Jim Rogers on Ben Bernanke

I saw Bernanke testifying before Congress, and he said that if an American buys only American products in American currency he is not affected by the decline in the U.S. dollar. I couldn't believe the man said that! I was looking at him to see - Is he lying? Is he just using government propaganda? Or does the man just not know?

He's supposed to be an economist, and he doesn't know how the economy works! Let's say you only buy American tires. Well, if the price of foreign tires goes up because the dollar goes down, the price of American tires is going to go up too. American companies are going to raise the prices if the competition goes higher. And if the dollar goes down, the price of the rubber in the tires is going to go higher. The price of oil, wheat, copper, everything is going to go higher if the dollar goes down. So it's another signal to get out of the dollar.

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How to Sell your Art

by John Baldessari

We lose a dollar on every sale, but we make it up in volume.

from Carl Howe at Seeking Alpha:

Wharton Business School professor J. Scott Armstrong now has data that demonstrates that market share maximization strategies provide poorer long-term business results than profit maximization strategies, both in the lab and in the field. They cite the video game business as one of the worse offenders in chasing the wrong metrics:

The harm that competitor-oriented objectives can cause the companies that pursue them was the subject of a December 4, 2006, article in The New Yorker by James Surowiecki, the magazine's business writer. Surowiecki describes how Sony (SNE), with its PlayStation 3, and Microsoft (MSFT), maker of the Xbox 360, are beating each other's brains out trying to capture the biggest share of the video-game market. Meanwhile, third-place Nintendo (NTDOY.PK), with its new game console called Wii (pronounced "wee"), has quietly become the most profitable game console company in Japan.

Nintendo "has not just survived out of the spotlight; it has thrived," Surowiecki writes. "It has $5 billion in the bank from years of solid profits, and this past year, though it has spent heavily on the launch of the Wii, it made close to a billion dollars in profit and saw its stock price rise by 65%. Sony's game division, by contrast, barely eked out a profit and Microsoft's reportedly lost money. Who knew bringing up the rear could be so lucrative?"

Wharton Debunks Market Share Myth

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The law is now an asset class

The law is now an asset class
Patrick Hosking:

The notion of litigation as a separate asset class is a novel one. It's hard to imagine fund managers one day allotting a bit of their portfolio to third-party lawsuits, alongside shares, bonds, property and hedge funds.

But some wealthy investors are starting to dabble in lawsuit investment, bankrolling some or all of the heavy upfront costs in return for a share of the damages in the event of a win.

The London-managed hedge fund MKM Longboat last month revealed plans to invest $100million (£50.5million) to finance European lawsuits. Today a new company, Juridica, floats on AIM, having raised £80million to make litigation bets.

Juridica will make investments in ongoing legal claims, mostly in the US, and loans to law firms to finance their costs in pursuing claims.

Profiting from other people's lawsuits, a practice known as champerty, is illegal in some jurisdictions and risks accusations of ambulance-chasing, but Juridica is concentrating on backing business plaintiffs, where the practice is better established and more accepted.

Xmas story - Angel In The Post Office

Craigslist -

AN ANGEL IN THE POST OFFICE

---

Date: 2007-11-23, 10:55PM MST


This is one of the kindest things I've ever experienced. I have no way to know who sent it, but there is a kind soul working in the dead letter office of the US postal service. Our 14 year old dog, Abbey, died last month. The day after she died, my 4 year old daughter Meredith was crying and talking about how much she missed Abbey. She asked if we could write a letter to God so that when Abbey got to heaven, God would recognize her. I told her that I thought we could so she dictated these words:

Dear God, Will you please take care of my dog? She died yesterday and is with you in heaven. I miss her very much. I am happy that you let me have her as my dog even though she got sick. I hope you will play with her. She likes to play with balls and to swim. I am sending a picture of her so when you see her you will know that she is my dog. I really miss her.

Love, Meredith.

We put the letter in an envelope with a picture of Abbey and Meredith and addressed it to God/Heaven. We put our return address on it. Then Meredith pasted several stamps on the front of the envelope because she said it would take lots of stamps to get the letter all the way to heaven. That afternoon she dropped it into the letter box at the post office. A few days later, she asked if God had gotten the letter yet. I told her that I thought He had.

Yesterday, there was a package wrapped in gold paper on our front porch addressed, 'To Meredith' in an unfamiliar hand. Meredith opened it. Inside was a book by Mr. Rogers called, 'When a Pet Dies.' Taped to the inside front cover was the letter we had written to God in its opened envelope. On the opposite page was the picture of Abbey & Meredith and this note:

Dear Meredith,

Abbey arrived safely in heaven. Having the picture was a big help. I recognized Abbey right away. Abbey isn't sick anymore. Her spirit is here with me just like it stays in your heart. Abbey loved being your dog. Since we don't need our bodies in heaven, I don't have any pockets to keep your picture in, so I am sending it back to you in this little book for you to keep and have something to remember Abbey by. Thank you for the beautiful letter and thank your mother for helping you write it and sending it to me. What a wonderful mother you have. I picked her especially for you. I send my blessings every day and remember that I love you very much. By the way, I am wherever there is love.

Love, God

Boredom is so yesterday

Free college lectures by the best teachers.

Education evolves.

iTunes University has arrived, giving higher education institutions an ingenious way to get audio and video content out to their students. Presentations, performances, lectures, demonstrations, debates, tours, archival footage — school is about to become even more inspiring.

More of a very good thing.

Designed to be completely intuitive, iTunes U is based on the iTunes Store, where millions of people already get their music, movies, and TV shows. Now there’s an area of the iTunes Store devoted entirely to education, where it’s easy to search thousands of audio and video files from schools across the country.

DNA dating site predicts chemical romance

By Elsa Wenzel – Dec 17, 20o7

The first dating service to use lab-based genetic profiling launched online last week. Scientific Match promises to pair up people who will be physically attracted to each other because their DNA is different.

Well-matched couples will like each others' natural scents, have more fun in bed, and bear healthier children than those who are genetically similar, the company claims.

The service, available only in the Boston area, charges $1,995 for a year-long subscription.

Members swab their cheeks and send in saliva samples. A lab spends two weeks analyzing the immune system genes, and then the company matches individuals with genetic profiles that are unalike.

"We look at six specific genetic reference points on DNA, and none of those six can match to make a match," Holzle explained.

He was inspired by a well-known "sweaty T-shirt" study of a dozen years ago, in which biologists found that women liked the smell of dirty shirts worn by men who were immunologically dissimilar to themselves.

$731 billion dollars is a lot of money

• States have promised at least $2.73 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits for public employees over the next three decades, but have set aside only $2 trillion for pension payments, and only $11 billion is available for benefits, the Pew Center on States report released today said.
• See, look at the pie chart:
  
• States still need to come up with about $731 billion to meet their promises.
• The Pew Center says that's a conservative figure that does not include all costs for teachers and local government employees.
• The number of people 65 and older is projected to increase by 80% between 2010 and 2030, the report said.
• Of course, by 2030 about 71 million, or one out of every five people, will be over 65, so any funding shortfall can be easily managed by simply confiscating huge portions of the earnings of anyone under 35.

Legend of the Rothschild

From a Wikipedia entry on Rothschild:

In the 19th century a legend began which falsely accuses him of having used his early knowledge of victory at the Battle of Waterloo to speculate on the Stock Exchange and make a vast fortune.^[6]

Frederic Morton relates the story thus:^[7]

To the Rothschilds, [England's] chief financial agents, Waterloo brought a many million pound scoop.
... a Rothschild agent ... jumped into a boat at Ostend ... Nathan Rothschild ... let his eye fly over the lead paragraphs. A moment later he was on his way to London (beating Wellington's envoy by many hours) to tell the government that Napoleon had been crushed: but his news was not believed, because the government had just heard of the English defeat at Quatre Bras. Then he proceeded to the Stock Exchange.
Another man in his position would have sunk his work into consols, already weak because of Quatre Bra. But this was Nathan Rothschild. He leaned against "his" pillar. He did not invest. He sold. He dumped consols.
...Consols dropped still more. "Rothschild knows," the whisper rippled through the 'Change. "Waterloo is lost."
Nathan kept on selling ... consols plummeted—until, a split second before it was too late, Nathan suddenly bought a giant parcel for a song. Moments afterwards the great news broke, to send consols soaring.
We cannot guess the number of hopes and savings wiped out by this engineered panic.

Research by the Rothschild family^[8] has shown that this legend originated in an anti-semitic French pamphlet in 1846, was embellished by John Reeves in 1887 in The Rothschilds: the Financial Rulers of Nations and then repeated in other later popular accounts, such as that of Morton. Many of the alleged facts stated are incorrect. For example, it has been shown that the size of the market in government bonds at the time would not have enabled a scenario producing a profit of anything near £1 million.

"Not me! Not me!"

Summary of Alan 'Not-Me' Greenspan Strikes Again:

My mother said the same person caused every mishap around our house. That person stuck a screwdriver in the TV, broke the talking robot, hid the dirty dishes under the fridge. Who was it? Not Me. I used to always say when accused: "Not me! Not me!"

In Greenspan's WSJ column about subprime, he found fault pretty much everywhere but in his own actions in explaining the current subprime-related credit problems in the U.S.. It was glasnost and the end of the Cold War; it was emerging economies; it was low-priced exports; it was market euphoria, etc. It just wasn't Greenspan.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/57212-alan-not-me-greenspan-strikes-again?source=financialcontent

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The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

Many freeware products are as good as or better than their commercial alternatives. This website lists 46 of the best.

46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

1 Best Free Web Browser	32 Best Free Search Toolbar
2 Best Free Anti-Virus Software	33 Best Free Download Manager
3 Best Free Adware/Spyware/Scumware Remover	34 Best Free Web Site Ripper
4 Best Free Browser Protection Utility	35 Best Free Download/Upload Meter
5 Best Free Firewall	36 Best Free TCP Settings Tweaker
6 Best Free Trojan Scanner/Trojan Remover	37 Best Free File Cleaner
7 Best Free Rootkit Scanner/Remover	38 Best Free Resource Meter
8 Best Free Intrusion Detection Utility	39 Best Free Sticky Notes Utility
9 Best Free Anonymous Surfing Service	40 Best Free Secure Erase Utility
10 Best Free Software Suite	41 Best Free Registry Editor
11 Best Free File Manager	42 Best Free Process Viewer
12 Best Free Email Client	43 Best Free System Information Utility
13 Best Free Web Mail Accessory	44 Best Free Search and Replace Utility
14 Best Free Clipboard Replacement Utility	45 Best Free Outliner
15 Best Free HTML Editor	46 Best Free Rename Utility
16 Best Free Spam Filter for the Average User
17 Best Free Spam Filter for Experienced Users
18 Best Free Popup Stopper

Give the money you save to the charity of your choice!

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Calling all psychotic shoppers.

The holiday season is the busiest shopping time of the year. In fact, more than 147 million shoppers hit the stores on Black Friday weekend this year according to a survey by the National Retail Federation. And annually during this time, economists pay close attention to the shopping trends.

One such economist, Dr. Paul Albanese, Kent State University associate professor of marketing and author of The Personality Continuum and Consumer Behavior, has taken it a step further. In his current research, Albanese examined shopping behavior and classified it into four levels of personality development: Normal, neurotic, primitive and psychotic.

“Normal consumers spend less than they earn and save for future purchases they cannot afford in the future, while neurotic shoppers spend an excessive amount of time shopping, often not buying anything,” says Albanese. In addition, he found that compulsive shoppers usually fall within the primitive personality type, while psychotic personalities go overboard in spending, usually resulting in serious financial and legal problems.


Kent State University

Accidental Landlord

The Sun Sentinel from Florida:

“An accidental landlord last year would have been called a
real estate investor. But now that there are so few home buyers, many
investors are renting their homes. The apartment rental professionals
say the accidental landlords are a pretty aggressive group, too.”

“‘They’re competing with the [apartment] complexes even if it means they only get 50 percent of what it costs them to own that unit,’ said Jack McCabe of McCabe Research and Consulting, a Deerfield Beach firm that specializes in apartment market research. ‘You can rent a $325,000 or $400,000 house for $1,800.’”

“By comparison, the monthly payment — principal and interest, plus estimated taxes and insurance — on a $300,000, 30-year mortgage at 6 percent, would cost you $2,526.”

Sun Sentinel Article

incompetent

Doctors' hearts are in the right place, but their behaviour leaves a little to be desired - particularly when it comes to reporting colleagues' incompetence.

So says a survey of physicians' attitudes led by Eric Campbell at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. His team surveyed more than 3500 US doctors, probing their attitudes to a professional charter introduced in 2002. More than 90 per cent of the 1662 doctors who responded agreed with statements about improving access to healthcare, managing conflicts of interest and regulating the medical profession.

However, when asked about their own behaviour, things looked less rosy. For instance, 24 per cent of physicians said they would refer patients to an imaging facility in which they had invested, without revealing this financial conflict. And 45 per cent of those who had encountered an incompetent colleague within the previous three years had failed to report their concerns (Annals of Internal Medicine, vol 147, p 795).

link to article

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From $130,000 Annual Income to Foreclosure

We all know that foreclosures are on the rise throughout the nation. Most people realize that a foreclosure means that you will lose your home. But how does this process look like? In reality, the foreclosure process is a drawn out and lengthy ordeal. It is a gut wrenching and personal nightmare for most folks. So this article is a story about a couple. A couple who is the poster representation of the housing boom and now bust. In this article, we will examine their profession, income, and monthly budget. Amazingly, folks are very upfront when they are making lots of money but go into clandestine mode when they are having financial difficulties.

the-foreclosure-story-what-does-the-process-look-like

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Temporary 'Pleasure' Marriages

Lust in Lebanon, Low Pay Lead to Temporary 'Pleasure' Marriages
Dec. 4 (Bloomberg)

Firaz, a 24-year-old Shiite Muslim, felt suspended between lust and too little money to afford matrimony.Enter the "pleasure'' marriage, a way-station in tough times on the path to the real thing.

"I had sexual desires and was looking for a girl,'' says Firaz, who consulted a religious scholar before making his first tryst. "Pleasure marriage is a way I could feel good about it.'' This particular pleasure -- in Arabic, mutaah -- is a version of common-law matrimony, a practice that's become familiar in the Middle East.

Relatively high unemployment and low pay make it hard for many 20-somethings to finance the requirements of formal marriage -- opulent wedding, gifts of gold for the bride, furniture, an apartment -- so they're delaying official unions.Mutaah, or temporary wedlock, provides the intimate benefits of marriage without the costs -- and, because it is religiously sanctioned in Shiite Islam, without guilt. Firaz says he's had several such affiliations, for as long as a month and short as a week. He keeps his last name to himself to protect women he's been with.

During the past three decades, first-marriage ages for Middle Eastern men have risen from the mid-to-late 20s to over 30, depending on the country, and from the early 20s to mid-20s for women.

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Belly Dancers Bulldozed by Yuppies

Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Sukru Punduk says his family has lived in Sulukule, Istanbul's Gypsy quarter, for six centuries and he won't be driven out by laptop-carrying, stroller-pushing yuppies. The city plans to bulldoze Sulukule to make way for 620 townhouses as part of its effort to spruce up the area by 2010, when Istanbul will be the European Capital of Culture.

Residents of Sulukule, the setting for the belly dancing and Gypsy fight scenes in the 1963 James Bond film ``From Russia With Love,'' were left behind by Turkey's economic boom over the past five years. Their average monthly income of $250 is about half the national figure.

Homeowners are being offered cash compensation. Those who can afford to stay in Sulukule will get 15-year loans to cover the additional cost of one of the new homes, Demir said. Tenants in the Gypsy quarter will get loans to buy less expensive apartments about 40 kilometers (25 miles) away on the fringes of Istanbul.

click for whole Gypsy story

James Thurber Quotations

"Nowadays, men lead lives of noisy desperation."

"Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?"

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."

"He who hesitates is sometimes saved."

"I hate women because they always know where things are."

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1 in 10 English patients comes to harm while in hospital

The findings are based on a review of the case notes of a random sample of just over 1000 patients admitted to one large teaching hospital in the north of England during the first six months of 2004.The findings are likely to be typical of other similar facilities, however, say the authors.

Surgical patients were more likely to come to harm, but these incidents were less preventable.Diagnostic errors, on the other hand, were less common, but more preventable, the findings showed.Incidents causing harm lengthened hospital stay by an average of eight days.

By far the largest category of problematic incidents involved an unplanned admission or readmission as a result of previous treatment at the hospital. One in 10 caused permanent disability and a further one in 10 contributed to the patient’s death.

http://www.sciencecodex.com/1_in_10_patients_comes_to_harm_while_in_hospital

Madness on a heroic scale

Extracts from "The Great Crash: 1929", John Kenneth Galbraith, First Published 1955, Page 27

"Even in such a time of madness as the late twenties, a great many man in Wall Street remained quite sane. But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them."

The World As Seen From New York’s 9th Avenue

link to more strange maps

Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts.

( http://www.thinkgeek.com/ )

A website for finding a holiday gift for the special technical person in your life.

Those who spend their lives dwelling in the abstract are well aware of
this maxim. If one is convinced that 2 + 2 = 5, then that is proof
alone. Are we right? Probably not. Or is this some sort of Gestalt
'whole greater than the sum of its parts' equation designed by
motivational speakers for a 'conceptual breakthrough?' Probably not.

100% Cotton heavyweight black tshirt with the mathematical equation
'2 + 2 = 5' written in a chalkboard font.

An exploding mobile phone may have killed a South Korean man. Really?

Seoul (South Korea) - An exploding mobile phone may have killed a South Korean man working at a quarry south of Seoul. The man - who is only currently identified by his family name of “Suh” - was found Wednesday morning with a melted mobile phone and battery in his shirt pocket. Police and doctors believe the battery probably exploded causing massive blunt force trauma to the chest cavity.

The phone was made by LG Electronics and company officials have anonymously told the Associated Press that such an explosion is “virtually impossible”. Lithium ion batteries, like the ones typically used in mobile phone and notebook computers, have been known to “explode”, but they are usually of the slow burn type rather than a huge Hollywood type explosion. Also we find it unlike that a small mobile phone battery would have enough explosive power to kill a man.

Police have said that the man’s ribs and spine were broken. Of course, they don’t know yet if the broken bones came before (as in damage coming from a fall), during or after the phone exploding.

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Stalin Back in Vogue as Putin Endorses History-Book Nostalgia

Nov. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Josef Stalin may have been cruel, but he was first and foremost a great leader.

That rewriting of the history of the ruthless Soviet dictator who killed millions of real and imagined enemies comes from a new manual for Russia's high-school teachers endorsed by President Vladimir Putin. The book exemplifies Russia's growing nostalgia for its bygone superpower days -- a sentiment Putin stokes at every turn in his quest for political hegemony.

Russia feels that it was `"humiliated during the 1990s, when it lost its international weight,'' said Fyodor Lukyanov, who edits a quarterly journal for the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow. "Our leaders now believe it is necessary to consolidate the nation.''

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Remember ? Miami Condo Project May 2005

By ABBY GOODNOUGH
NY Times

In the last month alone, you could salsa with dancers in fringed hot pants at Aqua, hear a drag queen D.J. at Cynergi or watch stunt men ricochet off a trampoline at Soleil.

Nightclubs? No. Carnival acts? Not quite.

These were launch parties for condominium projects, one of the stranger forms of nightlife in a city obsessed with real estate. Alcohol and music were abundant, but so were sales agents and brochures with statements like, "It is the impeccable aesthetic of textures and calming shades - limestone and blue marble - that further distinguish these voluminous spaces."

Deep-pocketed developers, forced to be ever more creative in the pursuit of buyers for condos still years from being built, pay for these lavish affairs - another take on the "froth" in the housing market that Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, described last week. Though the parties emulate the club scene, most take place in hastily erected sales centers or parking lots near the future construction site. Guests encounter model kitchens and scan price lists while sampling mojitos and tuna tartare.

"Everyone needs to one-up each other more and more with these things," said Jorge Luis Garcia, a real estate agent attending a party for Vitri, an unbuilt project in South Beach where prices start above $600,000. "The food's got to be better, the lighting's got to be better, the D.J.'s got to be really good. The new norm is the quarter-million-dollar party."

Improve Your Game

"King of the Beach" James sent me this from the web:





Do you know who made the most money playing golf this year? No, it's not Tiger. Surprisingly, Stan O'Neal, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, made out like a bandit while on the links. In the six weeks between Aug. 12 and Sept. 30, as Merrill was on their way to lose a shocking $8.4 billion in its subprime mortgage portfolio for the quarter, O'Neil played 20 rounds of golf on four different courses — and played them beautifully. In fact, his handicap dropped to 9.1 from 10.2. (His scores are available on the USGA Web site.) Talk about performing under pressure! O'Neal's annual salary was $48 million and when he was fired he received $161 million. According to Forbes magazine, Tiger Woods made a measly $100 million

Big Apple

Big Apple 1

Bad predictions are good

A consistent record of predictions is useful, even when the forecasts are regularly wrong.
A relative of mine had a remarkable record of buying stocks which then proceeded to fall significantly. His friends used to ask his advice and then do the opposite.

From G.R. Morton at-
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/cera.htm

It would seem to me that CERA's numerous predictions of the fall of the price of oil have been false every time. ... I use Yergin and CERA as a contra-indicator for how I should invest. So far, it is working quite well.

Financial World quotes

"The ancient Scythians discouraged frivolous prophecies by burning to death any soothsayer whose predictions did not come true. (This had the desired outcome of reducing the number of such forecasts.) "

Swedroe

"It's interesting that the industry has invented new ways to lose money when the old ways seemed to work just fine."

Stumpf


"Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong."

Keynes

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How to Spot a Bubble.

John Rubino:

Bubbles are more than just rising prices. They’re also characterized by:

1) Time-tested business practices being
replaced with “innovations” that look like scams to
reasonable eyes. In the housing bubble, for instance, zero-down,
adjustable rate mortgages replaced the old 20% down 30-year fixed.

2) Regular people making fortunes doing
things that experts normally find difficult. Day traders in the 1990s
and condo flippers in 2005, for instance.

In gold and oil we see neither of those things. In fact, most people still have no idea what gold is or why it’s going up, and their understanding of oil ends at the gas
pump. When the person cutting your hair starts telling you about an emerging Brazilian oil company or Tanzanian gold miner you’ve got to buy, then it’s a bubble.

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Your money or your weight

Yale economist Barry Nalebuff says commitment of money is the key:

Nalebuff thinks the weight loss will happen only if there is something of importance being risked.. "As much as people don't like to lose money, what they really don't like to lose is their own money," he said.

In fact, some of his Yale colleagues are in the final stages of launching a business based on this very concept. They have started a company called stickK.com that will allow people to take out a contract on themselves. They pick a price. If they don't lose a certain amount of weight, they lose the money, either to a charity, friends or family. Ian Ayres, one of the company's founders, said he hopes the Web site makes money by selling advertisements and forming corporate partnerships.

"The basic idea is to let economic incentives have a chance," he said. "It's been very hard to produce successful results through traditional weight-loss methods."

Ayres took out a contract on himself with another of the company's founders. He needed to get down to 185 pounds, losing at least a pound a week or forfeiting $500 for each week he failed. Sure enough, he dropped below 185 pounds. Now if his weight goes above 185 pounds, a penalty kicks in. He has avoided more than $21,000 in potential penalties. "It's been a free way to lose weight," Ayres said.

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Microbial fuel cell: positive energy yield

Penn State University researcher Bruce Logan and his team have developed a method of harnessing hydrogen gas. By creating a type of controlled microbial soup, a bacteria-induced chemical reaction takes place, resulting in large quantities of hydrogen gas.

The process produces 288% more energy than the electricity required to extract it. Compared to water hydrolysis, for example, which is only 50% to 70% efficient making it require more input energy than the extracted hydrogen yields, the new process is efficient. Even using enough of the harnessed energy to sustain the reaction, 144% more energy is produced.

"While there is likely insufficient waste biomass to sustain a global hydrogen economy, this form of renewable energy production may help offset the substantial costs of waste water treatment as well as provide a contribution to nations able to harness hydrogen as an energy source," Logan notes.


http://live.psu.edu/story/11709

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Show Me the Money

From a Craigslist Advertisement:

To All the People Looking for Writers
Date: 2007-07-30, 8:43PM CDT


It's great that you have decided to start a blog, or a new webzine, or to publish your latest book, however it is damn nervy to ask writers to commit to writing articles (such as the gaming people who want FIVE articles per week) for free. A professional writer doesn't need "exposure", they need money. Professional writers don't waste time working on spec for startups, they only work on spec for established publications. Would you ask a hairdresser to style your hair for free because you couldn't pay them but offer them the "exposure" of telling everyone who did your hair?

If you want professional writers - PAY THEM.

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Three Quotes for Today

The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
- Thomas H. Huxley

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
- Leo Tolstoy

I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

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Marie Louise Lamp Will Get Marie Louis in the Mood

Buro Vormkrijgers not only has a stupendous name, but also tends to roll out fantastic designs intermittently. The Marie Louise lamp is constructed from sheets of acrylic and uses a 14-watt fluorescent bulb along the length of the structure's leg to provide the semi-creepy, stylish glow.

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implicit egotism and investing - Jason Zweig

Excerpt from interview:

Just as you can have a feeling that you're not aware of having, you also can have preferences that you don't realize you have. The simplest example is what psychologists call "implicit egotism," which is a really bad term for liking whatever is closest to you in some way or another. For example, people are 65% more likely to marry someone whose surname begins with the same initials as their own. When you tell people something like this, they tell you that's ridiculous, and how do they try to disprove it? They say something like, "Well, my name's Zweig and my last name begins with a "Z" and my wife's surname doesn't begin with a Z." That doesn't work. Psychologists have looked at hundreds of thousands of data points and demonstrated very clearly that this is true, and that people named Dennis and Denise are much more likely to become dentists then you would expect by random chance. People named George are more likely to become a geoscientist then you would expect by chance alone. We all come with these strange, unconsciousness preferences. We don't think we think that way, but we do.

The best example I can give is in June I was making a speech about the book in Edinburgh, Scotland, and I was at one of the largest global equity managers in the world, and I put up a slide about these forms of unconscious bias. All the Scots in the room were chortling: They couldn't believe how stupid Americans are, and that anybody would actually do something like this was just beyond them. Then the chief investment officer of the firm said, "Well, what about ..." and he named a stock that this firm is heavily overweight in. It turned out the ticker for the firm they're overweight in matches the firm's own initials. He said, "I'm very glad that you pointed this out because I never would've realized it. We probably do have an unconscious bias and now we're aware of it. Now maybe if the time ever comes that we need to sell that stock, we can make a more objective decision."

talking-neuroeconomics-with-jason-zweig

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Mirror_SPACE

http://www.zics.net/mirror_space/index.htm

Project Description:

Mirror_SPACE is a system of reflections of a type which involves not only optical
appearances but also forces which act on us and which we cannot control.

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Women Conquer Monster Trucks

Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The macho world of South America's gold, silver and copper mines is under invasion by women. The women come from remote communities in the Andes Mountains to work as monster-truck drivers. The jobs offer more income than they can earn in their villages and help mining companies preserve vehicles that cost about $3 million each.

``The men didn't think we were going to last out here,'' said Patricia Guajardo, 31, who drives a huge dump truck at Barrick Gold Corp.'s Veladero gold mine in Argentina. ``The winters can be very harsh, but I love it.''

Guajardo contends with blizzards and winds so strong they whip shale off the ground. Some mines are at altitudes exceeding 4,000 meters (12,200 feet), so high that visitors are given oxygen tanks to help them breathe.

Tough as they must be to withstand those conditions, the women have a gentle touch with the giant trucks. That helps cut costs and boost output for companies such as BHP Billiton Ltd. that mine ore in Argentina and Chile.

``Women tend to take more care of the machine and don't abuse the brakes or the engine,'' said Cristian Silva, who trains people to drive Caterpillar Inc. trucks and earth-moving equipment in Santiago for Vancouver-based Finning International Inc. ``Operating the machine better means more profits.''

Unfluence

Unfluence site constructs maps of the funding relations between groups
of candidates and donors. The data comes from candidates' required
disclosures, collected and made available to the public by the National
Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMSP). The basic idea is to help
people understand the context of political giving, and the relative
positions of various candidates in terms of who is paying for their
campaign.


http://unfluence.primate.net/

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History or Hollywood Movie Plot?

A movie actress, Heddi Lamarr, and an avant-garde composer, Geoge Anthiel, got together in the USA in 1940 to invent a device that controls torpedoes by radio. Lamarr's idea was frequency hopping, broadcasting a signal over a seemingly random series of radio frequencies, switching at split-second intervals. A receiver hopping between frequencies in sync with the transmitter can pick up the message, while an eavesdropper will hear only random blips. An attempt to jam such a signal will knock out onlyparts of it, often leaving enough untouched to do no harm.

In 1940s, Lamarr and Antheil were shunned by the US Navy. But in 1957 the concept was
taken up by engineers at Sylvania. Their arrangement, using electronics, ultimately became a basic tool for secure military communications. It was installed on ships sent to blockade Cuba in 1962, about three years after the Lamarr-Antheil patent had expired. Subsequent patents in frequency changing have referred to the Lamarr-Antheil patent as the basis of the field, and the concept lies behind the principal antijamming device used today, the U.S. government’s Milstar defense communications satellite system.

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News knitter

Ebru Kurbak / Mahir M. Yavuz: Newsknitter

A new project by Turkish artists Ebru Kurbakand Mahir Yavuz shows the computational potential of the medium. Newsknitter combines computerized knitting technology with live internet feeds to produce sweaters. Using the daily news as a data source, software generates patterns for knitting.

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Hebrew Bazooka

These pieces of Bazooka Joe bubble gum are almost exactly like the ones you remember. The shape is the same (1" x 1-1/4"), and the fruity flavor is as sweet as ever, but there is one difference: both the outer wrapper and the Bazooka Joe comics inside are in Hebrew.

http://www.mcphee.com/

Three times two

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art."

"I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them."

--S. Sontag

"History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."

"The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."

--Edward Gibbon

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it."

--Mark Twain

10 ways to make money while in your underwear

excerpt from webware: By Rafe Needleman

It's worked for me. A while ago I was interviewed by a TV news syndication service for a story on sites that let you sell your expertise online. The story showed, just briefly, screenshots of a few of the services. For completeness' sake, here's a list of 10 sites (plus a few bonus sites) you can use to monetize your down cycles, e.g., make money in your spare time from the stuff in your head.

BitWine has a large list of topics from which you can select your expertise. You set your own hourly rates. Calls from customers looking for your expertise come in to your computer, but people calling you can connect to the network via ordinary telephone. (See story.) See also Wengo, a European take on this concept.

Talkbean is designed for language teachers. It escrows the lesson fees: Students pay up front, and tutors get taught once the lesson is complete. (Review.)

click for whole article-
webware

Help Me Jesus

Are the flavors of your last supper lingering too long? Freshen your
palate with the miraculous breath-cleansing power of these Last Supper
After Dinner Mints. Each collectible, 3" x 1-1/4" x -1/2" tin contains
one hundred mints that you can share with your apostles!

http://www.mcphee.com/

Bacon Mints

Bacon Flavored Mints

Each one of these mints tastes like a delicious slice of crispy bacon with
just a hint of mint flavor to give it that extra punch! It may sound
weird but once you taste it, you'll see that mint and bacon is a match
made in heaven. Each 2-1/4" x 2" x 1/2" tin contains one hundred mints.

http://www.mcphee.com/

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blockhead, bonehead, dolt, dope, dunce, fool, halfwit, idiot

House Panel Screw-Up Reveals Whistleblower Email Addresses

By Paul Kiel - October 26, 2007, 10:07PM

Here's a whoops with a capital W.

This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee's website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the "strictest confidence."

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the "to:" field -- instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or "bcc:".

Only the email addresses were exposed; none of the names or other identifying information of the whistleblowers was revealed. The blunder, however, was noticed by a number of people who had used the website form and received today's email. One disgruntled recipient replied to the entire list of whistleblowers angrily complaining about the snafu; two others forwarded the committee email to TPMmuckraker with similar complaints.

Compounding the mistake, the committee later sent out a second email attempting to recall the original email; it, too, included all recipients in the "to:" field, according to a recipient of the emails.

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divorce fair

Vienna Divorce Fair Touts DNA Tests, Lawyers for Fed-Up Spouses

By Jonathan Tirone

Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -Austrians stuck in loveless marriages may lie about their whereabouts this weekend. Instead of pursuing trysts, they'll be attending a "divorce fair'' to plan their return to the single life. At the two-day event in Vienna, fed-up spouses can contract private detectives to spy on philandering mates, hire real estate agents to find new homes and book vacation packages designed for the newly separated. They can even hire a DNA sampling lab to see if it will really be necessary to pay child support.

"New Beginnings'' is the world's first divorce fair, according to Anton Barz, 37, a wedding organizer who came up with the idea after realizing many unions were doomed. "Austria's divorce statistics are shocking,'' Barz said in a café near Sigmund Freud's former home. In Vienna, newlyweds face the gloomy prospect that two-thirds of all marriages will end in divorce.

Danica says, "Math Doesn't Suck."

excerpt from Women in Mathematics ---


The actress Danica McKellar, perhaps better known as Winnie from The Wonder Years, has written a math book for middle school girls called "Math Doesn't Suck". Read the Newsweek article in the August 6 issue. Danica graduated with highest honors from UCLA with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics, and is the co-author of a mathematical research paper published in the Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General. Her accomplishments in mathematics have been profiled in the New York Times, July 19, 2005 (section F). Listen to her February 11th interview on NRP Weekend Edition in which she discusses this paper. Or visit the mathematics link on her website to read about her interest in mathematics.

Guidelines to Improve Your Doctor's Performance

How the Medical Mind Works

a book review by Harriet Hall, M.D.

Jerome Groopman’s book How Doctors Think is a superb commentary on the intersection between medical science, compassionate personal interactions, and critical thinking.

Groopman cites a recent study of 100 incorrect diagnoses: only four of them were due to inadequate medical knowledge; in the rest of the cases the doctors fell into cognitive traps. He targets errors that are particularly hazardous to doctors, such as poor communication with patients, buying into fad diagnoses, bowing to economic pressures, and succumbing to pharmaceutical company influences.

Doctors may be well educated, but they are no less subject to the various cognitive biases that plague the rest of humanity, educated or not. Thus, Groopman offers several guidelines to improve performance: don’t stop thinking after you reach a diagnosis; keep an open mind so you can reconsider if new data suggest another possibility; don’t skip steps in a misguided attempt to spare your patient discomfort; guard against treating patients differently because of your own emotions or prejudices; listen to the patient’s own story and make up your own mind rather than accepting the diagnosis of a previous doctor.

Groopman also gives practical advice to patients so they can help their doctors think better. They can offer to tell their story again from scratch to allow a fresh reassessment. They can ask, “What else could it be? Is there anything that doesn’t fit? Is it possible I have more than one problem?” If they have their own ideas about what might be wrong, or if they are worried about something the doctor hasn’t mentioned, they should speak up.

http://tinyurl.com/2j7mup

Vending Machine Disguise

Japanese Anti Rape/Mugging Dress

Crime happens everywhere, even in Japan. To ward off criminals, fashion
designer Aya Tsukioka has conjured up transforming
clothes to deceive potential muggers.

A Rose By Any Other Name

http://foundmagazine.com/find/526

Housing Bubble

http://efinancedirectory.com/articles/New_Survey_Shows_ARM_Mortgage_Holders_are_Clueless.html?ref=patrick.net

According to the AFL-CIO commissioned survey conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, 73 percent of the 500 ARM holders surveyed have no idea how much their payment will increase after the rate on their ARM mortgage loan resets.

But the confusion doesn't stop there--18 percent of borrowers do not even know what their interest rate is right now.

-------------

http://thehousingbubbleblog.com/?p=3605

“‘I had a guy who called me who owns 70 homes,’ says Stuart broker Michael Morgan. ‘I know a lady who owns 16. It’s the room of 1,000 doughnuts. How many can you eat? Two? Three? Well, how many houses can you live in?’”

The Future of the Past Tense

Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who've invoked evolutionary principles to study language over the past 1,200 years, from "Beowulf" to "Canterbury Tales" to "Harry Potter."

Writing in the journal Nature, colleagues in Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, led by Martin Nowak, conceive of linguistic development as an evolutionary scheme. Just as organisms undergo natural selection, words -- specifically, irregular verbs that do not take an "-ed" ending in the past tense -- are subject to pressure to "regularize" as the language develops.

"Mathematical analysis of this linguistic evolution reveals that irregular verb conjugations behave in an extremely regular way -- one that can yield predictions and insights into the future stages of a verb's evolutionary trajectory," says Lieberman, a graduate student at Harvard. "We measured something no one really thought could be measured, and got a striking and beautiful result."

Myth-busters have the odds against them.

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post
September 4, 2007

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. Various commonly held views were labeled as either "true" or "false." Some of the false statements were "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier. He found within a half an hour people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Most troubling was people now felt the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The conventional response to myths is to counter bad information with accurate information. But this study shows denials can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths. Denials inherently require repeating the bad information, which may reinforce it.

Repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.

Many easily remembered things such as one's birth date are true. But one can manipulate public opinion by taking advantage of this aspect of brain functioning. In politics and elsewhere, whoever makes the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone who denies it later.

Keep it Simple - Don't buy stuff you can't afford

Snl_dontbuystuff

social investing is an oxymoron

September 7th, 2007

Vitaliy Katsenelson

We live in the society where, to our detriment, being politically correct is often more important than being correct. So I am going to come out and make a politically incorrect statement - social investing is an oxymoron.

There is nothing social about investing. Investing is not about making popular, socially approved choices. It is about allocating capital from a less efficient use to more efficient use. Touchy-feely types of choices make us feel good about ourselves… well, until we have to retire and have to start paying for things.

link to whole post:

http://contrarianedge.com/2007/09/07/anti-social-investing/

'only a theory'

Misconceptions about Evolution:

Excerpt:
'Evolution is only a theory; it hasn't been proved.'

First, we should clarify what 'evolution' means. Like so many other words, it has more than one meaning. Its strict biological definition is 'a change in allele frequencies over time.' By that definition, evolution is an indisputable fact. Most people seem to associate the word 'evolution' mainly with common descent, the theory that all life arose from one common ancestor. Many people believe that there is enough evidence to call this a fact, too. However, common descent is still not the theory of evolution, but just a fraction of it (and a part of several quite different theories as well). The theory of evolution not only says that life evolved, it also includes mechanisms, like mutations, natural selection, and genetic drift, which go a long way towards explaining how life evolved.

Calling the theory of evolution 'only a theory' is, strictly speaking, true, but the idea it tries to convey is completely wrong. The argument rests on a confusion between what 'theory' means in informal usage and in a scientific context. A theory, in the scientific sense, is 'a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena' [Random House American College Dictionary]. The term does not imply tentativeness or lack of certainty.

What's the story behind this card?

More things in heaven and earth...........

A Rayon plant by moonlight in North Carolina

Predictions from January 2007- Gradual Rise Projected for Home Sales!

Bad predictions can come back to haunt you. The man who made these predictions,David Lereah, has been replaced.

WASHINGTON, January 10, 2007 - After bottoming in the fourth quarter of 2006, existing-home sales are forecast to gradually rise through 2007 and into 2008, while new-home sales should turnaround by summer, according to the latest forecast by the National Association of Realtors. David Lereah, NAR's chief economist, said annual totals for existing-home sales will be fairly comparable between 2006 and 2007. 'We have to keep in mind that we were still in boom conditions during the first quarter of 2006 with a high sales volume and double-digit price appreciation,' he said. 'We are starting 2007 from a relatively low point, so even with a gradual improvement in sales it'll be pretty much of a wash in terms of annual totals. The good news is that the steady improvement in sales will support price appreciation moving forward.'

A jolly good time in Buffalo NY

What's not to like?

Summary of article-

LONDON - A British couple have shacked up in a budget roadside motel for more than 20 years because they love never having to do the laundry or cooking. David Davidson, 79, and his wife, Jean, 70, first tried out a Travelodge hotel while visiting a sick aunt in 1985.

"We get great rates because we book well in advance and we even have our own personal housekeeper. All our bed linen is laundered, too. It doesn't get much better than that, does it?" said former Royal Navy sailor David Davidson. The couple have spent around 100,000 pounds (200,000 dollars, 150,000 euros) renting rooms which cost them as little as 15 pounds (30 dollars, 22 euros) a night."Some will think David and Jean Davidson bonkers to have spent the last 22 years living in a hotel," said the Daily Express in its editorial.

But their room rates are "not more than many people's mortgage payments, the housework is done for them and they do not pay utility bills. "

full article link

First as Tragedy, then as Farce

Summary of article-

Florida entered a period of speculative excess in the 1920s. Jazz music best expressed the energy of the flamboyant time. Intense building began in Miami in the early 1920s and quickly led to increased real estate activity. Speculators began to buy land and to sell it for small profits within a few months.

Then the winter tourists began to invest. Profits increased as turnover time decreased. Windfall profits began to escalate to unsustainable levels and were merely a pyramiding of paper profits. Word of Florida real estate activity spread across the county and people poured in for quick profits.

The Real Estate boom was a building Ponzi scheme, named for the infamous Charles Ponzi, who founded The Security Exchange Company in Boston. The company, “dealt” in international postal reply coupons and promised its “investors” a 100% return in 90 days. Theoretically Ponzi had planned to play currency exchange rates using international postal reply coupons. By July 26, 1920 Ponzi’s house of cards began to collapse and on August 13, 1920 he was arrested after costing 40,000 “investors” $140,000,000. The 1920s theme of huge profits based on ever rising prices and an infinite supply of greater fools was set.

http://tinyurl.com/3cdugk

A Culture of Fantasy and Deception

Essay by Charles Hugh Smith

Yaddo, Yadaa, Yoda

From Robert Cringely:

Nolo mojo. Lulu.com is suing Hulu.com for trade name infringement, alleging the new site will cause marketplace confusion. For those of you not paying close attention, Lulu is a site that lets you publish and sell your own books; Hulu is the NBC/Fox site for distributing video. (Or, to put it another way, Lulu is a site for people who know how to read.) No word yet on whether LaLa, PuPu or JuJu will join the suit.

Warren Buffett MBA Talk

More Warren Buffett on Risk

George Santayana quotes

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.

Bad Science Column -Testing Social Policy

Ben Goldacre
Saturday July 21, 2007
The Guardian

Excerpt:

When you know, deep down, that your intervention doesn't work, then you're not going to subject yourself to public exposure through a randomised trial. And if you really believe your policies are effective, then when the results come back negative you're simply going to argue that trials aren't the right way to test a policy. For some cod-philosophical reason or another.

Just like the quacks. Medicine, perhaps through the ubiquity of death, has learnt to accept failure better. Most of the drugs developed don't work either, but we don't say "let's stop bothering"; we say, "great, we've stopped wasting money and side effects on ineffective treatments".

But lastly, people will object, because even when you're subjecting citizens to an experimental new policy, flagging the uncertainty with a trial reinforces the uncertainty. This was a key issue with early trials in medicine, and we overcame our irksomeness decades ago, right up at the front of the game. The crucial early trials on surgical options for breast cancer were highly emotionally charged, but necessary, simply because the options were equipoised.

If we can do Randomized Control Trial's on something as horrifying as whether women have their breasts removed then we can do RCT's on social policy.

click to read full bad science column