Category: rePosts

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.
Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.
Even people who say they are looking for creativity react negatively to creative ideas, as demonstrated in a 2011 study from the University of Pennsylvania. Uncertainty is an inherent part of new ideas, and it’s also something that most people would do almost anything to avoid. People’s partiality toward certainty biases them against creative ideas and can interfere with their ability to even recognize creative ideas.
via Creativity is rejected: Teachers and bosses don’t value out-of-the-box thinking..

The two men were compared with Timothy Ray Brown, also known as the “Berlin Patient.” Brown is thought to be the first person ever “cured” of HIV/AIDS.
In 2007, Brown had a stem cell transplant to treat his leukemia. His doctor searched for a donor with a rare genetic mutation called CCR5 delta32 that makes stem cells naturally resistant to HIV infection.
Today, the virus is still undetectable in Brown’s blood, and he is still considered to be “functionally cured.” A functional cure means the virus is controlled and will not be transmitted to others.
The stem cell transplant procedure, however, is very dangerous because a patient’s immune system has to be wiped out in order to accept the transplant.
Using a stem cell transplant to treat HIV is not for most patients, and only 1% of Caucasians — mostly Northern Europeans — and no African-Americans or Asians have the CCR5 delta32 mutation, researchers say.
The transplant is still not a practical strategy for the majority of HIV patients, and the risk of mortality is up to 20%, Henrich says.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, agreed.
“This is not a practical approach for someone who does not need a stem cell transplant since the transplant and its preparation and its subsequent need for chronic immunosuppression is a risky procedure,” Fauci said.
“If you have an underlying neoplasm (tumor) like these patients had, then the risk outweighs the benefit,” he said. “However, if you are doing well on ARVs and you merely want to get off antiretroviral therapy, then the risk seems greater than the benefit.”
via HIV returns in two Boston patients after bone marrow transplants – CNN.com.

Mankind’s attitude to gold is bizarre. Chemically, it is uninteresting – it barely reacts with any other element. Yet, of all the 118 elements in the periodic table, gold is the one we humans have always tended to choose to use as currency. Why?
Why not osmium or chromium, or helium, say – or maybe seaborgium?
I’m not the first to ask the question, but I like to think I’m asking it in one of the most compelling locations possible – the extraordinary exhibition of pre-Columbian gold artefacts at the British Museum?
That’s where I meet Andrea Sella, a professor of chemistry at University College London, beside an exquisite breastplate of pure beaten gold.
He pulls out a copy of the periodic table.
via BBC News – Why do we value gold?.

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.
The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.
He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”
Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.
Edinburgh University’s authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he “might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn’t we can always get rid of him”.
Higgs said he became “an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises”. A message would go around the department saying: “Please give a list of your recent publications.” Higgs said: “I would send back a statement: ‘None.’ ”
By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. “After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn’t my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”
Higgs revealed that his career had also been jeopardised by his disagreements in the 1960s and 70s with the then principal, Michael Swann, who went on to chair the BBC. Higgs objected to Swann’s handling of student protests and to the university’s shareholdings in South African companies during the apartheid regime. “[Swann] didn’t understand the issues, and denounced the student leaders.”
He regrets that the particle he identified in 1964 became known as the “God particle”.
He said: “Some people get confused between the science and the theology. They claim that what happened at Cern proves the existence of God.”
An atheist since the age of 10, he fears the nickname “reinforces confused thinking in the heads of people who are already thinking in a confused way. If they believe that story about creation in seven days, are they being intelligent?”
He also revealed that he turned down a knighthood in 1999. “I’m rather cynical about the way the honours system is used, frankly. A whole lot of the honours system is used for political purposes by the government in power.”
He has not yet decided which way he will vote in the referendum on Scottish independence. “My attitude would depend a little bit on how much progress the lunatic right of the Conservative party makes in trying to get us out of Europe. If the UK were threatening to withdraw from Europe, I would certainly want Scotland to be out of that.”
He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn’t impressed.
via Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system | Science | The Guardian.

OCT. 6, 2013

1. Accept that there will be whole swaths of you that will always seem like a mystery. There will be things that may never make sense. There will be questions that may always go unanswered. Despite this, you must stop questioning the steady sense of knowing your body somehow delivers to you anyway. Even when logic would seem to defeat it, and your mind is combatting it furiously. That knowing is your truth. That knowing is what you have to act on without sound reason. We call this the leap of faith. Learn to take it.
2. Learn what it means to have radical empathy. Realize that underneath it all we are the same. We have all suffered. We have all known loss, heartbreak, grief, sadness, tragedy and misfortune, all in the uniqueness of our own experiences. You may not know what someone’s story is but you do know what it feels like to have a knife going through you when you lose someone you love. What it’s like to be completely alone and thwarted from society. You always have the ability to understand people at that very raw, human level. It’s only a matter of how much you’re willing to see yourself in them.
3. If you love someone, freaking tell them. Write it on notes next to their bed and in journals that they’ll one day find and interrupt their sentences with it if you have to. There is nothing more important than being vocal about loving someone. You want to know the truth? We are all starving for love and acceptance and if you love someone you need to tell them that without being afraid that they don’t love you as much, or at all. That’s not love. That’s greed. That’s neediness. That’s the desire for affirmation and attention. Love, in it’s purest, untapped form, does not hinge on the requirement that they’ll love you in return.
4. Let loving someone or not loving someone be enough in deciding whether or not you want to be with them. The rest are augmentable details. But that core is unchanging.
5. Have a verifiably effective plan for coping with emotional pain. Sometimes wicked anxiety crops up out of nowhere. Some days we’ll be just going along our way and then all of a sudden all of the issues of our childhood come sweeping back through us like we never grew out of them and we panic and hold onto them because we don’t know how to let go because it seems like doing so will give them the power to sneak up on us again. In these moments, you need a friend to call and a shoulder to lean on and a playlist to blast and a journal to write in. And somewhere in that journal, you need to have written: “this too shall pass.”
6. Stop trying to convince people to love you. With what you wear, in sullied comments that dig for their appreciation, in how your interests have forcefully evolved to complement or mirror those of whom you are so desperately trying to win over. Stop doing things so you’ll be regarded highly in other people’s opinions. That won’t make them love you more. It will only drive you farther away from yourself.
7. Learn to say sorry and mean it. Realize that what most wisdom stems from is forgiveness: for ourselves, for others, for what happened and for what’s missing, for what’s unstable and what’s gone unacknowledged. Realize that you won’t always receive an apology and you still may have to find forgiveness anyway. Realize that’s the only way to understand just how powerful a genuine apology can be.
8. Write lists and make goals and always keep yourself moving toward something. Joy is in the moment, but hope is in tomorrow. It’s a fine balance that takes lifetimes to perfect. Don’t feel bad if you err toward one mindset or another. Just don’t forget that when you do fall too deeply into focusing on today or tomorrow, that you always have the other option.
9. Accept that while most things end up okay, not everything does. Some things may dig themselves into you and you’ll carry them through your whole life. Sometimes things go mysteriously unresolved. Sometimes you’ll fight hard and lose. Sometimes you’ll be so far in denial that acceptance isn’t something you start to approach for years. It’s important to be okay with not being okay. It’s part of the human condition. It’s very beautiful if you let it show you a deeper route into yourself.
10. Stand up for what’s just. Stand up for love and stand up for equality and respect. Don’t be a bystander in someone else’s life but more importantly, don’t be a bystander in your own.
11. Let yourself be useless sometimes. You can’t spend your entire life reveling in achievement. In fact, you’ll spend most of your days on your knees grappling with what you’re most passionate about. You’ll turn up on the other side eventually, but not without days upon days of climbing.
12. Say thank you even when you don’t feel gratitude. It’s not that you shouldn’t feel it, but sometimes you just might not. But saying “thank you” is one of those rare things in which you do entirely for the other person. Saying thank you doesn’t help you. It helps the other person want to give again. You won’t understand what “thank you” means until it’s given to you after you’ve truly given to someone else. Foster that for other people and keep the cycle going. It will come back to you eventually.
13. Never go into anything thinking you are entitled to it because you are talented, because you have suffered for it or because it’s time for the universe to cater to your needs just this once. This will never be the truth.
14. Buy a notebook. Write down what you want. Write down what hurts you. Show it to someone you love. Save it for your children. Burn it in your backyard. Either way, go to bed knowing that in some way, those things are out of you.
15. Know the difference between the limits that withhold you and the limits that are crucial for you to obey. Draw your lines accordingly. Live your life around them.
16. Learn to comfort someone. Head nods and “I understands” won’t mean jack shit when someone is really in the depths of something. If you love someone, know when it’s time to order their favorite food and hold their hand the way they like and respond in the way they are looking to be responded to. Sometimes it’s with empathy and understanding, sometimes it’s with problem-solving mechanisms and jokes to lighten things. You won’t know unless you know someone thoroughly. There are reasons people don’t just look to anybody when they’re really in need. These are them.
17. Learn to enjoy talking about something that doesn’t come at the expense of someone else.
18. Realize how important it is to mourn properly. This means letting yourself be a whole big ball of effing mess now and again. Things and people will phase in and out as scheduled. You can’t keep holding on for their return because most often, they won’t come. But that withholding will shape you, and it will shape you through your own self-induced pain and suffering. If you don’t want that to be your story, write it a different way. It starts with saying goodbye to what’s not meant for us and what’s left inexplicably. Your quality of life will completely depend on how well you embrace this. Choose wisely.

1,000 bandsBrian Eno possibly said that, “the first Velvet Underground record may have only sold 1,000 copies, but every person who bought it started a band.” []It certainly wasnt a bestselling album, but without a doubt, it changed things.The scarcity mindset pushes us to corner the market, to be the only one selling what we sell.The abundance alternative, though, is to understand that many of us sell ideas, not widgets, and that ideas are best when used, and the more they get used, the more ideas they spawn.Kevin Kelly has inspired 10,000 companies, and Shepard Fairey, a generation of artists.How many bands will you inspire today? Two footnotes here. The first is that like most revolutionary ideas that start a ruckus, the first album was poorly reviewed. It wasnt the obvious next thing, the idea thats easy to celebrate. And second, Enos quote has been amended over time: “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. The sales have picked up in the past few years, but I mean, that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”
via Seths Blog: 1,000 bands.

It’s a widely held and probably comforting view that sports are driven by “transformative” athletes, a procession of unprecedented individual talents—Pelé, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods—that heroically drag their games to ever-escalating heights. Occasionally these players prompt physical transformations and rule changes, but usually their impact is more nebulous. Jordan never made anyone seriously consider raising the height of the hoop. He just played basketball better and more shrewdly than anyone else, and in doing so, he altered basketball’s cultural footprint, clearing the way for Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, maybe even Andrew Wiggins.
Robert Griffin III, 23 years old with a twice-reconstructed right knee, is, we’re told, one of these transformative athletes. This offseason, Griffin has been the subject of two full-length books, Dave Sheinin’s RG3: The Promise and Ted Kluck’s Robert Griffin III: Athlete, Leader, Believer, and both frame Griffin as an epochal, superhuman talent. “Someday historians may look back at the Redskins’ second play from scrimmage in their win over the Saints and pinpoint it as the moment offensive football changed forever in the NFL,” writes Sheinin. Kluck’s explicitly faith-based book goes even further, offering up RG3 as a sort of Cartesian theological proof: “RG3 and football should remind us of who it is that we really worship. … There’s something in Robert’s game that suggests that God made him to do exactly this, exactly now.” Take that, Tim Tebow.
Griffin was also the focus of a recent hourlong ESPN special that documented his rehabilitation process, his family life, and his insatiable thirst for Gatorade. And in May, Washington fans unearthed Griffin’s wedding registry and showered him and his fiancée with gifts, the sort of desperate affection normally lavished on a coveted free agent or a star player feared to be on the verge of departure. If Sunday football is America’s secular religion, all of this hagiography and breathless devotion has made Griffin seem like some blessed apparition: precious, magical, fleeting. We love him, and because we love him, we can’t stop worrying about him.
via RG3 knee injury: Can Robert Griffin III save the NFL, or will pro football destroy him? – Slate Magazine.

The Man Who Took on Amazon and Saved a Bookstore
 
Certain business ideas seem doomed to fail. You can walk into a restaurant or retail chain and know instantly that its days are numbered.
That’s the gut sense I had when I learned that someone new had bought the Harvard Book Store – a comforting oasis for bibliophiles and casual
browsers – just a few blocks from my office in Cambridge. In a town where independent bookstores have been folding faster than Starbucks can open coffee shops in China, this naïve optimist embarked on his new venture in the dark days of the recession, under the shadow of Amazon, and as e-books began their zenith rise.
Jeff Mayersohn, the new owner, elicited my sympathy, but I also wanted to get to know him. I respected his mission, even if I didn’t quite believe in its future. So, Jeff shocked me a couple of weeks ago, when he told me with a certain amount of pride and pleasure that he has been seeing double digit sales growth month by month over the last year.
I wanted to know how he managed to survive, let alone prosper, in the age of e-readers and the mighty Amazon. Over coffee, Jeff shared his original insight that led to his strategy for buying the store.
A former technology executive with a passion for reading and books, Jeff saw – like everyone else – that the digitization of content was destroying the neighborhood bookstore.
Imagine for a moment what it would feel like if people walked into your company and used the lobby to call your competitors and buy their products. That’s standard consumer behavior in a bookstore. People browse, find a book they like, pull out their smart phone, and order online.
Making an intuitive leap, Jeff wondered if the opposite could be true? Maybe access to the vast universe of digital content could also save the bookstore. Maybe the bookstore, while limited in inventory, could evolve in the digital world and become a destination where people had access to every digitized book ever published.
To truly compete, he would also have to solve consumer’s expectations for instant gratification and delivery. Jeff needed a complete production, distribution, and fulfillment model. He has likely shocked a lot of people by building one in his own backyard.
Essentially, Jeff installed a printing press to close the inventory gap with Amazon.  The Espresso Book Machine sits in the middle of Harvard Book Store like a hi-tech visitor to an earlier era. A compact digital press, it can print nearly five million titles including Google Books that are in the public domain, as well as out of print titles. We’re talking beautiful, perfect bound paperbacks indistinguishable from books produced by major publishing houses. The Espresso Book Machine can be also used for custom publishing, a growing source of revenue, and customers can order books in the store and on-line.
You can walk into the store, request an out-of-print, or hard-to-find title, and a bookseller can print that book for you in approximately four minutes. Ben Franklin would be impressed.
But you don’t even have to go into the store to get a book. If you live in Cambridge and neighboring communities, you can order online and get any book delivered the same day by an eco-friendly Metroped “pedal-truck,” or a bicycle, as I like to call them. Beat that Amazon.
Marketers know that success comes from a complex formula, and Jeff’s strategy includes many moving parts. Harvard Book Store pays fanatical attention to customer service with an unrivaled staff of passionate and educated booksellers. They have spent years building a local brand. They bring people together with over 300 public events a year. They’re exceptional retailers with a frequent buyer program. They understand technology, and you can expect them to continually adapt.
Of course, Amazon has got nothing to fear, but that’s not the point. Harvard Book Store defended their market and they did it by leveling the playing field with a giant. You shop there because it’s the most effective and satisfying experience.
Ultimately the bookstore exists to serve a community, and Jeff devised a strategy to safeguard that mission. While people will always take the path of least resistance to buy a book, they still value the experience of browsing and spending time in a place that ignites their imagination. That’s the position that Harvard Book Store has defended.
It might sound audacious to say that one bookstore devised a strategy to counter the long reach of Amazon. But it’s no more audacious than Amazon’s conviction in 1999 that you could sell books over the Internet.
Phil Johnson is the CEO of PJA Advertising and on Twitter @philjohnson
via The Man Who Took on Amazon and Saved a Bookstore – Forbes.

Self hosted Git management software
GitLab is a fast, secure and stable solution to manage your projects.
It is based on Ruby on Rails and has a free and open-source license (MIT).
GitLab is the most installed git management application in the world.
via GITLAB: Self Hosted Git Management Application.