’ll either get it done or we won’t.
  • Firedoglake » Want Something Fixed? Make Sure Important People Have Skin In the Game – Principle: when elites are not effected by a problem they have a lot less incentive to fix the problem.

    Solution: don't let elites opt out of things like military service and public schools if you want problems with both (illegal wars, not enough body armor, bad schools) to be dealt with properly and in a timely manner.

  • Emptywheel » Dan Quayle and Cerberus Holding American Economy Hostage – But understand: GM acquiring Chrysler–which is the most discussed option–offers little benefit to GM. Sure, the merged company would get to sell either the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit or Chrysler's fairly new digs up north; you could find efficiencies in headquarter structure (if you were a healthy company to begin with). But everyone agrees that two of GM's most urgent problems are that it has too many brands and too many dealerships. And you want to fix that by making it take on 3,300 more dealers and three more brands? This is Congress' idea of a really smart restructuring?
  • IIHS: Ten Most Stolen Vehicles For 2008 – The most stolen cars, actually, are the ones American automakers are taking the most flack over: big trucks and SUVs. Vehicles like the Cadillac Escalade were popular with automakers because it was a cheap platform they could load with lots of expensive parts and make a hefty profit on. For the same reason it is popular with thieves. Add expensive audio equipment and rims, especially on cars like the Hummer H2 and Dodge Magnum, to the equation and you might as well paint "steal my car" on the side.
  • Political Calculations: Detroit in Four Squares – With the U.S. automakers now in line for aid from the federal government, we thought it might be valuable to present the following four square chart, which depicts the typical historic interaction between the strength of the economy and how well Detroit satisfies consumers in the U.S. with the outcomes they produce for management, workers and the future of the auto industry
  • Kop Busters | Never Get Busted Again – KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.
  • 5 Comic Superheroes Who Made a Real-World Difference – If you think superheroes do amazing things in comic books, you won’t believe what they can do off the page. For starters, Superman brought down the Ku Klux Klan, Donald Duck raised ships from the ocean floor, and Spider-Man transformed the American justice system.