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Also, the story that drugs are more expensive in the US is largely an urban myth. Patent-protected drugs without significant competitors are more expensive in the US, but because of free-market competition, generics are a lot cheaper here than in Europe or Canada. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent article on this topic in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago:

It is not accurate to say, then, that the United States has higher prescription-drug prices than other countries. It is accurate to say only that the United States has a different pricing system from that of other countries. Americans pay more for drugs when they first come out and less as the drugs get older, while the rest of the world pays less in the beginning and more later. Whose pricing system is cheaper? It depends. If you are taking Mevacor for your cholesterol, the 20-mg. pill is two-twenty-five in America and less than two dollars if you buy it in Canada. But generic Mevacor (lovastatin) is about a dollar a pill in Canada and as low as sixty-five cents a pill in the United States.

I'd mod the parent up, but instead I'll point out an article by Malcolm Gladwell for New Yorker on the same topic.

I think Malcolm Gladwell (of "Tipping Point" fame) offered amazing insights in an article from the New Yorker a few years ago. (Now on his site.) It's a great read, but his main point is to compare the office to a well-functioning urban neighborhood... Greenwich Village in NYC being the example drawn from Jane Jacob's urban-planning classic "Death and Life of Great American Cities." There are a lot of specific ideas in the article about what makes individuals happy in an office environment(the thrust of most comments here as well) but the really interesting stuff concerns the way that an office's arrangement influences how people interact... and how that in turn influences the office's ability to share information and support creativity. I've referred several people making office-layout decisions to the article, to great effect. It's not coder-specific, but very focused on creativity... so to the extent that you are concerned about creativity in your coding environment, it is likely to have great information for you.

I highly recommend you take a look at this article: http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html .

It's unlikely that you will because you seem like the type that doesn't like his assumptions challenged in the name of pride (another typically American trait). However, you would discover that SUVs are not safer than other cars and they constitute a shift from placing responsibility on the skill of the driver to be safe onto the equipment and the chance provided by the environment. In other words, an SUV is another affort to be lazy and irresponsible with the lives of others. That is not speaking at all for the resources they consume.

What I find most amusing is that the execuatives of car manufacturers that make SUVs mock the customers who buy them.

Don't take my word for it. Check out this article, which appeared in the New Yorker magazine few months back.

Actually the bans on DDT have led to large numbers of deaths in third-world countries, since it is the only proven method of dealing with malaria. There was a New Yorker article on this a while back.

Here ya go [pdf] - I *highly* recommend this for anybody at all interested in the environmental movement, or the true nature of DDT...it's a real eyeopener.

Here ya go [pdf] - I *highly* recommend this for anybody at all interested in the environmental movement, or the true nature of DDT...it's a real eyeopener.

James Gleick's "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" is not mentioned frequently enough when Feynman bios come up. Very good reading indeed.

Gleick is also known as one of the first authors of a popularized book on Chaos theory, and in general produces some interesting reads.

And while we're at it, Malcolm Gladwell produces for the social sciences what Gleick does for the hard sciences... equally fascinating writing that examines wide implications of interesting facts and disciplines.

Malcolm Gladwell's article about Stanley Kaplan and the SAT should be required reading on the subject. Cool biography, and interesting examination of the idea that there is such a thing as an "uncoachable test" -- one that measures "innate" intelligence, rather than learning. Now tests don't claim that, but they do try to predict success in college.

To some extent, I can see how the latter is possible (if not perfectly accurate). If you can take a subset of subject matter, study it and master it to the point where you can bang out answers in hour-length periods, then you can probably do standard courses in education. Create original research, new thought? Maybe not, but you don't have to do that for many undergrad programs, and proably a number of grad programs. Just master what exists.

I aced several standardized tests in High School. 99%ile scores in multiple categories and overall scores. The interesting thing was that my grades rose steadily as soon as that happened... B to A-, and then my freshman year A- to A. It's a heady thing, to walk to the table, get evaluated, and get given an awful lot of chips to play with. I wrote a personal narrative about it after I had a less spectacular experience with the GMAT and the GRE.

Curious to know if anyone else has had this kind of experience, or has figured out a good way to goose their scores....

Scary! Do the questions even matter??

From the article mentioned in the review:

"'[Tricia Prickett] took fifteen seconds of videotape showing the applicant as he or she knocks on the door, comes in, shakes the hand of the interviewer, sits down, and the interviewer welcomes the person,' Bernieri explained. Then, like Ambady, Prickett got a series of strangers to rate the applicants based on the handshake clip, using the same criteria that the interviewers had used. Once more, against all expectations, the ratings were very similar to those of the interviewers. 'On nine out of the eleven traits the applicants were being judged on, the observers significantly predicted the outcome of the interview,' Bernieri says. 'The strength of the correlations was extraordinary.' " ...

"For most of us, hiring someone is essentially a romantic process, in which the job interview functions as a desexualized version of a date.
We are looking for someone with whom we have a certain chemistry, even if the coupling that results ends in tears and the pursuer and the pursued turn out to have nothing in common. We want the unlimited promise of a love affair. "

The problem I have with there being no "show-stopping problems" is that they are white-washing the risk away. There is inherent risk in space flight and the public is stupid if they think that it's now somehow safe (until they are shocked when the next O-Ring or Leading-Edge-of-the-Wing fails.)

Here's a good analysis from 1996 about the Challenger disaster and inherent risk that people need to accept.

I dunno, but I'll bet Malcom Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, might have some insights. "a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does."

Here's the best one I've ever seen. Notice he's wearing a hat though and not moving. :)

Our brains are wired to recognize faces which makes recreating one especially difficult. The limits to doing a face now are mostly artistic. Most of the professional software these days has passed the point where it limits the artist. (Whether it can do it in time for a production deadline is another matter.)

Things that make a face not work are:

-Perfect symmetry. (check out Cameron Diaz's nose for how far you can go and still look beautifull)

-Not enough articulation in the forms. (Poser people are getting better but still look like mannequins - too much symmmetry also)

-The eyes and mouth look dry. No meniscus of water at the lids or on the teeth.

-Simple skin textures. The values and color of real skin have quite a range and more variation than most faces are textured/colored.

If you want to see how subtle expressions are, try doing a portrait in paint or pencil and change the shape of the mouth by 1mm or 2. See this link for a really cool article on how subtle and complex facial expressions are. (Bill Clinton makes a guest appearance)

Malcolm Gladwell has written an excellent book on this phenomena - I highly recommend it. See excerpts at

The Tipping Point

Malcom Gladwell of the New Yorker recently wrote an article about some of the problems with "World Class" management teams, and in general, certain myths revolving around the concept of "talent". It's an excellent read.

There is some indication that talent is overrated.

Avweb has also had some interesting articles about England's experiement with new ATC systems.

sPh

Everything should be able to be done on the terminal and require no paper or anything that would even require a file cabinet.

Personally, while I find it very efficient to search for things on-line, I find that when it comes to actually reading and absorbing the information so found, ink on paper (aks "dead trees") is about 10 times more efficient than a CRT.

sPh

More interesting, I think, is the ever-thoughtful Malcolm Gladwell's review of two books about Philo T. Farnsworth. Contrary to the expected take of how small genius inventors are destroyed by large credit-stealing corporations, Gladwell argues that corporations are the safest and sanest way to let genius inventors concentrate on inventing. Worth reading.

mahlen

"In Trash Tango, the human race has become so feeble that the alien invasion of Earth occurs by means of a memo." -- Steve Aylett, _slaughtermatic_

Good discussion of doping and Ben Johnson:

http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_08_10_a_drug.htm

Books I've read about culture often pose it as a guerilla war between producers of stuff (who'd be a lot happier if everyone bought the same thing) and consumers (who like to be individuals). But rather than a top-down cool system, many would argue that it is a process of discovery, wherein cool people are continually surveyed by the producers of stuff, so that they can tell which way the wind is blowing. I know, it's much more pleasant to blame the state of pop culture on corporations than on the general public, but that don't make it so.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the wonderful The Tipping Point, has this New Yorker piece about people who are paid to figure out what's cool now. That's an Amazon link for the book, BTW; did you know they have a recommendation engine too?

mahlen

To have ambition was my ambition. --Gang of Four, "I Love Man in a Uniform"

Books I've read about culture often pose it as a guerilla war between producers of stuff (who'd be a lot happier if everyone bought the same thing) and consumers (who like to be individuals). But rather than a top-down cool system, many would argue that it is a process of discovery, wherein cool people are continually surveyed by the producers of stuff, so that they can tell which way the wind is blowing. I know, it's much more pleasant to blame the state of pop culture on corporations than on the general public, but that don't make it so.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the wonderful The Tipping Point, has this New Yorker piece about people who are paid to figure out what's cool now. That's an Amazon link for the book, BTW; did you know they have a recommendation engine too?

mahlen

To have ambition was my ambition. --Gang of Four, "I Love Man in a Uniform"

First, I think we should remember that the primary responsibility for students who are shot has to go to the person pulling the trigger. It's important to examine the reasons and motives, but it just doesn't make sense to say "it's the bully's fault." The bully may be wrong and be a bad person, but the bully did not open fire on anybody.

Second, I'd like to recommend a book called "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. In it he talks about social and cultural epedemics, whether it be school shootings or Blues Clues.

The book covers a variety of examples. Why does a particular type of shoe suddenly become popular for no apparent reason? Why does the number of fatal auto accidents involving only one person go up whenever a story about a suicide is reported on the news? Why did crime dropped so dramatically and so quickly in NYC? Was it simply because they started keeping the subways free of graffiti? Maybe. Tiny changes can sometimes have huge impacts and pave the way for epedemic changes.

Here is a relevent comment from the author:

I'm convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does. This isn't just a metaphor, in other words. I'm talking about a very literal analogy. One of the things I explore in the book is that ideas can be contagious in exactly the same way that a virus is. One chapter, for example, deals with the very strange epidemic of teenage suicide in the South Pacific islands of Micronesia. In the 1970's and 1980's, Micronesia had teen suicide rates ten times higher than anywhere else in the world. Teenagers were literally being infected with the suicide bug, and one after another they were killing themselves in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances. We like to use words like contagiousness and infectiousness just to apply to the medical realm. But I assure you that after you read about what happened in Micronesia you'll be convinced that behavior can be transmitted from one person to another as easily as the flu or the measles can. In fact, I don't think you have to go to Micronesia to see this pattern in action. Isn't this the explanation for the current epidemic of teen smoking in this country? And what about the rash of mass shootings we're facing at the moment--from Columbine through the Atlanta stockbroker through the neo-Nazi in Los Angeles?

While I'm at it, I highly recommend everybody read everything at his site. His choice of subject matter is unique, his scholarship is impeccable, and his writing lucidly conveys complicated ideas.

While I'm at it, I highly recommend everybody read everything at his site. His choice of subject matter is unique, his scholarship is impeccable, and his writing lucidly conveys complicated ideas.

While I'm at it, I highly recommend everybody read everything at his site. His choice of subject matter is unique, his scholarship is impeccable, and his writing lucidly conveys complicated ideas.