Month: May 2007

This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)

This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It) – New York Times
At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. Yet Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of well-being — who had recovered, by standard measures — told very similar tales about their experiences.

They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it.

“The story is one of victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own, Those in the study who scored lower on measures of psychological well-being were more likely to see their moods and behavior problems as a part of their own character, rather than as a villain to be defeated. To them, therapy was part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle.The findings suggest that psychotherapy, when it is effective, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own power, in effect altering their life story even as they work to disarm their own demons,” Mr. Adler said.

The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss

Review: The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvian – New Species From Underwater – New York TimesCheck-out

We know more about the moon than the depths of our Oceans. Check-out the stunning pictures in this new book are in a slide show in this NY Times Book Review. Thanks to Potter at Island Resources. Check the Island Resources Web Site at http://www.irf.org/

22deep-600.jpgThe images arrayed here come from “The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss” (University of Chicago Press, 2007), by Claire Nouvian, a French journalist and film director.

$1100 Text Messaging Bill

For Texting Teens, an OMG Moment When the Phone Bill Arrives – washingtonpost.com
Sofia Rubenstein, 17, got in trouble the way a lot of teens do these days.

anitelephoneoperator.gif “It’s whatever pops into my head. There’s no stopping it,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll be on the phone with someone and I get texted, and then I’m having two conversations at once.”

Last month the Washington high school junior used 6,807 text messages, which, at a rate of 15 cents apiece for most of them, pushed the family’s Verizon Wireless bill to more than $1,100 for the month. Sofia knew she’d been texting a lot but couldn’t believe the “incredible” number she hit. “I just thought, oh my God, my life is over,” she said.

Indeed. Sofia will be working in her parents’ retail store this summer to pay off her debt — but she definitely won’t be the only teenager paying for text abuse. Minutes? Forget minutes. It’s all about the text allowance.

In Defense of Multitasking

What’s Next: Taskus Interruptus – Multitasking – Distraction
Yes, multitasking can be stressful, but that’s a poor way to gauge its value. The fact is, in today’s business environment not being able to multitask would probably be highly stressful. Just imagine how you’d feel locked in a room focusing on a single task without computer, phone, or e-mail access, trying not to think about how many customers and colleagues were trying to reach you with urgent questions.

And by the way, not only is it possible to play tennis with two balls, many players make a point of training that way–as do some soccer, basketball, and baseball players. It’s a good way to improve reactions, to learn to cover more ground with less effort, and to develop a faster-paced game. Sound familiar?

 Though we lionize neat-freaks, it’s often the disorganized who are the most productive

Being messy, both at home and in foreign policy, may have its own advantages. Science backs up the notion that mess has gotten a bad rap, starting with something you learned in high-school physics: anything you do increases the universe’s entropy—that is, disorder. In other words, messiness isn’t the sorry wage of weak character or neglect, it’s the inseparable companion of constructive action. There are only two ways to minimize disorder: don’t do much, or spend lots of energy constantly restoring order instead of spending it on something potentially much more useful. Continue reading “In Defense of Multitasking”

What Really Happened in the French Elections

tompeters!
Tpm Peters, (the Chaos in Innovation Business Guru) is now blogging on his web-site. He produced this insight after reading this breakdown of France’s voting patterns in the Independent.

 Mr Sarkozy, a tough cookie, ran on an uncompromising platform that aims to deal with France’s dire slippage in global competitiveness. Some are predicting he’ll be France’s Margaret Thatcher. He aims to lengthen the work week, cut taxes, hammer the unions, and such to get the French economy in tune with 21st century economics. Ms Royal, on the other hand and in stark contrast, effectively ran on a “What’s all the fuss?” platform, claiming that the hyper-liberal French employment practices can be retained without further damage to France’s ranking in the global competitiveness polls. So, the rather straightforward story goes, “the voters” went to the polls in record numbers, bit their collective tongues, prepared to accept the bitter medicine—and awarded the powerful presidency to Atilla the Economic Reformer.

That is, Team Elder exerted incredible, decisive de facto unity and power in France’s demographically old-and-getting-older-and-we’re-healthy-and-will-
be-around-for-a-long-long-time population. It’s not that Sarkozy beat Royal. The actual story is that the 60+ geezers have ordered the wee 60 minus crew to get the hell to work and stay the hell at work … so the Six Zero Plussers can get their hands on the loot they need to spend their remaining winters in Nice, or some such.

Hydrogen On-Demand Discovery

New process generates hydrogen from aluminum alloy to run engines, fuel cells
A Purdue University engineer has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water for running fuel cells or internal combustion engines, and the technique could be used to replace gasoline.

“I was cleaning a crucible containing liquid alloys of gallium and aluminum,” Woodall said. “When I added water to this alloy – talk about a discovery – there was a violent poof. I went to my office and worked out the reaction in a couple of hours to figure out what had happened. When aluminum atoms in the liquid alloy come into contact with water, they react, splitting the water and producing hydrogen and aluminum oxide.

“Gallium is critical because it melts at low temperature and readily dissolves aluminum, and it renders the aluminum in the solid pellets reactive with water. This was a totally surprising discovery, since it is well known that pure solid aluminum does not readily react with water.”

The waste products are gallium and aluminum oxide, also called alumina. Combusting hydrogen in an engine produces only water as waste.

Edwards set to run as a Bull Mousse

Edwards set to run as a Bull Mousse
Here is a man with a net worth of at least $40 million, with cash stuffed in offshore hedge funds, with a basketball court off his living room, with a haircut debutantes would die for, charging a public university $40,000 for his ideas on combating poverty.

Shouldn’t the first idea he gives the poverty center be: Get rich guys to donate their service and don’t write them $40,000 checks for ceremonial jobs?

It could be that the YouTube video has captured the John Edwards voters need to see. If the nation’s ready for a pretty president, this could be the man.

Dance of the Oscar Nominees

If you haven’t seen acrobatic dancers creating symbolic motifs for this this year’s Oscar nominations, then you missed the best part of the Show. Here is your chance to still see them. Go ahead and name the movies to which they refer to. Thanks to Xavier Cantenot for forwarding this compilation. to.

Blame Income Inequality On Education?

Why Is Income Inequality in America So Pronounced? Consider Education – New York Times
Pessimists like Charles Murray, co-author of the much-debated 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” have argued that only so many individuals are educable at a high level. If that were the case, current levels of inequality might be here to stay.

But the evidence suggests that when additional higher education becomes available, it offers returns in the range of 10 to 14 percent per year of college, at least for the first newcomers to enroll.

Nonetheless it will, sooner or later, become increasingly difficult to deliver the gains from college — not to mention postgraduate study — to the entire population. Technology is advancing faster than our ability to educate. So even if inequality declines today, it may well intensify in the future. Even if American education improves at every level, the largely not-for-profit educational sector may simply be less dynamic than the progress of new technologies. Continue reading “Blame Income Inequality On Education?”