September 2009
44 posts
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Don’t Blame Flu Shots for All Ills →
Sometimes a serious illness after a flu shot is just a coincidence, and the decline of professional journalism has made that harder to communicate to society. (N.Y. Times)
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Playing Chicken With Suicide Bombers →
Is it time to pass a ‘preventive detention’ statute for terrorism? (N.Y. Times)
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“Germany is known for both its innovative engineering and its sausages.”
– Nicholas Kulish reporting on the Grillwalker, a one-man mobile sausage-cooking machine in Ovens on Feet Beckon Germans to Bratwurst. (N.Y. Times)
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“People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are...”
– President Roosevelt as quoted in the movie review for, Capitalism: A Love Story - Greed Is Good? He Begs to Differ. (N.Y. Times)
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Coming Out in Middle School →
LGBT folk are coming out earlier and earlier. Here are their stories. (N.Y. Times)
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Humans Prefer Cockiness to Expertise
It turns out that presentation does matter when it comes to getting advice. According to a study by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University, people will pick the advice of a confident person even if it’s less accurate. (Psychology Today)
Prof. Gregory Berns of Emory University may have the reason why this happens in financial decision-making. His study finds that parts of the brain that...
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Are Your Friends Making You Fat? →
Friends of your friends may have more influence on you than you thought. (N.Y. Times)
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So Much Food. So Much Hunger. →
Theoretically, there is enough food to feed everyone in the world. However, a record one billion people go hungry due to war, climate change, poverty, and famine—mainly the “lack of give-a-damn” according to David Beckmann, president of the antihunger group Bread for the World. (N.Y. Times)
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“There is something wrong when our country is willing to consider spending more...”
– Thomas L. Friedman in Real Men Tax Gas (N.Y. Times)
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Plugged-In Age Feeds a Hunger for Electricity →
Electronic gadgets, especially big flat screen TV’s, have offset the gains in appliance efficiency over the past 30 years. Electronics manufacturers have successfully lobbied against increases in efficiency. As a result, hundreds of potentially polluting power plants will have to be built around the world. (N.Y. Times)
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The Recession Is Over — for Now →
The same basic structures that led to the current recession are still in place. We’ve done nothing to prevent the crisis from recurring. (N.Y. Times)
Doing the same thing expecting different results is insanity.
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“Choice is inherently stressful, and women are being driven to distraction.”
– Marcus Buckingham, as quoted in Blue Is the New Black, on why women are getting unhappier. Buckingham is a former Gallup researcher who has a new book out called “Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently.” (N.Y. Times)
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Bristol Mountain Flies in New High Speed Lift
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Bristol Mountain, my hometown ski resort, just installed another high-speed lift, which I’m really excited about. The best part of this news footage is watching the 5,000 pound posts fly through the air at about 2:10 into the video. It looks like they’re levitating. (YNN Rochester)
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“If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.”
– Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor for Alameda County, California (sounding a bit like Big Brother). The government is accelerating the rate of DNA collection by going after arrestees who are still legally innocent. (N.Y. Times Upfront Magazine)
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New York’s Proposed Smoking Ban Rouses Tolerance →
New York City has proposed to ban smoking in public parks. Public sentiment is against it (rightfully so). (N.Y. Times)
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“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
– Kevan Olesan leaving a comment on Larks, Owls and Hummingbirds by Olivia Judson (N.Y. Times)
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If David Lynch directed Dirty Dancing... →
This is the version of ‘Dirty Dancing’ I want to see! (YouTube)
Insurers Shun Multitasking Speech Devices →
Those who’ve lost or never had the ability to speak, must use $8000 specialized computer speech synthesizers because insurance companies won’t pay for $1000 multitasking ones, like netbooks or the iPhone, for fear that patients will use them to browse the web or play a games. (N.Y. Times)
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When a Parent’s Love Comes With Conditions →
Conditional love can be harmful to children, new studies find. The key for parents is ‘autonomy support:’
explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.
Regarding psychologists who fear that unconditional love will...
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A Journalist’s ‘Actual Responsibility’ →
What journalists are really for. (N.Y. Times)
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On Wall Street, Obama Pushes Stricter Finance... →
President Obama flew to Wall Street to urge the financial industry to learn the lessons of the recession and accept new regulations. (N.Y. Times)
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Judge Rejects Settlement Over Merrill Bonuses →
I hearby nominate Jed S. Rakoff for Man of the Week. He’s the Manhattan judge who rejected a settlement that let Bank of America off with a $33 million slap on the wrist for a case involving $3.6 billion in bonuses that were paid by Merrill Lynch late last year, just as that firm was about to be merged with Bank of America. (N. Y. Times)
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Ikea Tries to Build a Case Against Russian Graft →
Ikea, the Swedish retailer with stores in Russia, has resorted to the courts to fight Russian corruption, but it’s finding those Russian courts may be just as corrupt. (N.Y. Times)
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A Year After a Cataclysm, Little Change on Wall... →
Wall Street is still a wild west that needs to be tamed. It’s incredible that depository banks are still allowed to participate in high risk, opaque investments like derivatives. (N.Y. Times)
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“I went to a few meetings of “4A” (Alcoholics and Agnostics in A.A.),...”
– Roger Ebert comes out as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous in My Name is Roger, and I’m an Alcoholic (Chicago Sun-Times)
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Motorola: A Lesson on How Not to Launch a Product →
Motorola, a Chicago hometown favorite, really needs to hit one out of the park. They’ve been sinking since the Razr fell out of favor, but they really screwed up their latest product launch, the CLIQ and its new operating system called MotoBlur, a version of Google’s Android. It’s very disappointing and is a bad sign for its future. My pet peeve: Don’t ever call a product a...
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Seafood Sustainability Guide →
Find out if your favorite seafood is sustainably farmed in a guide (PDF) that you can print out and put in your wallet.
You can even send Blue Ocean Institute a text message the next time you’re dining out to find out about a specific species. Text “FISH” and the species name to 30644 for instant sustainability info. when you need it. (Blue Ocean Institute via N.Y. Times)
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Big Food vs. Big Insurance →
Obesity-related disease hangs heavy on our healthcare system, and no one is powerful enough to face down the agribusiness industry. Maybe we should pit the insurance industry them. (N.Y. Times)
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“Stop obsessing about the economy, you’re scaring the children.”
– From a billboard I saw this afternoon. It gave me a chuckle. For more on the ad campaign, see Schott’s Vocab in the N.Y. Times.
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“The entire Republican Party has decided that it is in favor of absolutely...”
– Bob Herbert in It’s Time to Get Help (N.Y. Times)
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Preparing for a Stressful Flu Season →
Sage advice on the flus: seasonal flu and H1N1. (N.Y. Times)
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World Financial Leaders Pledge to Continue... →
We’re still in economic trouble. (N.Y. Times)
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The Damage of Vietnam, Four Decades Later →
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is still ruining some Vietnam veteran’s lives some 40 years later because they were never previously diagnosed. There is a movement to try to diagnose soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan earlier. (N.Y. Times)
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How Many People Will Die from H1N1? →
An H1N1 pandemic may help to get health care reform passed, but many children may die from it. (Esquire)
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“Throughout the industrialized world, there are a handful of these areas where...”
– Nicholas Kristof in Health Care That Works (N.Y. Times)
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