“Wired is running a story on the 2005 Foot In Mouth Awards.” From the article: “Tech execs say the darndest things. And so do shuffling presidents, and disgraced scientists, and Wikipedia fakers. It’s time to relive 2005’s biggest spoken gaffes.”
Archive for the ‘Reality’ Category
2005 Foot In Mouth Awards
Wednesday, December 28th, 2005holy cow!
Wednesday, December 28th, 2005Study: Cows Excel At Selecting Leaders
Recent studies on leadership in cows and other grazing herbivores suggest that intelligence, inquisitiveness, confidence, experience and good social skills help to determine which animals will become leaders within herds.
The findings suggest that, at least among these animals, individuals are not necessarily “born leaders,” and that bullying, selfishness, size and strength are not recognized as suitable leadership qualities.
“The fact that in groups of animals of different age, leaders are amongst the oldest animals suggests that it’s not innate, but the result of previous experience,” said Bertrand Dumont, lead author of a recent Applied Animal Behavior Science paper on leadership in a group of grazing heifers.
Dumont is a researcher at INRA, the national institute of agricultural research in Saint-Genès-Champanelle, France.
Warped geometry speeds airline boarding
Monday, December 19th, 2005What’s the most efficient way to get passengers on an airplane – boarding from front-to-back or a “free for all”? The answer may surprise you. (Here’s the full paper in PDF format.)
Why Do Computer Games Claim Lives?
Sunday, December 18th, 2005An article from Chosun, a Korean newspaper, asking the question why do videogames claim lives? The article is in response to some recent high profile gamer deaths. From the article: “Apparently rare overseas, such cases make frequent headlines in Korea. Why? Experts point to the poor environment of the ‘PC bang’ or Internet cafes that have mushroomed nationwide. Generally dark and poorly ventilated, they cater to gamers who tend to smoke heavily. The bad air and light can increase the danger of sudden death, experts warn.”
The Year’s 10 Worst Predictions
Thursday, December 15th, 2005Prognosticating is hardly a science — and these whoppers for 2005 show why
A great sage once said, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” That was more true than usual in 2005, which defied predictability. As the year of Katrina, Google, and $70 oil draws to a quiet (we hope) close, let’s stop to reflect on — and chuckle at — the worst of the forecasting mistakes.
Alternative Cover Sheets for Classified Info
Thursday, December 15th, 2005
From today’s Secrecy News:
ALTERNATIVE COVER SHEETS FOR CLASSIFIED INFO
While underlying questions of secrecy and disclosure carry a potent primeval charge, the actual implementation of government secrecy policy is about as boring as it could be.
In a rare attempt to leaven the subject with humor, some unidentified person has produced spoofs of the colored cover sheets that are often used on classified documents (Standard Forms 703, 704, and 705 for Top Secret, Secret and Confidential, respectively).
Three previously published bogus cover sheets (for Futile, Stupid and B*ll**** Information) have been augmented by three new ones.
The collection was circulated this week at the Pentagon.
See the set here:
No word on which cover sheet was used for the parasite microsatellite or the Liying Zhan intelligence.
Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t.
Wednesday, December 14th, 2005It’s official, humans are dumber than chimps. These guys show (at the NY Times level) that human kids will over-imitate every ritualized nuance modeled for them, whereas chimp kids just wanna get the damn cookie out of the box. Their website also describes more of their studies.
“park and walk” versus “cruise the lot.”
Tuesday, December 13th, 2005Parking Space Roulette
It’s the holiday season, and the parking lot at the mall is busy. You’re looking for a parking space. What’s the best strategy for selecting a “good” spot quickly?
If the lot is really jammed, you take the first spot that you can find—no matter where it is or how inconvenient it might be.
At other times, you might seek a spot that keeps the distance you have to walk to the mall entrance to a minimum or cuts down the amount of driving that you have to do to find a spot (or a combination of the two, represented by the total time it takes you to reach the mall’s front door).
In one approach, you enter the parking lot, select a row near the lot’s fringe where you entered, and take the first open space.
Alternatively, you could gamble by driving to the row nearest to the mall entrance to look for the closest open space. If there isn’t an open space in the first row, you “cycle” to the next adjacent row and take an open space, if one is available. Otherwise, you return to the first row and again look for the closest open spot.
Several years ago, C. Richard Cassady of Mississippi State University and John E. Kobza, then at Virginia Tech, compared the two strategies: “park and walk” versus “cruise the lot.” Their study appeared in the journal Transportation Science.
Enlightened Technology: Prophet of the Electric Age
Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
Prophet of the Electric Age
By
Thomas M. Easley © Copyright 2005
(with author’s permission)
Why is it so difficult for mankind to produce just and meaningful leadership? Why do small minded people, believing that acquisition of power increases intelligence, so often amass authority over the maintenance of societal well-being?
Are we certain, without doubt, that mankind is evolving?
Is there a link between technology and the concept of belief?
The human species is a self-organizing system wherein we, its comprising ingredients, exist as individual parts contributing to the species’ self-organization. This is much like an individual human body self-organizing its many parts. The immune and lymph systems, coordination, balance, soul, brain and heart functions, cellular and nerve functions, conscience, the senses, etc. all initiate and develop in conjunction with the mutual goal of shared authority over the life of the human body. As such the presence of leadership in the body of mankind represents a troubling deficiency, a failure in and of the organism to protect itself, to link all its parts, to understand itself, to actualize potential, to evolve.
Leadership by this account is a fraud, a millenniums old assault on the species well-being and the dissemination of supplementary scales of vision to its various organs and parts.
But how, you ask, can we survive without our Kings, Queens and Presidents, our Dictators, Tyrants, Popes, Princes, Teachers and Saints? How does one man survive from morning to night, day to day, year to year? He relies on the combined intelligence of all his parts to direct his way.
Presently, because of mankind’s addiction to leadership, survival without leadership would be difficult, even impossible. Yet … an ant of change is on the march. Year by year more people come to abhor our diminutive and abridged perspective on reality. More people flee the confines of our linear one-dimensional perspective and begin to reason multi-dimensionally, to increase scale of vision. We as a people are beginning to understand that those, or that, which we deservedly follow do not lead. They learn, and we learn from them that true leadership amasses no disciples.
Today’s average, the “common” man, has begun to gather and process observations with the initial gradient of species scale-of-vision: the freedom to communicate on all levels of interest both mundane and otherwise without the burden of physical proximity and the predatory assessment of an overriding authority granting them the privilege of doing so.
In these uninitiated saints, the anonymous masses, the electric age is being born. In them the gestating seeds of enlightened technology are taking hold and growing. Our species is self-organizing us.
For thousands of year’s one man’s ability to communicate with another was local. But for a long walk, distant ride on a horse or ship, a new idea in North America would not reach Asia. Even then when new ideas did travel they were filtered through established powers engineered to maintain leadership rule. Men were not free to exchange ideas as individuals. Today this has changed. Technological advances, an escalating Internet, media broadcasts and a wide range of telephone services have begun the process of interconnecting separate and diverse parts, expanding the reach of species-self-organization.
This is so because technology is not merely an array of intriguing and helpful devices. Technology is a being-state within the species, a quality of mind, or “brane;” capable of implementing the next level of species evolution. It may even represent the manufacture of our experience of human soul, our ambitious visions of eternal life and our contentious apprehensions of God.
Rather than using technology, perhaps it is we who are being used, used by our own species directing the growth of technological prowess to its purpose; that which we deservedly follow.
Further, taking the Bible as a historic rather than a religious text, we find this intriguing phrase, “Christ will return to Earth after the word of God (or is it Species Dictation), has reached all four corners of the Earth.”
Apart from being a man of profound worth in the role he plays in Christian belief systems, Jesus Christ duplicates as light or energy … electricity. Scanning the globe via satellite we note with some significance that electricity; technologies food source, has, in fact, reached all four corners of the earth.
The return of “The Son of God” is upon us yet not in the form or manner predicted. Indeed, but for whom has “The Light” returned, for whom or what?
Here we link belief with technology as man’s successful adaptation to Enlightened Technology requires belief, but not a belief in the absence or presence of any and all forms of God or God-ness.
Belief is a bioelectric impulse made active in all men as a means of fusing individuals to laws and processes (both known and unknown) governing the whole of mankind. That we believe, and not that we believe in, is the force of law within the species that connects the electricity in one man to that of all men. The common bioelectric of belief accounts for our eager and capable adaptation to any and all things electric, our hurry to turn on the light once it was invented.
Belief is our pathway to the stars held down by possessive interpretations of leadership. Where leadership prospers it divides and we are made weak as a whole. This deficit will be corrected as all structures requiring leadership, religious, political, economic, etc., meld into our absorption of electricity through technology, Enlightened Technology: prophet of the electric age.
spoof signs
Monday, November 28th, 2005A new book, Signs of Life, by Dave Askwith and Alex Normanton, features spoof signs which lampoon officious notices and labels that inform and instruct.
Museums Set to Sell Art, and Some Experts Cringe
Thursday, October 27th, 2005Museums Set to Sell Art, and Some Experts Cringe
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: October 26, 2005 in The New Work Times
Undaunted by the tempest over the New York Public Library’s sale of a prized painting, arts institutions across the country are cleaning out their closets for auctions starting next week, stirring fresh unease among art historians and curators.
Artworks going on the block include paintings by Picasso, Modigliani and Chagall, and rare photographs by masters like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston. In December, the public library is moving ahead with the sale of two portraits of George Washington, by Gilbert Stuart, and 16 other paintings.
Merely Following a Megatrend
Sunday, October 16th, 2005Merely Following a Megatrend
By ZUBIN JELVEH
Published: October 15, 2005 New York Times
Is your job at risk? If it’s the type of work that can be done over a wire, then probably yes, says Nandan M. Nilekani, the chief executive of Infosys Technologies.
Infosys is India’s second-largest outsourcer. After achieving success in software engineering and back-office service, it has now begun to compete with companies like I.B.M. for more lucrative consulting work. This week, Infosys reported that its second-quarter earnings rose 36 percent. It raised its earnings forecast for the full year on stronger demand and a weaker rupee.
In a recent interview, Mr. Nilekani, a chief executive who makes $60,000 a year at a company worth nearly $20 billion, spoke about Infosys’s success and the danger that it and other companies like it pose to American competitors.
Q. Are you worried about the outcry over outsourcing in America?
A. What’s happening is pretty fundamental. If you go back to the 1830’s, India and China were 50 percent of the world’s G.D.P., and then they missed the entire revolution of industry. So if you take a long view of this game, it’s just part of the process.
Q. Is there anything you realistically fear from Western policy makers?
A. No. I think politicians have to win elections. But underlying secular trends like technology and demographics – you can’t stop these things, they’re all megatrends. They’re going to happen whether you like it or not. In fact, the guys who are going to win are the ones who say, “It’s going to happen anyway; let’s figure out how we can take advantage of it.”
Q. Why did you branch out from just doing back-office work and add consulting to the mix of services you offer?
A. Our customers want us to be good at sitting down with them, understanding their business challenges, helping them devise a solution and then implementing it. They expect us to go up the chain in terms of relationships and business value. We’re not trying to be strategy consultants. We’re not sitting there and saying, “Buy this company.”
Q. So now you’ll be competing with the likes of I.B.M. and Accenture. Do you think you’ll change the cost structure of the consulting business?
A. This is a battle of business models. We believe that at the end of the day we have a disruptive business model that is a threat to the existing business model and older companies will have to reconfigure themselves to look more like us if they’re going to be globally competitive.
Q. What would that mean, to look more like you?
A. In any software project, we do 30 percent of the work in the U.S. and 70 percent in India. Our competitors do 100 percent of the work in a particular location. We have sort of become masters of delivering high value and high quality at lower cost, and on top of that we’re trying to add consulting. Their challenge is to retain their relationships and business knowledge while reconfiguring their internal operations to become as efficient as us.
Q. Do you think you will be able to accelerate your consulting services as fast as companies like I.B.M. ramp up their operations in places like India to lower their costs?
A. I think the challenge is fundamentally different. For us it’s about hiring and growth and building a brand; for them it’s about restructuring the work force and I think, frankly, I wouldn’t want to do that job because it’s very painful, whereas this is exciting.
Q. What do you say to people who think that globalization will inevitably harm the United States work force?
A. Every time Wal-Mart replaces a person at a checkout counter with an automatic machine they’re eliminating thousands of jobs. This is one more facet of that, except it’s more emotional because instead of a checkout counter machine replacing Steve Smith, some kid in Bangalore is replacing Steve Smith. You can point to that kid and say, “He took my job.”
Q. Does it feel odd to find yourself lecturing Americans on the joys of capitalism?
A. You guys told us for so many years to cut out this socialist rubbish and go to free markets. We came to free markets and now you’re telling us, “Stop, don’t come.”
The Blogger and IIPM
Saturday, October 15th, 2005(via Atanu Dey’s blog)
Here are the facts, very briefly. A magazine called JAM, did a story on a management institute called IIPM. The story said that IIPM makes tall claims. Many Indian newspapers carry full page IIPM ads. A blogger, Gaurav Sabnis, blogged about that and basically called IIPM claims fraudulent. IIPM served a legal notice threatening to sue Gaurav for a huge sum of money. They also contacted IBM, from whom they buy laptops for their students, to convey to them that they may stop that business relationship. Why? Gaurav works for IBM. So Gaurav resigned from IBM. The word got around and everyone and his brother is now blogging about the story—a rich corporation threatened a blogger and somehow managed to coerce him into quitting his job.
Everything you ever want to know about this affair and more is at Desipundit’s IIPM Blog Wars Redux.
Google 2084
Monday, October 10th, 2005
A mail from Vijay Kranti. Dean – IIT Madras
Friday, October 7th, 2005
Dear Friends,
Here is a personal experience, as well as a moment of national pride, which I want to share with you. Hope you find it worth the time you put in reading it :
“In the middle of 1965 India-Pakistan war, US govt – then a close friend of Pakistan – threatened India with stopping food-aid (remember “PL-480″?). For a food deficient India this threat was serious and humiliating. So much so that in the middle of war, Prime Minister (Late) Lal Bahadur Shastri went to Ram Leela Grounds in Delhi and appealed to each Indian to observe one-meal-fast every week to answer the American threat. As a school boy, I joined those millions who responded to Shastri ji’s call. I continued the fast even when the war was over and India became self sufficient in food. Hurt deep by the national humiliation suffered at the hands of the US govt, I had vowed to stop my weekly fast only when India starts giving aid to USA.
“It took just 40 years. Last week THE day arrived. When Indian ambassador in Washington DC handed over a cheque of US$ 50 million to the US govt, two plane loads of food, medical aid and other relief materials were waiting to fly to the USA. Time to break the fast? With no bad feeling about the USA, and good wishes for the Katrina victims, this humble Indian feels proud of the distance India has covered in 40 years. Let’s celebrate a New India!”
- Vijay Kranti. Dean – IIT Madras
Bush
Tuesday, October 4th, 2005Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.”
“OH NO!” the President exclaims. “That’s terrible!”
His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.
Finally, the President looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”
Marie La Coste: Somebody’s Darling
Wednesday, September 28th, 2005MARIE LA COSTE
1845 – 1935
After the death of Marie’s unnamed fiancée, a captain in the Confederate Army, apparently in 1862, the young French teacher became nurse and visitor at local hospitals for wounded Confederate soldiers. Her poem, which is sung at historical events today, is a distinctive memorial to those soldiers.
SOMEBODY’S DARLING
Into a ward of the white washed walls,
Where the dead and dying lay,
Wounded by bayonets, shells and balls,
Somebody’s darling was borne one day.
Somebody’s darling so young and brave
Wearing yet on his pale sweet face,
Soon to be hid by the dust of the grave,
The lingering light of his boyhood’s grace.
Matted and damp are the curls of gold
Kissing the snow of that fair young brow;
Pale are the lips of delicate mold -
Somebody’s darling is dying now.
Back from the beautiful blue-veined brow
Brushed all the wandering waves of gold;
Cross his hands on his bosom now;
Somebody’s darling is still and cold.
Kiss him once for somebody’s sake,
Murmur a prayer soft and low;
One bright curl from it’s fair mates take;
They were somebody’s pride you know.
Somebody’s hand has rested there;
Was it a mother’s soft and white?
And have the lips of a sister fair
Been baptized in the waves of light?
God knows best! He was somebody’s love,
Somebody’s heart enshrined him there.
Somebody wafted his name above,
Night and morn on the wings of prayer.
Somebody wept when he marched away,
Looking so handsome brave and grand;
Somebody’s kiss on his forehead lay;
Somebody clung to his parting hand.
Somebody’s watching and waiting for him,
Yearning to hold him again to her heart;
And there he lies with his blue eyes dim,
And the smiling child-like lips apart.
Tenderly bury the fair young dead,
Pausing to drop on his grave a tear;
Carve on the wooden slab at his head,
“Somebody’s darling slumbers here.”
Written by Marie La Coste
and subsequently published by
J .C. Schreiner & Son of Augusta, Georgia in 1864
(click here for Gujarati translation by Jhaverchand Meghani)
Psychopaths could be best financial traders?
Friday, September 23rd, 2005LONDON (Reuters) – “Wanted: psychopaths to make a killing in the markets.”
Such an advert will not be appearing in the world’s newspapers any time soon, but it may have a ring of truth after research revealed the best wheeler-dealers could well be “functional psychopaths.”
A team of U.S. scientists has found the emotionally impaired are more willing to gamble for high stakes and that people with brain damage may make good financial decisions, the Times newspaper reported Monday.
In a study of investors’ behavior 41 people with normal IQs were asked to play a simple investment game. Fifteen of the group had suffered lesions on the areas of the brain that affect emotions.
The result was those with brain damage outperformed those without.
Continue reading.
Well, if you can’t even trust a hitman..
Tuesday, September 20th, 2005TOKYO (Reuters) – A Japanese woman called in the police after a hitman she paid to kill her lover’s wife failed to carry out the job.
The 32-year-old Tokyo woman was arrested Wednesday for incitement to murder, the Daily Yomiuri newspaper said Friday.
The woman contacted a private detective through a Web site last November and paid him 1 million yen in cash to murder her love rival, the paper said.
The 40-year-old detective accepted the money and suggested he could carry out the job by chasing the victim on a motorcycle and spraying her with a biological agent in a tunnel.
Police also arrested the private detective and found the alleged target safe and well, the paper said.
speaks volume
Saturday, September 17th, 2005It’s one year old article from National Geographic. It speaks volume…
Comparison New Orleans vs. Mumbai (Bombay)
Wednesday, September 7th, 2005New Orleans vs. Mumbai (Bombay)
inches of rain in new orleans due to hurricane katrina… 18
inches of rain in mumbai (July 27th)…. 37.1
population of new orleans… 484,674
population of mumbai…. 12,622,500
deaths in new orleans within 48 hours of katrina…100
deaths in mumbai within 48hours of rain.. 37.
number of people to be evacuated in new orleans… entire city..wohh
number of people evacuated in mumbai…10,000
Cases of shooting and violence in new orleans…Countless
Cases of shooting and violence in mumbai.. NONE
Time taken for US army to reach new orleans…48hours
Time taken for Indian army and navy to reach mumbai…12hours
status 48hours later…new orleans is still waiting for relief, army and electricty
status 48hours later..mumbai is back on its feet and its business is as usual
USA…world’s most developed nation
India…third world country..
oopss…did i get the last fact wrong???
