• Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman - an outline
  Cool site, they post outlines of books, quality looks decent too. Def should check this out more often.
• Studying the Brain Off the Grid, Professors Find Clarity
  5 neuroscience professors go river rafting for a week, no phones or email. Mr. Kramer says the group has become more reflective, quieter, more focused on the surroundings. “If I looked around like this at work, people would think I was goofing off,” he says. The others are more relaxed too. Mr. Braver decides against coffee, bypassing his usual ritual. The next day, he neglects to put on his watch, though he cautions against reading too much into it. “I sometimes forget to put my watch on at home, but in fairness, I usually have my phone with me and it has a clock on it.” Mr. Strayer, the believer, says the travelers are experiencing a stage of relaxation he calls “third-day syndrome.”
• Ezra Klein, on politicians and politics
  Campaigns are built to fool us into thinking that we're voting for individuals. We learn about the candidate's family, her job, her background -- even her dog. But we're primarily voting for parties. The parties have just learned we're more likely to vote for them if they disguise themselves as individuals. And American politics would work better if we understood that.
• The crisis in customer service : The New Yorker
  The real problem may be that companies have a roving eye: they’re always more interested in the customers they don’t have. So they pour money into sales and marketing to lure new customers while giving their existing ones short shrift, in an effort to minimize costs and maximize revenue. The consultant Lior Arussy calls this the “efficient relationship paradox”: it’s only once you’ve actually become a customer that companies put efficiency ahead of attention, with the result that a company’s current customers are often the ones who experience its worst service.
• Top Ten Typefaces of the Decade

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• Live Life as an Experiment - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review
  What I had left, I realized, was nothing. Which was the exact strategy I was practicing. "I'd like to return this," I said to the sales person behind the cash register, "and I know you charge a restocking fee — which you have every right to do — but I'd really appreciate it if you didn't." gets better from there - man i really need to try that more often - you get something for nothing!
• What are good stock icon packs? - User Interface - Stack Exchange
• Tenured Radical: Writing Your Own Academic Job Description
  professor on how to manage your time - say no like hell, avoid extra work
• Michael Pollan writes about growing, smoking opium
  Pretty good, long
• One in every five teenagers in the United States today has slight hearing loss
  might be a good time to go into the hearing aid industry - One in every five teenagers in the United States today has slight hearing loss, according to the authors of a new report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The proportion of teenagers with slight hearing loss has jumped 30 percent in the past 15 years. While the new report doesn't speculate as to the causes of problem, a similar study done in Australia this year linked hearing loss to the increased use of headphones and many experts have agreed with those findings.
• People who are most worried about being energy-efficient are often the most uninformed
  People who make an effort to be eco-friendly - for instance by recycling glass bottles, turning off lights and unplugging cellphone chargers - have no idea what they're on about, according to a new survey. Those who don't bother are more likely to know what actually saves energy and what doesn't.
• Sentenc.es - A Disciplined Way To Deal With Email
  The Problem E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it. The Solution Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.
• When to Make the First Offer in Negotiations - HBS Working Knowledge
  Standard theory says let the other person name their price first, but because of anchoring, it might be smart to make the first offer
• ATDHE.Net - Watch Free Live Sports TV
  watch live soccer, epl, basketball
• Africans do not want or need Britain’s development aid
  As Africans, we urge the generous-spirited British to reconsider an aid programme they can ill afford, and which we do not want or need. A real offer from the British people to help our development would consist of the abolition of the Common Agricultural Policy, which keeps African agricultural exports out of the European marketplace. It is that egregious policy, combined with the weight of regulations, bad laws and stifling bureaucracy, subsidised by five decades of development aid, which prevents Africans from lifting themselves out of poverty. Signed, The African People

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• where to get started with learning ruby on rails
• Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Plan.txt : The Most Effective Productivity Tool That You’ve Never Heard Of
  The Law of Action Planning: No rigid rules or systems for figuring out “what to do when” can work effectively for more than a few weeks before becoming obsolete. this has been my experience, yet I'm trying again... we'll see how it holds up.
• How we made an extra £14 million a year for a travel company | Conversion Rate Experts
  survey customers, figure out what the main selling points are, clear up points of confusion, usability test. great case study
• 8 things I wish I knew before starting a business | VentureBeat
  Something to consider when people say they've spent a lifetime with a company: 5. Your bad employees rarely quit – For one thing, poor performers aren’t really all that motivated to look, as that might involve actual performance. For another, no one else is likely to recruit them. Your marginal and weak employees are with you for life unless you move proactively. In many years of running businesses, the only time this wasn’t true was during the dot-com bubble. At that time, every idiot could get a 15 percent to 20 percent raise here in Northern Virginia by changing jobs. And they did. Aside from that blessed time, weak employees are your most “loyal.”
• Brass Monki Designs - a set on Flickr
  crazy customized dunk hi's. the problem is if i ever get enough money to afford these i'll probably have a nicer wardrobe than dunk hi's
• L.A. Times analysis rates teachers' effectiveness - latimes.com
  LA times sorted through years of test score data to figure out which teachers boost student test scores and which do the opposite. glad they are doing this, glad they are trying to stir the pot - analysis of teachers is biased b/c reporter knows teacher's score though.
• Overcome Resistance With the Right Questions - Harvard Business Review
  The typical manager's default response when somebody keeps saying no is to keep selling the idea. The manager trots out more evidence to support the idea and describes the payoffs for the other person. And the person keeps saying no. There's a better way. Asking a series of easily answered questions will help the other person rethink his assumptions and open up possibilities for agreement.
• 108 Garbage Bags Become 1 Giant Computer-Breathing Organism « Wonderment Blog
  cool video
  (tags: cool)
• Children Educate Themselves IV: Lessons from Sudbury Valley
  Students are free, all day, every day, to do what they wish at the school, as long as they don't violate any of the school's rules. None of the school's rules have to do with learning. The school gives no tests. It does not evaluate or grade students' progress.[1] There is no curriculum and no attempt to motivate students to learn. Courses occur only when students take the initiative to organize them, and they last only as long as the students want them. Many students at the school never join a course, and the school sees no problem with that. The staff members at the school do not consider themselves to be teachers. They are, instead, adult members of the community who provide a wide variety of services, including some teaching. Most of their "teaching" is of the same variety as can be found in any human setting; it involves answering sincere questions and presenting ideas in the context of real conversations.
• blistering criticism of pakistani culture
  The fact is, if we had real democracy, there would be no internet in Pakistan, women would not be allowed out of their homes, education would come to a standstill and we would begin a programme of killing off every minority. Thank you corrupt generals and politicians, you keep this at bay with some sense of being answerable to a world that still has some humanity in it, even if you don’t.
• Why taxes are low in the Middle East | Brian Whitaker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
  Taxation is an often-overlooked factor in the internal politics of the Middle East: it helps to explain why undemocratic regimes stay in power for so long. Governments that have substantial non-tax income can buy themselves out of trouble by showering largesse on the population, often keeping prices low through subsidies (as happens in Iran). As a rule of thumb, high taxes can act as a spur towards democracy and accountable government. Conversely, where taxes are low the pressure for democracy and accountability is usually less.
• Twenty-Somethings, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
  I think that the central trend here is that people do not want to work. 1. I worry that many college graduates are unsettled nowadays because they did not really learn much.
• How to easily increase charitable donations
  Ask giver to think in terms of time given up, not money. Asking giver to think about anything (5 babies, 100 pencils, etc) instead of "how much money" works

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• How to easily increase charitable donations
  Ask giver to think in terms of time given up, not money. Asking giver to think about anything (5 babies, 100 pencils, etc) instead of "how much money" works
• Inside the secret world of Trader Joe's - Aug. 23, 2010
  keep things simple, focus on quality and service. Crew members aren't told the margins on products, so placement decisions are made based not on profits but on what's best for the shopper.
• SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck
  50 mechanics used in all sorts of games. Giving rewards, scheduling benefits, punishment if not kept up, etc. Interesting
• Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything - HBR
  Pursue what you love, work hard (less than 90 mins) in the morning, practice intensely, get expert feedback, take regular breaks, ritualize practice
• What advice would you give to a graphic design student?
  If you meet a person who cares about the same obscure things you do, hold on to them for dear life. Sympathy is medicine.
•  How bathroom posture affects your health: Squat, don't sit | Slate
  Awkward I guess, but I've been squatting since I got home from India. Supposedly healthier, quicker, be wary of people that overstate benefits however
• StartUp Jobs | StartUpers
  (tags: jobs)
• Are you rich? If so, how did you get there? : AskReddit
  During/after college I worked at a couple of startups that merely got absorbed into larger companies - but I learned a lot. In fact, after working both at startups and big companies I can say: You should always choose the startup because you will learn much more. lots of other good advice in the post
• Stop Being A Wimp | WePay
  If you look at the founders that PG talks about the most, they are all tough as hell – and I’m pretty sure that’s why he likes them so much. I doubt he is particularly impressed by my and my co-founder’s raw intelligence, especially given how ridiculously smart the other YC founders are. I can hear him now: “I don’t know how smart they are, but god damn are those WePayers tough.” PG knows a lot about WePay. His favorite stories are those that demonstrate our toughness…like the time my co-founder and I adopted a dog together, dropped out of law school, and quit a high paying banking job, just to “burn the ships” before we founded WePay. I can probably recall two dozen stories about other founders that demonstrate how insanely tough they are — all stories frequently and proudly recited by PG.
  (tags: jobs)
• College Dropout Factories | Washington Monthly
  The Washington Monthly and Education Sector, an independent think tank, looked at the 15 percent of colleges and universities with the worst graduation records—about 200 schools in all—and found that the graduation rate at these schools is 26 percent. (See the table at left for a listing of the fifty colleges and universities with the worst graduation rates.) America’s “college dropout factories,” in other words, are twice as bad at graduating their students as the worst high schools are at graduating theirs.
• Study Hacks » Blog Archive » An Open Letter to Students on the Danger of Seeing School as a Trial to Survive
  “The demands of imminent independence can worsen mental-health problems or create new ones for people who have managed up to that point to perform all the expected roles,” explains Henig. “[They] get lost when schooling ends and expected roles disappear.” In other words, when you go through life thinking “if I can make it through this, things will be better later,” you eventually forget what “better” means. the despair that accompanies the perpetual postponement of an enjoyable life has a way of making its presence known. It is seen, for example, in the regular e-mails I receive from college students suffering from deep procrastination — an advanced stage of burnout where, as with the Yellowbrick patient mentioned above, completing work becomes impossible — or the quiet desperation of the overworked law associate who strains to remember why, exactly, law school had once evinced such certainty."
• Alan Richman's Tips for Ordering Wine in a Restaurant: GQ
  1. The sommerlier pours. You sip. You hesitate. Good move. Never say yes to a wine until you're sure it's sound. Try it a second time. A third, minutes later, if you still have doubts. Like sex on a first date, you'll regret it if you're not sure.
• College Writing Class Assignments with Real World Applications | McSweeney's
  1. Write a text message to a girl apologizing for the series of drunken text messages you sent her at 2 a.m. last night, which were just poorly composed requests for her to come over. 8. Write and practice reciting a monologue in which you explain to a girl that you aren't a scumbag like your friend(s), who slept with her and then didn't call her. Incorporate the phrase "I don't even know why I still hang out with those guys." 10. Write a cover letter to a bank manager that claims your B.A. in literature gives you advantages that people who have degrees in business, finance or economics simply don't have.
  (tags: humor)
• Map of the Day: Gold's 99 Essential Restaurants - LAist
• Can Preschoolers Be Depressed? - NYTimes.com
  martin seligman says in learned optimism that 25% of 3rd, 4th graders are depressed: unlike your typical joyful and carefree 4-year-old, Kiran didn’t have a lot of fun. “He wasn’t running around, bouncing about, battling to get to the top of the slide like other kids,” Raghu notes. Kiran’s mother, Elizabeth (her middle name), an engineer, recalls constant refrains of “Nothing is fun; I’m bored.” When Raghu and Elizabeth reminded a downbeat Kiran of their coming trip to Disney World, Kiran responded: “Mickey lies. Dreams don’t come true.”
• What are some interesting startups in the education space? - Quora
  (tags: jobs)
• How Facebook Stalking an Ex May Hold Us Back - Read More on ELLE.com
  Online stalking has been scientifically proven to feel good. This past spring, researchers at the University of Missouri School of Journalism hooked 36 students up to sensors and monitored their faces and palms while they navigated Facebook. By measuring physiological responses associated with motivation and emotion, the researchers found that the students derived the most pleasure from activities described as “social searching”: “goal-oriented surveillance” (yikes!) that involved visiting another friend’s profile page, reading their Wall posts, perusing their photos, checking out the events they’d recently attended.
• YouTube - 1955 Wichita U vs Seattle U Men's Basketball Part 1
  the differences are shocking
• Christopher Poole, creator of 4chan on anonymity:
  "People deserve a place to be wrong."
• Jay Bilas: Is UCLA Bruins coach Ben Howland holding back his players? - ESPN
  I have said this before, and it applies now: The Princeton offense is a good offense but it is not some magical system that will win games that other well-run offenses won't. Whether it is motion, flex, reverse action, the triangle offense, a set play offense or the Princeton offense, it matters how the offense is run, not the offense itself. There is nothing inferior about the Princeton offense. But there is nothing superior about it, either.
• How To Raise A Superstar | Wired Science | Wired.com
  This is when they discovered something peculiar: the percent of professional athletes who came from cities of fewer than a half million people was far higher than expected. While approximately 52 percent of the United States population resides in metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 people, such cities only produce 13% of the players in the NHL, 29% of the players in the NBA, 15% of the players in MLB, and 13% of players in the PGA.*
• How to Tell When Your Boss Is Lying: Cool New Study - Bob Sutton
  Using more general words instead of specifics, referring less often to shareholder value, using more extreme superlatives, use the third person more often, don't say "um" as much, swear more

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• What should I expect in a Product Manager interview at Google and how should I prepare? - Quora
  goes through all the interview steps, too detailed to quote
• Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong
  terrible. Given that factual backdrop, you'd think that people would say, "You're right, we made a terrible, terrible error, we investigated the case incorrectly, and it led to this tragic result." But no. Even with the DNA evidence, even though the serial murder-rapist gave a full, detailed confession and provided all kinds of details that no one knew, but the real perpetrator could know, this detective just last week said, "I'm sorry, that's ridiculous, Jeffrey Deskovic is guilty. The only false confession in this whole matter is the false confession given by the serial rape-murderer."
• The Future of Internet Search - Project Syndicate
  To me, the meaning was clear: when people search, they aren't just looking for nouns or information; they are looking for action. They want to book a flight, reserve a table, buy a product, cure a hangover, take a class, fix a leak, resolve an argument, or occasionally find a person, for which Facebook is very handy. They mostly want to find something in order to do something.
• Giving people accurate information about others' misbehavior increases misbehavior
  Social norms etc - if you expect that everyone else is cheating/stealing you do too
• Liberaltarianism and regulation: Swimming and freedom | The Economist
  The park officials in Massachusetts aren't really trying to minimise the risk that you might drown. They're trying to minimise the risk that you might sue. The problem here, as Mr Howard says, isn't simply over-regulation as such. It's a culture of litigiousness and a refusal to accept personal responsibility. When some of the public behave like children, we all get a nanny state.
• Loco-Vores at Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics
  The implicit recommendation seems to be that when you’re choosing a tomato, you should care about all the energy costs. Well, yes. You should. You should care about all those costs. And here are some other things you should care about: How many grapes were sacrificed by growing that California tomato in a place where there might have been a vineyard? How many morning commutes are increased, and by how much, because that New York greenhouse displaces a conveniently located housing development? What useful tasks could those California workers perform if they weren’t busy growing tomatoes? What about the New York workers? What alternative uses were there for the fertilizers and the farming equipment — or better yet, the resources that went into producing those fertilizers and farming equipment — in each location?
• The Fuck It List: opposite of the bucket list
  STUFF I DON’T WANT TO DO, AND WON’T: -ORGANIZE ALL MY DIGITAL PHOTOS -STAY ON TOP OF ALL MY EMAILS -DRINK 8 GLASSES OF WATER A DAY -DO IRON MAN OR CLIMB EVEREST STUFF I WILL NO LONGER TOLERATE: -ALLOW TOXIC PEOPLE IN MY AIR SPACE -NONSENSE STUFF WE HUMANS SHOULD NO LONGER ALLOW: -CNN BLARING IN AIRPORTS/PUBLIC SPACES (SO MANY BETTER OPTIONS!) -NON-STOP CONNECTIVITY– EATING INTO THE SACRED SPACE WHERE INVALUABLE REFLECTING AND THINKING OCCURS. -LETTING ANYONE UNDER AGE 18 DRIVE -RIDICULOUSLY COLD AIR CONDITIONING IN JUST ABOUT EVERY PUBLIC SPACE (MAJOR WASTE OF ENERGY, AS WELL AS UNCOMFORTABLY FREEZING) -5-YEAR PARTY SCHOOLS
• Contradictions/Ongoing : Filippo Minelli
  photos of social networking names, poverty, pretty
• Robin Hanson : Why Nerds Like Games
  One explanation is that nerds want to show off their non-social skills, and so require social games so that there are others who can observe their impressive performance. But nerds seem to prefer more social interaction in their games than having a mere audience requires. Another explanation is that while nerds like to socialize, they are terrified of making social mistakes. This explains why they tend to avoid eye-contact – it is too easy to make the wrong eye contacts. Games let nerds interact socially, yet avoid mistakes via well-defined rules, and a social norm that all legal moves are “fair game.” Role-playing has less well-defined rules, but the norm there is that social mistakes are to be blamed on characters, not players.
• Anne Holland's Which Test Won - A/B Test & Multivariate Testing Education for Marketing Professionals
  anne holland posts results of A/B tests on this blog. interesting finding: "We think it’s interesting that Version A won even though its ‘Download Now’ button was way below the fold. Perhaps the authoritative quote made a big impact. Kudos to YNAB for testing their product tour page. This shows you really should be testing every page that can get you more conversions."
• Blind soccer
  Amazing, inspiring
• My Kushy New Job: Wells Tower's Experience at a Marijuana Coffee Shop
  writer goes to amsterdam to see what retail pot looks like. When Jason asks me before my first shift, "So, you did your homework? You know your way around the menu?" I say, "Oh, sure." But what really happened during my tasting session was that I got very worried that someone in the coffee shop might try to talk to me, so I sprinted back to my hotel and stood in front of the elevator for thirty terrified seconds, praying that I wouldn't have to cope with the desk clerk bidding me good evening. At last I made it to the third floor and was so relieved to reach the sanctuary of my room that I spent twenty minutes moonwalking the carpet and singing Andy Gibb's "I Just Want to Be Your Everything" before collapsing on the bed, where I lay awake until dawn, quaking with the conviction that every decision I've made since birth has been corrupt, selfish, and wrong.
• Field Guide To Aircraft Boneyards
  large numbers of planes sitting empty in western deserts
• Inimitable | Dictionary.com
  incapable of being imitated or copied; surpassing imitation; matchless. Like this word
• Great introduction to why you should want to live forever: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Chapter 39: Pretending to be Wise, Pt 1
  great introduction to a counterintuitive idea, that you should want to live as long as possible. I am appreciating this format more and more "All right," Harry said coldly. "I'll answer your original question, then. You asked why Dark Wizards are afraid of death. Pretend, Headmaster, that you really believed in souls. Pretend that anyone could verify the existence of souls at any time, pretend that nobody cried at funerals because they knew their loved ones were still alive. Now can you imagine destroying a soul? Ripping it to shreds so that nothing remains to go on its next great adventure? Can you imagine what a terrible thing that would be, the worst crime that had ever been committed in the history of the universe, which you would do anything to prevent from happening even once? Because that's what Death really is - the annihilation of a soul!"

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• Youtube - Hide your kids, hide your wife
  Funny song
  (tags: humor)

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