.
Watching this obama ad, made me remember the my favorite show (tied with the Wire) the West Wing. I distinctly remember the matt santos ad where matt santos says “This is matt santos and you better believe that I approve this ad”. I was almost half expecting barack obama to say those very words.
This left me wanting to rewatch my favorite scenes from the west wing. thanks to youtube, Desire To watch Favorite Scenes + youtube means a half day spent on watching West Wing scenes. Damn you west wing. I love that show soooooo much!
repost: Angry Bear: Dueling Mooses
Reading this made me WANT TO WORK HARDER!
— He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Harvard (in Law)
— age 24, he wrote the definitive book ‘The Naval War of 1812’, standard history for two generations.
— age 24 the president appointed him to the United States Civil Service Commission, where he served for 13 years. In his term, he vigorously fought the spoilsmen and demanded the enforcement of civil service laws.
Angry Bear: Dueling Mooses.
Oh No Another Excuse For Being Fat!
I Don’t Like This Because This Will Affect How I View My and Other People’s obesity, It just feels dirty blaiming genetics for everything , but nonetheless facts are facts!
Somehow I Think I Knew This Already…
from Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal by Brad DeLong
From Gordon’s Notes:
Exercise cannot control obesity gene associated weight gain: The title on this SciAm summary is silly…
Do I look fat in these genes? Exercise can cancel out effects of ‘heavy-weight’ DNA: Scientific American Blog: … Physically active people who carry gene mutations linked to obesity are no more likely to be overweight than those without the variants — as long as they exercise at least three hours a day…
Exercising 3+ hours a day is not compatible with life in a post-industrial world. If these results turned out be generalizable to a reasonable portion of the obese population (big if), then we’d know that exercise won’t control our expanding (sorry) obesity problem. We already know diet doesn’t work, so here’s hoping for great drugs …
Either that, or we get rid of our cars …
Repost: Anime Wine Mover
I confess that I had a pixar marathon this weekend (Incredibles, Ratatouille two times each), and It really helped me rediscover cooking again. I was planning a hackaton last saturday but it became a cookfest!
Thanks to j for the pointer: from here:
Anime Sommelier
Interesting piece from the Times Online on the biggest trend shaping the Japanese wine market:
Entire 20,000-bottle shipments of burgundy sell out within hours in Tokyo if he so much as looks at a glass, South Korea’s biggest film star is lined-up to play him in a TV drama and he has converted thousands of Asian women into the most discerning oenophiles.
In the rarefied world of superstar sommeliers, there may be none greater than Shizuku Kanzaki. The only snag is that he is a cartoon.
Despite his two-dimensional limitations, the hero of Kami no Shizuku (The drops of the gods) has emerged as an extraordinarily potent mover of Asian wine markets — far more so, say some in the industry, than flesh-and-blood wine critics.
The sales records of Japan’s largest wine merchants have been smashed because, in a single frame of comic, the hero has uttered a dreamy sigh over a 2006 New Zealand Riesling or closed his eyes in appreciation of a Saint-Aubin Premier Cru.
…….Shizuku’s adventures are read by about 500,000 Japanese each week and book collections of the comics have sold millions of copies. Wines that feature in his weekly manga activities regularly become overnight hits, particularly for Japan’s frenetic online wine markets.
In Taiwan a single reference to a relatively obscure French terroir shifted dozens of cases of the stuff within a few days.
…..
Watch your back Parker.
Posted by J at 8:43 PM
Labels: Miscellany
The Meaningfulness of Little Things: Anime Sommelier.
Money and Blogging
I am not earning from my blog, through experiments I’ve seen ways of earning with simple changes in what I post. I write because I love writing, I blog because i’ve continually interacted with people who have enrich my life. I blog because I want to share. Money almost always changes everything, and oft times things become all for the the love of money. Like all great gold rush, and with the help of the invisible hand the money well will dry and the endless september of the blogging will finally begone!
from Doc Searls blog here:
What I don’t like is the corrupting influence of the advertising economy itself.
Right now online advertising is a river of gold flowing out of the ground in California, and millions of bloggers — along with countless new and traditional businesses — are rushing to grab some. In addition to the other economy-distorting consequences of this rush, it is corrupting blogging’s original nature, which is amateur in the best sense or the word. Amateur is derived from amatorem, the Latin word for lover.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with making money by blogging. I am saying there’s something wrong with blogging mostly to make money, or to let advertising determine the purpose of your blog and what you say with it. If your business is the latter, you’re flogging, not blogging.
There is an old and subtle distinction here. Businesses and professions at their best are ways to pursue passions and organize talents — not just to make money. Of course they can’t thrive unless they make money. But few of us go into business just saying “I can’t wait to return value to my shareholders.” Investors are the main exceptions, but the best of those know that human passions other than greed are at the heart of every good business.
Victimized
Do we have to be victimized for us to have compassion?
Damn, just got this idea for an Alan Moore Graphic Novel:
The main idea is that for people to be compassionate we need to be victimized, and in 2059 the government institutes a law that people have to be victimized to help them in the pursuit of happyness!
From Overcoming Bias here:
Guiltless Victims
When we are reminded of when others have victimized us, we are less able to see that we victimize others:Wohl and Branscombe randomly divided [US] volunteers into groups. One group was reminded of the terrorist attacks, while another was told about Nazi atrocities in Poland during World War II. A third group was reminded of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. … Volunteers reminded about the Sept. 11 attacks were less likely to perceive the distress the [Iraq] war has caused many Iraqis, and less likely to feel collective responsibility, compared with volunteers told about the tragedy in Poland. … it makes no difference whether you remind them about the Sept. 11 attacks or about Pearl Harbor. …
The psychologists re-ran the experiment with Canadian volunteers. Two groups heard reminders of the Sept. 11 attacks and Pearl Harbor, while a third heard about a deadly terrorist attack in Sri Lanka. None of these tragedies affected Canadians personally. Wohl and Branscombe found no differences among the groups in whether they felt distress on behalf of Iraqis, or a sense of collective guilt. … The psychologists similarly found that Jewish volunteers in North America feel reduced guilt and responsibility for Israeli actions that cause suffering among Palestinians when they are first reminded about the Holocaust, compared with when they are reminded about the genocide in Cambodia.
I Think Most Bloggers Need To Read This
Sometimes form is an art unto itself! Think Comedy!
but often times people write just to write. There is nothing wrong with this.
The thing is at least once a week we should try to write something we are proud of, to at least try to fool ourselves that we are trying to do write something worthwhile!
from the Overcoming Bias blog here:
If you just want to look insightful yourself, then you’ll want to ape insight like everyone else. Use big words, attend to anal formatting rules, use many citations in academic articles, clever turns of phrase in popular articles, and so on. In literary articles give many quotes, in science articles show many data tables and statistical tests, etc.
But if you actually want to be insightful, you face a harder problem. Once you realize that most folks are merely aping surface features thought to correlate with insight, you see that doing this yourself may not actually help you to be insightful. You may face a choice between looking insightful and being insightful. Yes for some factors that correlate with insight, increasing your score on such factors will tend to cause you to be insightful, but for many other factors such an increase will reduce or have no effect on your insight.
Cold Call
I Gave Myself 6 months to put things in order before trying the Startup route again, this time not as an employee but as founder. The scars from the last startup haven’t healed completely but can’t sulk forever.
I know its a longshot but when I have finally done something/anything I think I’m gonna cold call/email Mark Cuban every little thing counts/matters for a startup and emailing him is not that much of a burden for me. I am expecting nothing , but hoping that I get a feedback, any kind be it the (f~ck you wasted 30 minutes of my life kind)!
I am quite excited just three and a half months to go!
from TechCrunch here:
How do people reach you?
Send me an email and in three paragraphs or less, tell me about your business. Dont say you need an NDA or want a call. Just tell me how youre going to make money and how I’m going to add value. Give me a URL if you have a website, I’ll figure it out. 5% of the people will hear back from me.
TC50 interview of Mark Cuban
rePost: Top Teachers Ineffective
This hit home because my sister was telling me of the recent moves to abolish the BS Education as a recognized course in the Philippines, meaning that people who want to become teachers of Preschool/Elementary/Highschool must have an Education degree and pass a National Certification Exam known as (LET – Licensure Exam for Teachers).
It seems that recent research has shown that people with degrees in the subjects they will teach are more effective teachers than Education Majors studying those subjects as minor subject in college.
In the Philippines , almost all colleges/universities (Excepting UP) have different classes for Education (insert subject here ) majors and (Subject majors). I was told that Classes for Education Math Majors were for easier than Math majors (except in UP where people take the same classes ).
Getting back to the excerpted blog post below, Are the researches cited by those wanting to abolish the Education degree in the Philippines even valid?? If Top Teachers are ineffective are teachers even effective??
I think the post was a little misleading because :
- What if the reason some teachers do not get a license is not that they are not good, rather they perform well enough to not need a license to signify capability?
- What if the lack of a license acts as a motivator or a threat against employment status that people work or try to educate students as well if not better than licensed colleagues.
I don’t know haven’t made up my mind yet.!
from the Overcoming Bias blog here , a personal must read blog for me.
Top Teachers Ineffective
Yesterday I reported that top med school docs are no healthier for patients. Today I report that even at private schools, teachers who are fully certified do not help students perform any better on math and science tests:Data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS:88) were used to investigate the effect of teacher licensure status on private school students’ 12th grade math and science test scores. This data includes schooling and family background information on students that can be linked to employment information on teachers. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, private school students of fully certified 12th grade math and science teachers do not appear to outperform students of private school teachers who are not fully certified.
My urban econ text says:
Studies have consistently shown that graduate coursework (e.g., a Master’s degree) does not affect teacher productivity.
I expect patients are willing to pay more for top med school docs, and parents are willing to pay more for educated and certified teachers. And I expect that this would continue even if patients and parents knew the above results. I suspect most of the demand for teachers, doctors, and many other professionals comes from folks wanting to affiliate with certified-as-impressive people. And merely making patients healthier or making students perform better doesn’t count much toward impressiveness, relative to academia-certified impressiveness.
But folks don’t like to admit this directly; they’d rather pretend they care more than they do about other outputs. Which is why folks don’t want to hear about the above results. The media will oblige them, and so they will continue in their preferred delusions. Bet on it.Added: James Hubbard points us to a related critique of MBA training.
Quote Of The Day
Reads like part two to yesterday’s quote of the day!
from TechCrunch here :
MC: Ill tell you what I learned from Bobby Knight: everybody’s got the will to win but when it comes time to doing something, it’s always about someone else. Not many people have the will to prepare. You got to be willing to know your product and environment better than anybody. No matter what you do there is someone out there trying to kick your ass. You got to be the smartest guy in the room about your product. Then you need to have a revenue source. You need a company with a revenue to make money. Concept, competition, and where the money is — plus something you love doing. I’ve never had a day of work. When I die I want to come back as me.
from Jason Calcanis’ interview of Mark Cuban at TC50