Williams and Stone: The Twitter Revolution - WSJ.com

Williams and Stone: The Twitter Revolution - WSJ.com:

"Regional emergency preparedness organizations are looking at Twitter as a way to reach millions of people during a disaster. NASA is using it to regularly update interested parties about the status of space shuttle flights. And one journalist solicited help from fellow Twitterers to get himself out of an Egyptian jail. (It worked.)

The real Twitter revolution may prove to be much more everyday. When I stop for a latte at Peet's Coffee on the way to the interview, the manager tells me that he plans to start sending out tweets to let regular customers know when a table is open. He isn't alone. A Manhattan bakery twitters when warm cookies come out of the oven. 'It's those small stories that really inspire us,' says Mr. Stone. 'Those are the things that transform people's lives.'"

How to Raise Our I.Q. - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - How to Raise Our I.Q. - NYTimes.com:

"...while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong. Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, “Intelligence and How to Get It,” which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.

Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity — but focuses on how to raise America’s collective I.Q. That’s important, because while I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life."

Tracking CO2 -- Biogeochemists Map Out Carbon Dioxide Emissions In The U.S.

Tracking CO2 -- Biogeochemists Map Out Carbon Dioxide Emissions In The U.S.:

"Biogeochemists located where the most carbon dioxide emissions occur in the U.S. using a new mapping system. With this program-available to anyone on the Web-researchers were able to extract information about carbon dioxide emissions by transforming data on local air pollution and combining it with geographic information systems (GIS) data to layer the emissions onto infrastructures at the Earth's surface."

Watch the video. Pretty amazing.

The Free-Versus-Paid Debate for Online Web News Heats Up - NYTimes.com

It will be very interesting to see the future internet landscape.

The Free-Versus-Paid Debate for Online Web News Heats Up - NYTimes.com:

"Publishers like Hearst Newspapers, The New York Times and Time Inc.are drawing up plans for possible Internet fees....

“People reading news for free on the Web, that’s got to change,” Mr. Murdoch said last week at a cable industry conference in Washington.

The Associated Press said on Monday that it intended to police the use of news articles linked on countless Web sites, where many consumers read them free, to make sure the sites shared advertising revenue with those who created the material."

Calorie-Burning Fat? Studies Say You Have It - NYTimes.com

Calorie-Burning Fat? Studies Say You Have It - NYTimes.com:

".....appearing Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, indicate that nearly every adult has little blobs of brown fat that can burn huge numbers of calories when activated by the cold, like sitting in a chilly room that is between 61 and 66 degrees.

Thinner people appeared to have more brown fat than heavier people, younger people more than older people; people with higher metabolic rates had more than those whose metabolisms were more sluggish, and women had more than men.....

“The thing about this brown fat is that it takes a very small amount to burn a lot of energy,” said Dr. C. Ronald Kahn, head of the section on obesity and hormone action at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.

The fat really is brown, researchers say, because it is filled with mitochondria, cells’ tiny energy factories. Mitochondria contain iron, giving the tissue a reddish brown color.

The hope is that scientists may find safe ways to turn peoples’ brown fat on"

Maybe vegetarians are just high volatility people

From Science Daily:

Young Vegetarians May Have Healthier Diets But Could Be At Risk For Disordered Eating Behaviors:

"In a study published in the April 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, researchers observed that adolescent and young adult vegetarians may experience the health benefits associated with increased fruit and vegetable intake and young adults my experience the added benefit of decreased risk for overweight and obesity.

However, current vegetarians may be at increased risk for binge eating, while former vegetarians may be at increased risk for extreme unhealthful weight control behaviors."

To which I would suggest that the people (i.e. the vegetarians) studied, may be high volatility people in the sense they go to extremes. As such, they are more apt to become vegetarians but also more likely to have eating problems later on if they give up the vegetarianism.


Cross posted at ParkandShop's blog too. (I had intended it for there, but messed up so might as well leave it here as well).

Privately-repaired potholes: a good start - Mises Economics Blog

The article starts off saying KFC offered to fix some of the roads in Chicago if they could paint an advertisement on them, BUT WERE TURNED DOWN! Huh?

Privately-repaired potholes: a good start - Mises Economics Blog:

"..why are potholes and road maintenance even an issue? Governments have been telling us for centuries that they must own the roads, that no one else can do it, and that road-building and maintenance is one of the reasons we must have government.

Yet, governments are terrible at this. Daily now, we are inundated with reports of how bridges are falling down, roads are in disrepair, and the infrastructure in general is a nightmare. And this caught government by surprise? The life span of roads and bridges isn't a big mystery. If roads are the government's specialty, why are they so lousy at it, and why did they not even notice that their bridges are in lousy shape? It's not as if this problem couldn't be anticipated.

So now, everywhere across America, at local, state and federal levels, Americans are being told that taxes must be increased to pay for road and bridge repair. But why? There are already taxes in place for this. The tax revenues for this are generally based on vehicle registration fee revenues, gas taxes, and income taxes. All of these taxes increase either with the number of cars on the road, or with miles driven, or with population growth, or with economic growth. In other words, tax revenues have increased many times over, yet we're now being told 'oops we forgot about the roads, so give us more money."

Mises has a really good article!