In this astonishing new book, legendary wildlife photographer Art Wolfe turns to one of nature’s most fundamental survival techniques: the vanishing act. His portraits show animals and insects disappearing into their surroundings, using deceptions, disguises, lures, and decoys to confuse the eye of both predator and prey. Click on this link and hit the “Slideshow” option and see how many you can find.
Vanishing Act: Camouflage in Nature | Art Wolfe Stock Photography 888-973-0011.
High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don’t start school until age 7. Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world.
Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. “In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs,” says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.
One explanation for the Finns’ success is their love of reading. Parents of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture book. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls, and a book bus travels to more remote neighborhoods like a Good Humor truck.
Op-Ed Columnist – A Virginal Goth Girl – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com
“Only a vampire, ladies,” said Jessica Valenti, the author of “Full Frontal Feminism.” She worries that in the real world, young men are spending so much time watching pornography on the Internet that they will never be satisfied with normal women and normal relationships.
This sure sounds like trouble to me: A generation of guys who will settle for nothing less than a porn star meets a generation of women who expect their boyfriend to crawl through their bedroom window at night and just nuzzle gently until they fall asleep.
It’s no wonder that Valenti sees today’s young women being pulled between complete chastity and utter sluttiness. Good girl or “Gossip Girl?” Courtney Martin, the author of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters,” spends a lot of time on college campuses and says students seem to be torn between anonymous sex and monogamy — “either hooking up with no expectations or you’re basically married. You stay home and watch movies.”
Essay About Love and Literary Taste – Books – Review – New York Times
Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction.
Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. “As a writer, the last thing I want in my personal life is somebody who is overly focused on the whole literary world in general,” said Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her partner, a green-building consultant, “doesn’t like to read,” Levy said. When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand.”
The Age of Ambition – New York Times
In the ’60s, perhaps the most remarkable Americans were the civil rights workers and antiwar protesters who started movements that transformed the country. In the 1980s, the most fascinating people were entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who started companies and ended up revolutionizing the way we use technology.
Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Drayton, the chief executive of an organization called Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, likes to say that such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry. If that sounds insanely ambitious, it is. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan title their new book on social entrepreneurs “The Power of Unreasonable People.” 
Renowned playwright George Bernard Shaw once said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” By this definition, some of today’s entrepreneurs are decidedly unreasonable–and have even been dubbed crazy.
The Pirate’s Dilemma
As piracy continues to change the way we all use information, how should we respond? Do we fight pirates, or do we learn from them? Should piracy be treated as a problem, or a solution? To compete or not to compete – that is the question – that is the Pirate’s Dilemma, perhaps one of the most important economic and cultural conundrums of the 21st Century.
When European governments failed to accept commercial radio, pirates began broadcasting from international waters, he writes. When Beijing banned the movie “Memoirs of a Geisha” as “socially unhealthy,” pirates sold millions of copies. And when Western pharmaceutical companies declined to slash prices on AIDS drugs in developing countries, generic makers like Cipla Ltd. stepped in.
Though he doesn’t condone all piracy, Mason argues that it “transforms the markets it operates in, changing the way distribution works and forcing companies to be more competitive and innovative.” Corporate leaders are gradually accepting this reality, he says, citing Apple Inc.: The way to stop piracy, Jobs has said, “is by competing with it.”
This is Dr. Adrian Bowyer, who alongside his team of engineers at the University of Bath in England, is working on a project called the RepRap; an open source 3-D printer – a self-replicating machine that will one day be able to print out all of its own parts.
It has been hailed as “the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment.”
C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success – New York Times
Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. Forget finding the business best-seller list in these libraries.
Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private.
Now you can download books in the public domain in an easy to read Adobe Reader format, with easy page turning.
The Wealth Report – WSJ.com : Why Richistan? Why Now?
The wealthy weren’t just getting wealthier — they were forming their own virtual country. They were wealthier than most nations, with the top 1% controlling $17 trillion in wealth. And they were increasingly building a self-contained world, with its own health-care system (concierge doctors), travel system (private jets, destination clubs) and language. (”Who’s your household manager?”) They had created their own breakaway republic — one I called Richistan.
As the chart over there on the right shows, never before have so many Americans become so rich so quickly. The number of millionaire households at every level ($1 million, $10 million, $100 million) has more than doubled over the past decade. And there are no signs that the wealth explosion will slow.
The real story behind all this wealth, however, isn’t in the numbers. It’s in the people, and how they’re changing the culture and character of wealth in America. Richistan is largely about a country in flux — one in which Old Money is being shoved aside by self-made entrepreneurs, philanthropy is changing from passive check-writing to “high-engagement philanthropy,” and the progressive new rich are changing the politics of wealth. Most of all, Richistan is about the entertaining way that today’s rich are making, spending, donating and living with their wealth. (Like the guy in my book who has a house staff of 105 people.)
Hitchens Book Debunking The Deity Is Surprise Hit – WSJ.com
Summer beach-reading season is just beginning, and already several books have broken out from the pack, such as Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, and Conn and Hal Iggulden’s “The Dangerous Book for Boys.”
But the biggest surprise is a blazing attack on God and religion that is flying off bookshelves, even in the Bible Belt. “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchens, wasn’t expected to be a blockbuster.
Mr. Hitchens says he has received surprisingly little hate mail since his book was published. What does he think readers have learned from “God is Not Great?” “That your life is probably better led after you’ve outgrown the idea that the universe has a plan for you,” he says. “The cosmos isn’t designed with you in mind. You might as well just consult an astrological chart.”