links for 2010-04-29

• Scientists develop spray to make men more affectionate using 'cuddle' hormone oxytocin | Mail Online
  quote:"They have created a spray that makes men more caring, affectionate and in tune with others' feelings.

  Just a puff or two and even the most macho of males is as sensitive as a woman, they claim.
  The spray is based on oxytocin – a hormone naturally made in the body and involved in sex, sexual attraction, trust and confidence.

  // ugh

  (tags: futurism psychology)
• Group: Army symbol is religious, should be changed – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"The Military Religious Freedom Foundation asked the Army this week to change the emblem of Evans Army Community Hospital at Fort Carson, outside Colorado Springs.

  The emblem says "Pro deo et humanitate" or "For God and humanity."

  // What a bunch of crap. Now we're just trying to erase history.

  (tags: faith law military stupid)
• One of many lemon pickles – Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
  // This recipe was appetizing, in an unappetizing way.
  (tags: recipes cooking food recipe)
• AgriNews.com: Mai Village introduces Vietnamese culture, cusine in St. Paul
  // Mai village is awesome.
  (tags: twincities Restaurants)
• BackupMyTweets Home: Backup Your Twitter Account
  // In case any of us ever think of our Tweets as literature
  (tags: twitter archive twittertools socialmedia web2.0 application personal)

links for 2010-04-28

• Contested Will by James Shapiro reviewed by Charles Nicholl – TLS
  Quote:"The authorship controversy is a sorry story, with its core of undiluted snobbery, its self-generating conspiracy theories, its manipulated evidence, its reductive view of plays and poems as fiendishly difficult crossword puzzles.
  (tags: biography books history literature Shakespeare)
• From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons
  // Mostly Bullshit.
  (tags: education web2.0 teaching curmudgenism pedagogy ludditism technology)
• Sprint Fires Employees for Pursuing Alleged Shoplifter
  Quote:"Sprint's corporate policy states that employees should not chase shoplifters, though the men argue they were on break and it wasn't even Sprint's merchandise they were seeking to retrieve. Sprint declined to comment, citing privacy concerns.

  The firing isn't without precedent. In October Walmart fired an Ocala branch's loss prevention officer for chasing a man allegedly trying to steal golf balls.

  // Take note shoplifters. Those "Security" people are just eye candy.

  (tags: crime martyemail stupid law)
• Baby boy survives for nearly two days after abortion – Telegraph
  Quote:"The mother, pregnant for the first time, had opted for an abortion after prenatal scans suggested that her baby was disabled.

  He was discovered alive the following day – some 20 hours after the operation – by Father Antonio Martello, the hospital chaplain, who had gone to pray beside his body.

  // What a sad outcome of a sad worldview.

  (tags: abortion life Bradburyness)
• the pothole gardener
  (tags: randomlinks gardening horticulture guerrila.marketing)
• 10-things-human-resources-wont-say: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance
  // Upon reflection, I wonder, Who watches the HR department?
  (tags: career jobs business MBA)
• Confidante: Fla. gov likely to run as independent – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"Crist will announce his plans at 5 p.m. Thursday in his hometown of St. Petersburg. The confidante, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement has not been made, cautioned that Crist can be unpredictable.

  // Crist's stock has fallen. I hope he doesn't do this; but there are some Republicans out there who are…well, I won't say it.

  (tags: gop politics Florida)
• IOC strips 2000 Games bronze medal from China – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"The International Olympic Committee acted after investigations by the sport's governing body determined that Dong Fangxiao was only 14 at the 2000 Games. Gymnasts must turn 16 during the Olympic year to be eligible.

  // Relax, I'm sure those Chinese ladies were bored with those medals anyway; it's been ten years.

  (tags: olympics sports gymnastics)
• 60 Minutes: FBI Wiseguy Fooled The Mob – 60 Minutes – CBS News
  Quote:"Garcia may be the most unlikely law enforcement figure in history – all 390 pounds of him – whose performance was so convincing that he was offered the Mafia's highest honor: to become a "made man" in the mob.

  // excellent article. Mr. Garcia even had to watch cooking shows so he could learn to pronounce Italian food correctly.

  (tags: mafia crime true-crime fatpride)
• Google Answers: What percentage of Americans are arrested in their lifetime?
  Quote:"Lifetime likelihood of going to State or Federal prison
  "If recent incarceration rates remain unchanged, an estimated 1 of
  every 15 persons (6.6%) will serve time in a prison during their
  lifetime.

  Lifetime chances of a person going to prison are higher for
  – men (11.3%) than for women (1.8%)
  – blacks (18.6%) and Hispanics (10%) than for whites (3.4%)

  Based on current rates of first incarceration, an estimated 32% of
  black males will enter State or Federal prison during their lifetime,
  compared to 17% of Hispanic males and 5.9% of white males."

  http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm#lifetime

  // Whoa. Those numbers sound crazy to me.

  (tags: numbersandstudies crime race)
• Forgotten Detroit
  (tags: randomlinks photography detroit architecture history urbanexploration)
• Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre Photography – The Ruins of Detroit
  (tags: photography architecture history photos detroit randomlinks)

links for 2010-04-27

• 6 Mistakes New Grads Make in Their First Jobs – Yahoo! Finance
  Quote:"Thinking that what you post on social networking sites doesn't matter. At best, being unprofessional on sites like Facebook or Twitter will limit your professional growth and change the way your boss sees you; at worst, it can get you fired.

  // Cause remember folks, making jokes about boobs and earthquakes has a direct impact on how productive you are as a worker.

  (tags: business MBA)
• Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com
  Quote:"Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.)

  // Word.

  (tags: military powerpoint education technology ludditism)
• 'Noah's Ark' found in Turkey | The Sun |News
  // It will be very interesting to find out what the wooden structure on Mount Ararat is, why it is so old, who built it and a few dozen other questions. The wooden structure had been found by several groups over the past 100 years, including a military force and climbers.
  (tags: Bible history martyemail cool)
• France24 – Robot takes on battle of the bulge
  // Yes, that's what we need, freakin' robots to boss us around and call us fat. I thought that's what friends were for.
  (tags: health martyemail robots ludditism technology)
• Homeless good Samaritan left to die on NYC street – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"It wasn't until after the 31-year-old Guatemalan immigrant had been lying there for nearly an hour that emergency workers arrived, and by then, it was too late. Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax — who police said was stabbed while intervening to help a woman being attacked — had died.

  "I think it's horrific," said Marla Cohan, who teaches at P.S. 82, a school across the street from where Tale-Yax died. "I think people are just afraid to step in; they don't want to get involved; who knows what their reasons are?"

  // Ray Bradbury warned us about the heartless trends of technological society.

  (tags: Bradburyness ludditism culture psychology sociology)

links for 2010-04-26

• Depressed? You must like chocolate | Reuters
  // Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc
  (tags: numbersandstudies psychology)
• Bad habits can age you by 12 years, study suggests – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"The findings are from a study that tracked nearly 5,000 British adults for 20 years, and they highlight yet another reason to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

  Overall, 314 people studied had all four unhealthy behaviors. Among them, 91 died during the study, or 29 percent. Among the 387 healthiest people with none of the four habits, only 32 died, or about 8 percent.

  The risky behaviors were: smoking tobacco; downing more than three alcoholic drinks per day for men and more than two daily for women; getting less than two hours of physical activity per week; and eating fruits and vegetables fewer than three times daily.

  (tags: health numbersandstudies)
• The Floppy is Dead: Time to Move Memories to the Cloud – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"I suspect that my scenario is not all that unusual and not worth much discussion. However, it should give us all pause; with so many storage mediums now gone or on their way out, what's next? At the tail end of my 2003 column, I mused that I could move all of my 3.5-inch data to a CD-R drive. Optical drives had reached ubiquity by the late 1990s and writable drives were the norm in 2003. Still, I worried about what might happen if the CD-R drive fell out of favor. I even considered moving my data to the next big thing in personal data storage (at least it was in 2003): DVD-R drives.

  The fact is that storage mediums and the drives that read and write them are not permanent like Mt. Rushmore. Instead, they're more like our sandy beaches, which seem permanent but are slowly but surely washing out to sea."

  // Still have a 3.5 inch floppy USB drive. Not that I had any data on any of those things.

  (tags: technology ludditism)
• Out for the count: Why levels of sperm in men are falling – Science, News – The Independent
  Quote:""It's most likely a reflection of the fact that many environmental and lifestyle changes over the past 50 years are inherently detrimental to sperm production," says Professor Richard Sharpe, fertility research expert at the Medical Research Council. "It may be that different factors come together to have a combined effect." A number of studies point to a connection between early development in the womb and male reproductive problems in later life, especially low sperm counts.

  // The Baby Boomers get to destroy the lives of all sorts of people.

  (tags: Family gender health men numbersandstudies pregnancy sex)
• US newspaper circulation down 8.7 percent
  Quote:"USA Today's decline last year allowed The Wall Street Journal to surpass it as the newspaper with the biggest U.S. circulation. In Monday's report, the Journal once again posted the only gain in circulation among the top 25 newspapers that had comparable figures from a year ago. It grew its circulation 0.5 percent to 2.09 million. The Journal can count online readers because it charges them to read its website, while many newspapers can only count print subscriptions and newsstand sales.

  // Awesome.

  (tags: ludditism Media newspapers)
• Economists say the stimulus didn't help – Apr. 26, 2010
  // Duh
  (tags: economics economy numbersandstudies stimulus)
• 9 Ways to Ensure You Don't Get the Job- Yahoo! HotJobs
  Quote:"Many hiring managers dislike it when people bring their own take-out cups of coffee to drink during an interview, according to career strategist Barbara Safani. It can come across as far too informal. And if you bring a child's Hello Kitty lunch box containing utensils to brew your own tea, as one candidate did when meeting Terdik, you will be memorable–but not in a good way.

  // Yes. That's it. people who buy their own coffee are clearly unqualified to work at yuor company.

  #InterviewsAreStillWorthless

  (tags: MBA business employment interview jobs)
• Calif.'s costly trout recovery effort criticized – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"But government agencies have footed the bill for many projects including the concrete fish ladders and fishways to help the steelhead get around dams and other structures. The ladders are expensive, short-lived, require maintenance and have even been known to harm fish.

  "Fish ladders don't work like the engineers have them work on paper," said Matt Stoecker, a biological consultant who has spent years working on steelhead recovery.

  // Okay, someone in this article should have asked for some data on how many fish use the ladders. Do any? One? 500?

  (tags: conservation enviromentalism governmenteffeciency)
• Deleted from Wikipedia – Main Page – Deletionpedia
  // Some many wikis. So little time.
  (tags: wikis)
• Monarchy Party – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  // Funny
  (tags: politics humour monarchism martyemail wikipedia)
• More American Expatriates Give Up Citizenship – NYTimes.com
  Quote:"American expats have long complained that the United States is the only industrialized country to tax citizens on income earned abroad, even when they are taxed in their country of residence, though they are allowed to exclude their first $91,400 in foreign-earned income.

  // I wouldn't want to get taxed twice over either.

  (tags: banking taxation economics)

links for 2010-04-24

• 28-tasty-tips-to-save-on-food: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance
  (tags: weekendreading food economics finance savings toread)

links for 2010-04-23

• Death of 'Caveman' ends an era in Idaho | Local News | Idaho Statesman
  Quote:"He was the last of Idaho's river-canyon loners that date back to Territorial days. They are a unique group that until the 1980s included canyon contemporaries with names like Beaver Dick, Cougar Dave and Wheelbarrow Annie, "Buckskin Bill" (real name Sylvan Hart) and "Free Press Frances" Wisner. Fiercely independent loners, they lived eccentric lives on their own terms and made the state more interesting just by being here.
  (tags: Idaho culture history martyemail people)
• Reuters AlertNet – Potentially deadly fungus spreading in US, Canada
  Quote:""The findings presented here document that the outbreak of C. gattii in Western North America is continuing to expand throughout this temperate region," the researchers said in their report, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1000850.

  // This is all based on 21 cases of the disease in the U.S.

  (tags: disease health pandemic)
• Jillian Michaels Criticized for Anti-Pregnancy Comments – Yahoo! TV Blog
  Quote:""The Biggest Loser" trainer Jillian Michaels is getting some interesting feedback for comments she made in Women's Health magazine about the reasons she plans to adopt, rather than give birth to, children. "I'm going to adopt. I can't handle doing that to my body," Michaels told the magazine.

  // And the shallow, narcissistic obsession over image continues.

  (tags: women ludditism culture curmudgenism)
• 100 Dollar Bill and Other Money Gets Plastic Surgery – Newsweek
  // Though I've only read a couple of books on Lincoln, I'm sure he'd laugh at getting a portrait makeover
  (tags: martyemail currency)

links for 2010-04-22

• Rock-paper-scissors – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  // The real reason Wikipedia is worth the billions of human-hours it took to write it (versus useful things people could be doing)
  (tags: rockpaperscissors games culture wikipedia weekendreading martyemail)
• Seven things you should say in a job interview from Yahoo! Finance
  // Remember, say these things whether they are true or not.

  #InterviewsAreUseless

  (tags: career tips business jobs employment)
• Bundyology
  // A leftover from the golden age of the internet.
  (tags: tv reference television humor randomlinks martyemail)
• RealClearPolitics – Myths About Capitalism
  // Looks like another book to add to the pile, Medved's "The 5 big lies about american business"
  (tags: weekendreading books)
• Joe Biden discusses gaffe, Palin, Tea Party on 'The View' – Yahoo! News
  Quote:"In another segment, Joy Behar asked Biden, "What is the appeal of Sarah Palin, exactly?"

  Biden said: "After you meet her, she is a charming person. It's hard not to like her." The vice president paused to ponder a more detailed explanation for Palin's mass appeal — then wound up saying simply, "I don't know." He then judiciously returned to his initial point: "I say this and people look at me like I'm kidding. I like her."

  // Matches my own thoughts on the Palin phenomena

  (tags: politics Biden)
• Views: Teaching Tips – Inside Higher Ed
  // Via King B.

  I completely endorse the column. Most teachers, I'd rather have them in absentia

  (tags: teaching humor college education)
• Plant City girl, 12, pitches second perfect Little League game
  // Stick with the knuckleball, drop the curveball until the teen years, and keep the pitch count below 60 and Chelsea Baker may rival Ila Borders for the coveted title of "Best Lady of Baseball"

  But we'll see if she survives the torrent of the teens.

  (tags: Baseball gender)
• New $100 bill unveiled to thwart high-tech counterfeits – Yahoo! News
  // The bill that will drive OCD sufferers crazy
  (tags: money martyemail)
• Top 10 Little-Known Dream Islands
  // Caught my eye as sufficiently dreary enough for a writer;s vacation: Iles de la Madeleine, Quebec
  (tags: Travel reference personal vacation)

links for 2010-04-21

• Overton window – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (tags: politicalhackery psychology wikipedia politics)
• xkcd: Correlation
  // Via MPBerg. Very funny.
  (tags: humor philosophy statistics)
• Botox may diminish the experience of emotion : Neurophilosophy
  Quote:"The reseachers found that botox slowed the reading of the sentences containing sad emotional content, which, as the earlier work showed, would normally cause the frown muscle to contract. The reading time for the happy and neutral sentence was the same in both sessions. The researchers assume that the increase in reading time means that paralysis of the frown muscles hindered the participants' understanding of the emotional content of the sad sentences. They also argue that their findings support the hypothesis that feedback from the muscles involved in producing facial expressions is critical in regulating emotional experiences.
  (tags: ludditism numbersandstudies psychology)
• Study: Brain games don't make you smarter on Yahoo! Health
  Quote:"More than 8,600 people aged 18 to 60 were asked to play online brain games designed by the researchers to improve their memory, reasoning and other skills for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a week.

  They were compared to more than 2,700 people who didn't play any brain games, but spent a similar amount of time surfing the Internet and answering general knowledge questions. All participants were given a sort of I.Q. test before and after the experiment.

  // Exercise improves brain function more than anything.

  (tags: psychology intelligence neuroscience numbersandstudies ludditism technology)

links for 2010-04-20

• 50 Secrets From Real Dentists – Healthy Living on Shine
  Quote:"If you want to reduce the bad bacteria in your mouth, you should be all over xylitol [a sugar substitute found in chewing gum]. It changes the chemistry of your mouth. Six or seven pieces of xylitol gum every day will help keep cavities away

  // Lots of good advice, but some of what they say is slightly disturbing.

  (tags: health healthcare medical dentists toread)
• yes-everyone-really-does-hate-performance-reviews: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance
  Quote:"If you're a boss, and your subordinate isn't succeeding, something is broken here. Doing more of the same isn't going to cut it. It's now time for you to ask, "What do you need from me to deliver what we are both on the firing line to produce?" And just as important, it's time for you to listen to the answer.

  // Just say no to Performance Reviews.

  (tags: management business)

Something to do:

I wanted to invite all of you and your readers and members to CFACT’s
Earth Day Eve event with John Coleman – the founder of the weather
channel – and why this particular meteorologist believes that global
warming is, “a fictional, manufactured crisis, and a total scam.”

The event is free and open to the public.
John Coleman – Weather Channel Founder’s Forecast for Global Warming
University of Minnesota – East Bank campus
Rapson Hall – Room 43   (Parking in the Church Street Garage
recommended – http://campusmaps.umn.edu/tc/map.php?extent=east)
7:30 PM Wednesday April 21, 2010

Sponsored by Collegians For A Constructive Tomorrow – CFACT
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the College
Republican’s are hosting Karl Rove on campus on Thursday April 22.

Karl Rove: Liberals’ Worst Nightmare
Date:   Thursday, April 22, 2010
Time:   12:00pm – 2:00pm
Location:       Smith Hall 100, East Bank, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

Sincerely,

Bill Gilles
CFACT