Loewy had an uncanny sense of how to make things fashionable. He believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. Loewy called his grand theory “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”—maya. He said to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising.

Source: The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

Right now, however, my biggest concern in this context is somewhat different: the past decade’s policies of anemic recovery are apparently not perceived as a failure by either those at the tiller at the time or by their successors. With a few honorable exceptions, Fed policymakers tend to say that they did the best they could, given the fiscal headwinds imposed on them. With a few honorable exceptions, Obama administration policymakers say that they stopped a second Great Depression, and that during the recovery they did their best given how they were hobbled by the Republican majorities in Congress.
For their part, conservative economists tend to either be silent on the subject or say that the policies — both fiscal and monetary — pursued by the Obama administration and by the Bernanke Fed were dangerously inflationary, and that we have been lucky to escape the fate of Greece — or Zimbabwe.
Economic analysis has made the rise and fall of economies easier to understand and easier to manage — or at least I thought it had. Yet once again, policymakers (including the decision makers at the top in the Obama administration) abandoned modern economics in favor of discredited policies born of a mixture of so-called common sense and 19th-century misunderstandings. We are all paying the price — well, the bottom 99 percent of us, anyway.

Source: Was the Great Recession More Damaging Than the Great Depression? – Milken Institute Review

I shift a large part of my offering from church-based offering to more NGO/charity giving when I am irked at …

WITH a six-figure salary from a London private equity firm, it could be expected that Grayden Reece-Smith would be living it up on eye-wateringly expensive holidays or driving a suitably flash sports car around south London, where he lives. Instead, the 28-year-old lives a very different existence to his peers and gives away everything he earns over £42,000 – a figure he calculated he could comfortably live on. Over the past five years, Reece-Smith has handed over more than £250,000 to organisations such as

Source: The millennials donating 10% of their pay to save the world | Money | The Guardian

Agree with about 75 percent of this

When You Should Avoid Node.js in Back-End Development

As I have noted, the primary strength of Node.js is its single-threaded nature. It significantly decreases the complexity of handling various requests when you have hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users with limited requests when it comes to sheer computational power.
The trend shifts significantly when you have a small number of client-side requests that, however, demand significant computational power. Let us imagine a situation in which you build a complex web application for rather complicated mathematical calculations. In specific scenarios, even two simultaneous inquiries can quickly overload your server CPU.
Only multithreading can offer you a robust solution to the problem, as it will dedicate more “firepower” to complex processes, immediately initializing calculations on multiple cores of a CPU.
However, this situation is highly hypothetical. The majority of the programs that involve heavy calculations are always desktop-based. The complexity of the calculations is often so high that even the multithreading server back-ends cannot deal with a relatively small number of user inquiries.
It is easier to offload all calculations to user PCs, making offline programs for some of the most complex tasks such as video rendering or mathematical calculations. Thus, I do not recommend that you use web platforms for any type of complex calculations. This situation may change in this decade; however, the future solution is likely to involve some radical innovations. Node.js is clearly not an option in this case.
Node.js is a niche product that is oriented at the everyday needs of non-advanced PC users; if you go outside of this safe zone, you are essentially shooting yourself in the foot. Complex calculations should be dedicated only to classical development solutions.

Source: When To Use Node.js as a Back-End – Simple Programmer

Conflict with my parents and wife revolve around my being the only one who figured this out.

 
If managing the demands of working and parenting in the 21st century feels impossible, Christine M. Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian argue, that’s because the ideals that many working parents subscribe to are impossible to fulfill.

Three core myths animate much of American life, according to Beckman and Mazmanian, professors at the University of Southern California and UC Irvine, respectively. The first myth, they explain in their recent book, Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working and Parenting in the Digital Age, is that of the “ideal worker,” who “has no competing obligations that might get in the way of total devotion to the workplace.” The second is that of the “perfect parent,” who “always puts family first.” And the third is that of the “ultimate body,” which is cultivated through diligent dieting and exercise, and doesn’t deteriorate with age. “Achieving even one of these myths would be impossible,” Mazmanian told me in an interview, “but achieving all three is ludicrous.”

Source: America’s Ideal of Working Parents Has Become Unattainable – The Atlantic

I have enrolled in 4 online courses during the 60 or so days of the pandemic that I was able to concentrate on studying.
 
I enrolled in the most successful online course of Learning How to Learn and then Mindshift from the same professors and providers (Coursera).
 
Due to the medical nature of one of my consultancies specifically interoperability layers for health care data I enrolled two related courses that have been very useful for my consultancy work.
 

“Health Informatics: A Current and Historical Perspective“

and

“Health Informatics: Data and Interoperability Standards”

which are both from EdX.
 
Here are some of my notes on how I made the most of online learning and what strategies online course makers should have to make their courses effective:

1. Start online-learning by going through the excellent learning how to learn course from Coursera. This maximizes the chance  of success in online learning possible.
2. Make lessons as atomic as possible. Teach one concept at a time if possible, for concepts that make sense only in relation to other concepts be mindful of the order of presentation.
3. Use the techniques outlined in the Learning How To Learn Course.
4. Start with online courses you are very interested in.
5. Do not hesitate to repeat lessons.
6. Take personalized notes.
7. Mix both handwritten and electronic notes. Electronic notes are easily organized and searched, while personalized handwritten notes promote easier recall when you need to refresh yourself of skill, technique, learning.

For African Americans and First Nations populations, the correlations are very robust. Surprisingly, for these two groups the racial disparity does not seem to be due to differences in income, poverty rates, education, occupational mix, or even access to healthcare insurance. A significant portion of the disparity can, however, be sourced to the use of public transit.

Source: Racial disparities in Covid-19 outcomes – Marginal REVOLUTION

Introduction

This page discusses the question of evaluating e-health standards for longevity.
Over the last 20 years many attempts have been made to solve the wicked problem of health data interoperability, and more recently, ‘semantic’ versions of the same. The problem to be solved is essentially:

• semantic interoperability across and within enterprises,
• semantic interoperability between layers of functionality within a system,
• with an ultimate aim of being able to compute intelligently on the data

A much larger list of concrete needs can be constructed from this abstract description. Solving these challenges would result in great advances for:

• shared care, community care, since health records can be not just shared but treated as a single point of truth
• individualised, preventive medicine, since semantically computable EHR data are amenable to automated evaluation of clinical guidelines
• medical research, since data would be far more computable, and more data per patient could be aggregated from multiple sources
• public health, since aggregation of computable data of large numbers of patients will clearly enable epidemiological functions as well as routine health statistics
• cost determination, re-imbursement, fraud detection and better management of public and private payer funds.

Source: Desiderata for successful e-health standards | Woland’s cat

Behind all this is the astonishing, baffling breadth of what sleep does for the body. The fact that learning, metabolism, memory, and myriad other functions and systems are affected makes an alteration as basic as the presence of ROS quite interesting. But even if ROS is behind the lethality of sleep loss, there is no evidence yet that sleep’s cognitive effects, for instance, come from the same source. And even if antioxidants prevent premature death in flies, they may not affect sleep’s other functions, or if they do, it may be for different reasons.
The flies that never sleep and their glowing guts remind us that sleep is profoundly a full-body experience, not merely a function of the mind and brain. In their deaths may lie some answers as to why sleeplessness kills and — potentially, tantalizingly — what sleep does to link disparate systems throughout the body. Shaw, for one, is interested to see what happens next in Rogulja’s lab. “It’s a super important question,” he said, “and they’ve come up with a way to address it.

Source: Why Sleep Deprivation Kills | Quanta Magazine

Doing Business In Japan

(For readers for whom Japanese is easier than English / 日本語が読みやすい方：上杉周作さんが本投稿を日本語に翻訳してくださいました。ビジネス・イン・ジャパンをご参照ください。)
I’ve been in Japan for ten years now and often get asked about how business works here, sometimes by folks in the industry wondering about the Japanese startup culture, sometimes by folks wishing to sell their software in Japan, and sometimes by folks who are just curious. Keith and I have discussed this on the podcast before, but I thought I’d write a bit about my take on it.
Disclaimer: Some of this is going to be colored by my own experiences.
The brief version: white male American (which occasionally matters — see below), came to Japan right out of college in 2004. I have spent my entire professional life here. I’ve worked in two traditionally-managed Japanese organizations (one governmental body and one megacorp), run my own business full-time since 2010, and have modest professional experience with Japanese startups (both run by Japanese folks and by foreigners).
I’m fluent in Japanese to all practical purposes.
Disclaimer the second: I’m going to attempt to avoid essentializing Japan too much, as (like the US) it is a big country with a broad range of human experience in it. Essentialization is a persistent problem with most writing about foreign cultures. The best antidote for it ever with regards to Japan is an out-of-print book Making Common Sense of Japan.
That said, there may be some generalization and/or exaggeration for dramatic effect. Mea maxima culpa.

Source: Doing Business In Japan | Kalzumeus Software