• Habit vs. Discipline « Autocatalyst
  I’m going to steal the adage of Hanlon’s Razor, and apply it here: Never attribute to discipline that which is adequately explained by habit. (Hanlon’s Razor states: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.)
• Did Fred Smith (Fed-ex founder) really make payroll one time by taking his remaining cash to Vegas and playing blackjack? - Quora
  By mid-July our funds were so meager that on Friday we were down to about $5,000 in the checking account, while we needed $24,000 for the jet fuel payment... When I arrived back in Memphis on Monday morning, much to my surprise, the bank balance stood at nearly $32,000. I asked Fred where the funds had come from, and he responded, "The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000." I said, "You mean you took our last $5,000-- how could you do that?" He shrugged his shoulders and said, "What difference does it make? Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldn't have flown anyway." Fred's luck held again. It was not much, but it came at a critical time and kept us in business for another week."
• What are the best ways to prepare for interviews with top-tier management consulting firms? - Quora

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Intrade Prediction Markets - Will Congress allow the Bush tax cuts to sunset?
  1 in 6 chance, so not really. I think lots of the CBO projections during the healthcare debate assumed tax rates would revert to their pre-2003 levels.
• What Happened to Your Parachute?
  story behind popular job hunting book "And, over the past three decades, Bolles's preferred method has remained remarkably consistent: Sending out résumés doesn't work. Neither does answering ads. Employment agencies? No way. What does work is figuring out what you like to do and what you do well -- and then finding a place that needs people like you. Contact organizations that you're interested in, even if they don't have known vacancies. (Bolles actually coined the now commonplace term "informational interview.") Pester friends and family members for leads. Once you get in the door of the employer of your dreams, show how you can solve its problems."
• Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers, Study Finds - TIME
  But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who were not current drinkers, regardless of whether they used to be alcoholics, second highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.
• This Chaplain Is Protected By God—and by an Atheist--at War - WSJ.com
  an army chaplain in afghanistan has an atheist assistant, good article. "The chaplain was struck both by RP2 Chute's command of the Book of Revelation, and his refusal to take it seriously. "He's familiar with the Christian doctrine, but he chooses not to believe it," says the chaplain, a slender-faced, soft-spoken man with a fringe of gray in his black hair. "That's what I find puzzling."

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Culture Change - Peak Oil is History
  discussion of some of the issues involved with peak oil. given the shocks that have accompanied increasing oil production, shocks in decline likely instead of smooth decline. large potential for economic collapse, need to prepare
• Ajax Forms with jQuery | Trevor Davis
  tutorial, will implement this soon on cardboardsmile
• Readable Feeds
  (tags: rssproject)
• Pricing & Signup for ClickTale
  (tags: ganguly)
• Online Python Tutor: Write Python code online and single-step through its execution
  pretty cool, steps through program online
• How do I write so much, you ask? Well, glad you asked - | SebastianMarshall.com: Strategy, Philosophy, Self-Discipline, Science. Victory.
  The equal-odds rule says that the average publication of any particular scientist does not have any statistically different chance of having more of an impact than any other scientist’s average publication. In other words, those scientists who create publications with the most impact, also create publications with the least impact, and when great publications that make a huge impact are created, it is just a result of “trying” enough times. This is an indication that chance plays a larger role in scientific creativity than previously theorized. So I read that, and I’m like – whoa. You know Neo in the Matrix? Whoa. If you want to make excellent stuff, you need to make a lot of stuff. If you want to make a lot of stuff, you’ll make a lot of crap. If you want to make excellent stuff, you need to make a lot of crap. And my personal opinion here - And that’s okay, because you get judged by your best work, not your bad work.
• Down for everyone or just me?
  IS a website down for everyone or is it a local problem
• Google Code Labs - Google Code
  cool google tools
  (tags: APIs google)
• How To Tell Who Is Influencing Whom in a Group Discussion
  The question Pan and co try to answer at each point in these discussions is: who is going to speak next. Humans listening to these discussions get this right about half the time. Presumably, they are able to use various cues such as the topic of conversation and the inferred emotional state of each speaker. Pan and co's algorithm does significantly better than this, correctly predicting the next speaker between 55 and 67 per cent of the time. And get this: it does it using nothing but the volume of speech to determine the patterns of influence between individuals.
• BonBon Buttons - Sweet CSS3 buttons

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Node.js for Server Newbs - David Trejo's Thoughts
  web server for beginners
• A Safety Net for Global Capitalism: Inside Munich Re, the World's Risk Center - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
  awesome article on a german reinsurer, who computes the probabilities of everything. would like to work at that place just to know what the odds are
• Planning on giving to a microfinance organization? Try these ones
  GiveWell analysis of microfinance charities
• The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution | The Economist
  Three forces trying to pull the Internet apart: Governments want more access to browsing history, email messages. IT companies might fragment into digital territories they can control, limit access to other parts of internet (the "cloud," I think). Network owners might try to segregate traffic, sending some traffic faster and some traffic slower
• Free Range: Naked : The New Yorker
  I wouldn’t have recognized him on the street and I didn’t know his name, but I knew him, or at least knew his body, and knew this odd habit of his. To put it in social-media terms, it was as if @weirdneighbor were tweeting, “I like playing piano in the nude. Whatever.” Because of the slant of the sun and the size of my windows, I don’t think he could see me, so our relationship, as it were, was less like Facebook, where the exchange is mutual, and more like Twitter: in other words, I was “following” him, but he wasn’t following me.
• If I Taught Greg Mankiw's Seminar, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
  8. Tyler Cowen, The Age of the Infovore. This would replace Landsburg in the category I think of as "economists outside the box." Many alternatives here, none exactly right. What I really want is The Best of Robin Hanson, a collection of six essays (any more and the students' heads would explode), but that book doesn't exist.
• First virtual school in Mass. opens Thursday - Boston.com
  The school also plans to enroll students who may have suffered from bullying, young athletes who spend a lot of time traveling, children from military families who tend to move often and students who don't feel challenged at traditional schools. The school is being funded as any other public school in the state. School districts that have students attending the school will have to pay Greenfield up to $5,000 per student.
• Google Checkout API
  how to add google shopping cart to your site
• BBC News - Charles Darwin's ecological experiment on Ascension isle
  Such ecosystems normally develop over million of years through a slow process of co-evolution. By contrast, the Green Mountain cloud forest was cobbled together by the Royal Navy in a matter of decades. Dr Wilkinson exclaimed: "This is really exciting!" "What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error."
• Scientist at Work - Debunking Myths of the Medical World - NYTimes.com
  Dr. Redelmeier’s unusual approach goes hand in hand with some pronounced personality quirks. His e-mails, which are legendary among their recipients, are written as lists, with a number assigned to each thought. Dr. Redelmeier does this, he said, in order to focus on the content of a message rather than get distracted by grammar, punctuation and syntax.
• BPS Research Digest: 9 evidence-based study tips
  Adopt a growth mindset, sleep well, nap lying down for < 30 mins, forgive yourself for procrastinating, test yourself (not immediately following studying), pace your studies (review frequently in short bursts), beware vivid examples, get handouts prior to the lecture, believe in yourself
• notironic.com - Things that are not ironic.
  List of things people call "ironic" that are actually bad luck, coincidence, sarcastic, or hypocritical - in other words not ironic.
• Web packets in flight
  How much data gets sent between your computer and Youtube when you request a video, and how fast
• Want to be a profitable baseball team? Have a low salary and lose all your games
  n both books we observed that payroll and wins in baseball do not have a strong correlation. Specifically, a team’s payroll only explains about 20% of a team’s wins. This means that it takes more than dollars to win in baseball. And this means that simply taking money from the rich teams and giving it to the poor teams is not going to transform baseball’s lower classes into winners. The Pirates appear to be agreeing with this observation. Rather than spend all the revenue sharing money – which may or may not lead to many more wins – the Pirates have decided to just keep part of this money as profits.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Kauffman Labs | Entrepreneurship Education
  (tags: jobs)
• Haidt, Graham et al. - Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology by Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, Jesse Graham, Peter Ditto, Jonathan Haidt
  Libertarians are an increasingly vocal ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they are understudied compared to liberals and conservatives. Much of what is known about libertarians is based on the writing of libertarian intellectuals and political leaders, rather than surveying libertarians in the general population. Across three studies, 15 measures, and a large web-based sample (N = 152,239), we sought to understand the morality of selfdescribed libertarians. We found that, compared to liberals and conservatives, libertarians show 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of psychological predispositions in the organization of political attitudes.
• Jonathan Haidt - Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality by Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham
  excellent, will blog soon: "Most academic efforts to understand morality and ideology come from theorists who constrain the moral domain to issues of harm and fairness. For such theorists, conservative beliefs are puzzles requiring non-moral explanations. In contrast, we present the "five foundations theory of intuitive ethics," which broadens the moral domain to match the anthropological literature on morality. We extend the theory by integrating it with a review of the sociological constructs of community, authority, and sacredness, as formulated by Emile Durkheim and others. We present data supporting the theory, which also shows that liberals may have a special difficulty in understanding the morality of conservatives. We suggest that what liberals see as a non-moral motivation for system justification may be better described as a moral motivation to protect society, groups, and the structures and constraints that are often (though not always) beneficial for individuals."
• Will Wilkinson on conservatives
  The conservative conception of American identity is so selective and so specific that it tends to suggest to its adherents that many (maybe even most!) Americans aren’t real Americans, or are Americans who betray real American ideals.
• Sarah Palin the Sound and the Fury | Politics | Vanity Fair
  devastating palin takedown. too bad the audience we need to persuade doesn't read vanity fair After starting her new career as a national figure, Palin disengaged from the community. When in Wasilla, she rarely leaves the house. At her favorite coffee shop, Mocha Moose, Palin has been seen only once in the past three months. On those occasions when she goes to Church on the Rock, she usually arrives late, leaves early, and sits in the back. For runs to Target, she waits until it’s almost closing time. She has never darkened the doorway of Wasilla’s one independent bookstore, Pandemonium Booksellers, which took part in her Going Rogue book signing at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center. Sarah’s mother, Sally Heath, is a charter member of the Valley Republican Women’s Club, which sells a batch of Palin-family recipes for $5, but Palin has not been to any of their meetings since resigning as governor.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• The bowling pin strategy cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog
  Any company where the value's in the network - focus on one specific area and then expand. Example - Facebook at Harvard
• Whites in Shining Armor
  when there are problems in the third world, whites in shining armor come to the rescue. Local charities and NGO's get no coverage
• YouTube - Oxxford Clothes - Made in the USA
  Promotional video for luxury clothing company in the US. Great example of how to show, not tell, quality - show the tools, the care, the attention to detail, instead of just showing great suits
• Is it often a surprise who turns out to be an NBA superstar? - Barking up the wrong tree
  This article explores the dilemma of choosing talent using NBA data from 1987 to 2003. We find there is much uncertainty in selecting talent. If superstars are found, they are usually identified early. However, more false positives exist than correct decisions with high draft picks. Our results suggest the dilemma of choosing talent is not so much a winner's curse but more like a purchase of a lottery ticket. Most times you lose, but, if you are going to win, you must buy a ticket.
• Unhear it - get that damn song out of your head!
  Plays a random song to unfix songs from your head. Need a mobile version though, if I'm on my computer i can find another song
• How to Focus - A Healthy Information Diet - InfoVegan.com
  Build your focus like an endurance athlete. He uses interval training - slowly building the length of focused time. Recommends ditching second monitor, use Spaces to filter distracting things. Sets up Chrome to have no more than 5 tabs open at one time (oldest one closes if you open a 6th tab). Ditches the mouse (i'm getting close to this point as well).
  (tags: focus productivity)
• Easiest Online Backup Service - Backblaze
  $5 month, unlimited, almost got bought last week. Looks cool - like the FAQ on the frontpage

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Tech startups are changing the way workers are screened and hired. - By Jill Priluck - Slate Magazine
  In a hiring climate in which companies find talented workers by seeing how they already perform, the RethinkDB founders turned to sites like Github.com and stackoverflow.com, where programmers collaborate and work on special projects. "You can see the code being written and how technically accurate they are," said Glukhovsky, who inhabits a world where 95 percent of coders can't complete basic computer-science tasks. Now, a few months from releasing their first product, RethinkDB is up to six people, a mix of full-timers and interns, both senior and junior.
• Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Get to Know an Internet Commenter.
  get to know an internet commenter is one of my favorite mcsweeney's. this guy might fail a turing test
• Low social class women's faces show age more quickly than other women
• How Our Professional Elites Are Hired - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
  The prize firms are after: talented people, to be sure, but also the ability to tell clients, "We can put together a team for your company that is entirely made up of Ivy League graduates." Apparently this is enormously appealing to companies, which makes sense, given that law firms and especially consulting firms are often used as a kind of responsibility deferral system, allowing managers to fall back on some variation on, Yes, technically I approved this consequential decision that didn't actually work out for the company, but as you can see we hired the most prestigious consulting firm in America -- a whole room full of Harvard graduates! -- who affirmed that this was the best option.
• Is the Federal Government Broke? Posner - The Becker-Posner Blog
  Morgan Stanley’s report estimates that the ratio of current U.S. public debt to realistically realizable tax revenues is 3.58 to 1, which is the highest by a large margin of the countries in the report’s list; only Greece comes close (3.12 to 1). But America has certain advantages, such as a younger population and a more rapid rate of economic growth, and as a result its ratio of net worth to GDP is in the middle of Morgan Stanley’s list of countries—but it is strongly negative, as are the ratios of all the countries in the list (Italy, surprisingly, being at the top, and Greece, unsurprisingly, at the bottom). According to Morgan Stanley’s calculation (which obviously is merely suggestive, as the report emphasizes, because of the uncertainty of the future), America’s net worth is negative, and this negative net worth is eight times larger than our GDP. This means that the net present value of the government’s liabilities, minus assets, is approximately $120 trillion.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• 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

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• 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

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• 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

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.