March 2009
35 posts
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Atul Gawande on solitary confinement →
One of my favorite New Yorker writers covers the effects of solitary confinement on humans.
EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like...
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Economic Recovery Dashboard →
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Scanwiches →
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M.T.A. Increases Fares and Cuts Services →
The fare hikes on the subway and buses, including an increase in the base subway and bus fare to $2.50, from $2, will take effect May 31.
Commuter rail fares will increase June 1. Tolls on the authority’s bridges and tunnels will also go up, with the increase taking effect in mid-July.
The service cuts are far reaching. They include the elimination of 35 bus routes and two subway...
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Why are so many pro-athletes broke? →
By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.
Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.
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NYT, 1999: Congress passes wide-ranging bill... →
”Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,” Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ”This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”
The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked...
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Cat Communication: Body Language →
Housecats develop a wide variety of sounds to alert humans to their needs and intentions. Many are variations on mother/kitten meow or chirp sounds which the cat has adapted in order to “speak” to non-cats. This is quite logical since the cosseted housecat remains dependent on humans i.e. a permanent kitten. Others are adult sounds such as the caterwaul (used in a sexual or...
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The Big Takeover →
It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of...
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Bernanke Pushes the Button →
In my ongoing quest to make this the most boring site ever, here’s some more financial news:
Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and the rest of the FOMC decided today to embark upon the one strategy central bankers have always considered the dreaded last option — Quantitative Easing. It’s one thing for the Fed to push the “Easy” button and lower rates or temporarily inject reserves into...
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Browser Ball →
Make sure to use multiple windows (via hn)
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Our Mission at AIG: Repairs, and Repayment →
Edward Liddy, head of AIG:
In all, total 2008 compensation for the top 47 executives is 56 percent lower than their total 2007 compensation.
Driving the company into the ground only gets you a 44% pay cut. Nice.
From the NYT:
Mr. Cuomo did not name the bonus recipients, but the numbers are eye-popping, given A.I.G.’s fragile state. The highest bonus was $6.4 million, and six other...
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Notes from a former college admissions officer →
If a school’s admitting X kids, you have to completely forget about that number. That number is meaningless. There’s a certain percentage of X that’s just spoken for. There are kids you have to admit to keep the school running and to meet all its institutional needs. Once you figure out how many kids that is, subtract that from the number of kids you’re supposedly...
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Detroit: The $100 house →
Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.
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Larry Walters, lawnchair flier →
Lawrence Richard Walters, nicknamed “Lawnchair Larry”, was an American truckdriver who took flight on July 2, 1982 in a homemade aircraft. Dubbed Inspiration I, the “flying machine” consisted of an ordinary patio chair with 45 helium-filled weather balloons attached to it. Walters rose to an altitude of 16,000 feet and floated from his point of origin in San Pedro,...
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Even young, tech savvy people hate change →
Facebook announces changes in UI, and they consistently get tons of comments like this:
i hate the new facebook
i just want the old facebook back.
Designing UI is challenging enough, must suck to have so many bitch and moan. You’d expect this from an older audience, but it’s surprising to see from the “net generation” (bleh). They’ll get over it soon...
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How Rich Countries Die →
The president of the U.S. would like to see greater economic efficiency in the U.S. as a whole. Individual congressmen, however, will push for pork-barrel legislation that benefits their district even if the cost to the overall economy is hundreds of times greater than the benefit (their constituents will pay 1/435th of the cost and receive 100 percent of the benefit). This leads to a...
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Vegetables today have fewer minerals →
Apparently produce in the U.S. not only tastes worse than it did in your grandparents’ days, it also contains fewer nutrients — at least according to Donald R. Davis, a former research associate with the Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. Davis claims the average vegetable found in today’s supermarket is anywhere from 5% to 40% lower in minerals (including...
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WatchJim Cramer vs. Stewart on the Daily show. (See also: unedited version)
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The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond... →
Sounds so much like a cheesy movie that you wonder if it’s false:
At first, Notarbartolo was confused. He seemed to be standing in the vault antechamber. To his left, he saw the vault door. He was inside an exact replica of the Diamond Center’s vault level. Everything was the same. As far as Notarbartolo could tell, the dealer had reconstructed it based on the photographs he had...
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Watch
This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.
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Maintained Relationships on Facebook →
We were asked a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks? This is a particularly difficult question to answer, so as a first attempt we looked into the types of relationships people do maintain, and the relative size of these groups. The image above presents a high-level overview of our findings: while the average Facebook user communicates with a...
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Watch
Mike Rowe, the host of “Dirty Jobs,” tells some compelling (and horrifying) real-life job stories. Listen for his insights and observations about the nature of hard work, and how it’s been unjustifiably degraded in society today.
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Morally Conflicted About Walking Away? Don't Be →
It’s worth noting, also, that invariably stories that mention the prospect of foreclosure talk about the hit that this causes to a borrowers’ credit rating. Obviously, there is a hit. However, journalists are mistaken when they imagine that a credit score is a judgment on the character of borrowers. It’s not. It’s a judgment about the likelihood of someone repaying a...
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Guide to Flirting →
When you first meet new people, their initial impression of you will be based 55% on your appearance and body-language, 38% on your style of speaking and only 7% on what you actually say.
Later:
Warning: some of the non-verbal flirting techniques outlined in this section are very powerful signals, and should be used with caution. Women should be particularly careful when using signals of...
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Michael Lewis: Wall Street on the Tundra →
For the past few years, some large number of Icelanders engaged in the same disastrous speculation. With local interest rates at 15.5 percent and the krona rising, they decided the smart thing to do, when they wanted to buy something they couldn’t afford, was to borrow not kronur but yen and Swiss francs. They paid 3 percent interest on the yen and in the bargain made a bundle on the currency...
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Detroit's outlook falls along with home prices →
The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service.
Not $75,000. Remove a zero—it’s seven thousand five hundred dollars, substantially less than the lowest-price car on the new-car market.
(thx Kalid!)
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Europe's Crisis: Much Bigger Than Subprime, Worse... →
This is why some folks think the dollar is going to remain strong over the coming months: Because the rest of the world is falling apart even faster than we are.
(thx lutz!)
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Deconstructing the Missing Weeks of a Teacher's... →
“I went from going for a run to being in the ambulance,” the woman said several months later in describing her ordeal. “It was like 10 minutes had passed. But it was almost three weeks.”
On Aug. 28, a Thursday, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from Hamilton Heights named Hannah Emily Upp went for a jog along Riverside Drive. That jog is the last thing that Ms. Upp says she remembers before the...