Why Obama, why?
November 21, 2011
November 18, 2011
November 17, 2011
The debate: within a Keynesian worldview
I would have loved to be at this debate- but fear not, we can watch it.
Topic: North America, economy, slow, recession, lost decade, Japan… all good buzz words
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/15/krugman-vs-summers-the-debate/
November 15, 2011
Drugs in Europe: the past 7 years
September 20, 2011
Rounding out my New Yorker bender……
Partners
Will Clarence and Virginia Thomas succeed in killing Obama’s health-care plan?
The New Yorker
September 20, 2011
Creation Myth
Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation
The New Yorker
Worth the whole read.
So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The parc researchers got it from the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus. Engelbart dreamed up the idea of moving the cursor around the screen with a stand-alone mechanical “animal” back in the mid- nineteen-sixties. His mouse was a bulky, rectangular affair, with what looked like steel roller-skate wheels. If you lined up Engelbart’s mouse, Xerox’s mouse, and Apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.
The same is true of the graphical user interface that so captured Jobs’s imagination. Xerox parc’s innovation had been to replace the traditional computer command line with onscreen icons. But when you clicked on an icon you got a pop-up menu: this was the intermediary between the user’s intention and the computer’s response. Jobs’s software team took the graphical interface a giant step further. It emphasized “direct manipulation.” If you wanted to make a window bigger, you just pulled on its corner and made it bigger; if you wanted to move a window across the screen, you just grabbed it and moved it. The Apple designers also invented the menu bar, the pull-down menu, and the trash can—all features that radically simplified the original Xerox parc idea.
The difference between direct and indirect manipulation—between three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ball—is not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox parc had in mind, and something that’s appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. parc was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell#ixzz1YVooFFbm
September 20, 2011
Jobs and the GOP
The New Yorker
While the 2009 stimulus plan succeeded in making the recession less awful than it might have been, you rarely get credit in politics for what didn’t happen. More important, in launching the plan, the President effectively took responsibility for the result. If you try to fix it, it’s yours. The Republicans were out of power for two years, and now control only one house of Congress. They can dodge blame, since they’ve had little chance of enacting anything. Coöperating on a bill would make it harder for them to disclaim responsibility for a weak economy at election time. They need to do enough to seem as if they cared about unemployment but not so much that they get blamed for it.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/09/26/110926ta_talk_surowiecki#ixzz1YVnbqj8e
September 2, 2011
History of surveys in Britain:
Why State Surveys Asked about Bras and Haddock
BBC
The survey was well intentioned - to work out the amount of steel that was being diverted from the war effort to prop up women’s corsets and other garments. But it led to unintended humour and, for a modern readership, some surprising answers.
It showed that on average women in 1941 owned 1.2 such items of underwear each. There were some strange variations, with housewives owning 0.8 brassieres but agricultural workers 1.9.
September 2, 2011
September 1, 2011
7 things McDonald’s knows about your brain
Psychology Today
I always knew that McDonald’s had it down to a science, but, seriously, they have it DOWN TO A SCIENCE. Really interesting, but slightly depressing article. Although, what most scares me is that now i feel like i MUST eat McDonalds…….
Reason #4:
4. Our brains prefer high-calorie foods
As suggested by Jonah Lehrer in “The Frontal Cortex,” our brains evolved during a time when food was scarce, so we became adept at choosing foods that packed calories.
In one recent experiment, scientists used genetically engineered mice that were missing sugar receptors and therefore unable to detect sweetness in food. The researchers then gave the mice free access to two water dispensers, one with sugar water and one with regular water. Initially, the mice showed no preference; sugar water tasted just like regular water. However, after several hours, the mice shifted to drinking almost exclusively from the sugar water dispenser. To ensure that the mice preferred the calories, but could not detect the taste, the researchers offered them water sweetened with sucralose (e.g. Splenda). The mice didn’t take it.
When the scientists analyzed the mice brains, they found that the mice released dopamine in response to sugar water, even though they couldn’t taste it, but not in response to regular water or sucralose. Our brains can tell the difference between high calorie foods and diet foods even if they taste the same.
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