Posts Tagged ‘quote’

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A man who recorded every detail of his life for five years has the ultimate way to live in the moment

February 8, 2016

A man who recorded every detail of his life for 5 yrs
http://qz.com/519298/the-story-of-a-man-who-recorded-every-detail-of-his-life-for-five-years/ Interesting combo of hi-tech camera & low-tech written logbook

QT:{{”
“For example, the camera captured a meeting with a colleague in the office corridor, but that didn’t make it in to the log book. Or the log book captured a 30-minute task completed on the computer, but the camera missed that.

The result, as he had suspected, was that the combination was helping him capture more of his day. The log book allowed for reflection and the narrative camera added texture to the reflection.

The power of introspection

There is some scientific evidence of the benefits of Villarroel’s practice. “The experience is consistent with mindfulness practices, which have been shown to have great benefits,” Ronald Riggio, a psychologist at Claremont McKenna College, told Quartz. “The perception of time, however, is subjective.””
“}}

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Google parent Alphabet passes Apple market cap at the open

February 7, 2016

Alphabet passes Apple market cap http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/01/google-passes-apple-as-most-valuable-company.html 4 largest now in tech ($GOOG $547B, $AAPL 529, $MSFT 425, $FB 326) w/ big oil at #5
QT:{{"
Shares of Alphabet opened nearly 3 percent higher Tuesday, pushing the
technology giant’s market capitalization past Apple to become the
world’s most valuable public company.

Alphabet has a market cap of $547.1 billion, higher than Apple’s
$529.3 billion as of 9:45 a.m. ET.

Apple’s massive market cap is still trailed by Microsoft ($425.7
billion),Facebook ($326.2 billion) and Exxon Mobil ($310.1 billion) to
round out the list of the world’s five biggest companies.
"}}

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Research Parasites

January 23, 2016

Dara sharing http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1516564 Deems #datascientists as “research parasites,” using another’s data for their own ends via @dspakowicz

QT:{{”
“A second concern held by some is that a new class of research person will emerge — people who had nothing to do with the design and execution of the study but use another group’s data for their own ends, possibly stealing from the research productivity planned by the data gatherers, or even use the data to try to disprove what the original investigators had posited. There is concern among some front-line researchers that the system will be taken over by what some researchers have characterized as “research parasites.””
“}}

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The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp

January 18, 2016

The Life & Death of an $AMZN Warehouse Temp
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/life-and-death-amazon-temp/ Monitoring every move for max efficiency. Assembly Line of the future?

QT:{{”
“In the years since Amazon became the symbol of the online retail economy, horror stories have periodically emerged about the conditions at its warehouses—workers faced with near-impossible targets, people dropping on the job from heat or extreme fatigue. This isn’t one of those stories. Jobs at Amazon are physically demanding and the expectations can be high, but the company’s fulfillment centers are not sweatshops. In late September, I visited the Chester warehouse for an hour-long guided tour. Employees were working at a speed that seemed brisk yet reasonable. There were no idle moments, but no signs of exhaustion, either.

At the same time, we are living in an era of maximum productivity. It has never been easier for employers to track the performance of workers and discard those who don’t meet their needs. This applies to employees at every level, from warehouse grunts to white-collar workers like those at Amazon headquarters who were recently the subject of a much-discussed New York Times piece about the company’s brutally competitive corporate culture. The difference is that people like Jeff don’t have the option of moving to Google, Microsoft or a tech startup eager to poach managers and engineers with Amazon on their resume.

When it comes to low-wage positions, companies like Amazon are now able to precisely calibrate the size of its workforce to meet consumer demand, week by week or even day by day. Amazon, for instance, says it has 90,000 full-time U.S. employees at its fulfillment and sorting centers—but it plans to bring on an estimated 100,000 seasonal workers to help handle this year’s peak. Many of these seasonal hires come through Integrity Staffing Solutions, a Delaware-based temp firm. The company’s website recently listed 22 corporate offices throughout the country, 15 of which were recruiting offices for Amazon fulfillment centers, including the one in Chester.”
“}}

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Glycan Notation Standardized At Last | January 4, 2016 Issue – Vol. 94 Issue 1 | Chemical & Engineering News

January 13, 2016

Glycan Notation Standardized http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i1/Glycan-Notation-Standardized-Last.html Merging 2 systems: essentials (sugars) & Oxford (bonds/angles). A prereq. for glycomics

QT:{{"Carbohydrate chemists and glycobiologists have now agreed on an expanded and standardized symbol nomenclature based primarily on the Essentials notation (Glycobiology 2015, DOI:10.1093/glycob/cwv091). The agreement “is a major step, as without a common vocabulary and language the glycosciences cannot advance as genomics and proteomics have,” says carbohydrate chemist Peter H. Seeberger of the Max Planck Institute of Colloids & Interfaces. For nonglycan experts, here we explain the two notation systems. ▪
…
The newly standardized Essentials system permits an optional mixed form of notation in which the Oxford system’s angles and dashed and solid bonds are used but its sugar symbols are not.
"}}

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Health ROI as a measure of misalignment of biomedical needs and resources : Nature Biotechnology : Nature Publishing Group

January 10, 2016

Health ROI as a measure of misalignment of…needs & resources by @arzhetsky http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v33/n8/full/nbt.3276.html See funding decisions like stock trades

QT:{{"In a recently published letter to Nature Biotechnology, Lixia Yao,
IGSB core faculty Andrey Rzhetsky and colleagues dissect the decisions
made in funding choices. His team compares these choices by funding
agencies to trades in a financial market. In this communication, they
expand on the idea that there exists an imbalance between health needs
and biomedical research investment.

In order to fairly examine the relationship between biomedical need
and biomedical research, they validated a new, insurance based measure
of health burden that enables automatic evaluation of burden and
research investment for many more diseases than have been previously
assessed. "
"}}

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We Need a New Green Revolution

January 9, 2016

We Need a New Green Revolution http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/opinion/we-need-a-new-green-revolution.html Advocates US agri-science funding to grow yields. Sensible given #obesity epidemic?

QT:{{"
“Today, farm production has stopped growing in the United States, and agriculture research is no longer a priority; it constitutes only 2 percent of federal research and development spending. And, according to the Department of Agriculture, total agricultural production has slowed significantly since the turn of the century. We need another ambitious surge in agricultural science.”
"}}

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Given that eyes appear to have evolved multiple times independently through evolution, why has human-level intelligence not evolved more than once? – Quora

January 7, 2016

QT:{{”
Richard Dawkins (in “The Blind Watchmaker”) writes:

“Michael Land reckons that there are nine basic principles for image-forming that eyes use, and that most of them have evolved many times independently. For instance, the curved dish-reflector principle is radically different from our own camera-eye (we use it in radiotelephones, and also in our largest optical telescopes because it is easier to make a large mirror than a large lens), and it has been independently ‘invented’ by various molluscs and crustaceans. Other crustaceans have a compound eye like insects (really a bank of lots of tiny eyes), while other molluscs, as we have seen, have a lensed camera-eye like ours, or a pinhole camera-eye. For each of these types of eye, stages corresponding to evolutionary intermediates exist as working eyes among other modern animals.”

With all respect to Mr. Dawkins, to believe that a structure as complex as any brain has evolved more than once is stretching credulity too far.

Michael Land calls the eyes “the premier sensory outposts of the brain” (see The Evolution of Eyes (1992)), but he only mentions the eye/brain connection three times (and then only in passing), and not in any brain evolution context.
“}}

http://redwood.berkeley.edu/vs265/landfernald92.pdf
https://www.quora.com/Given-that-eyes-appear-to-have-evolved-multiple-times-independently-through-evolution-why-has-human-level-intelligence-not-evolved-more-than-once

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Here’s Why Public Wifi is a Public Health Hazard — Matter

January 6, 2016

Why Public #Wifi is a…Hazard
https://medium.com/matter/heres-why-public-wifi-is-a-public-health-hazard-dd5b8dcb55e6 Exposes one’s past network usage; ergo, don’t put your street into your home’s SSID

QT:{{”

Wouter removes his laptop from his backpack, puts the black device on the table, and hides it under a menu. A waitress passes by and we ask for two coffees and the password for the WiFi network. Meanwhile, Wouter switches on his laptop and device, launches some programs, and soon the screen starts to fill with green text lines. It gradually becomes clear that Wouter’s device is connecting to the laptops, smartphones, and tablets of cafe visitors.

On his screen, phrases like “iPhone Joris” and “Simone’s MacBook” start to appear. The device’s antenna is intercepting the signals that are being sent from the laptops, smartphones, and tablets around us.

“More text starts to appear on the screen. We are able to see which WiFi networks the devices were previously connected to. Sometimes the names of the networks are composed of mostly numbers and random letters, making it hard to trace them to a definite location, but more often than not, these WiFi networks give away the place they belong to.

We learn that Joris had previously visited McDonald’s, probably spent his vacation in Spain (lots of Spanish-language network names), and had been kart-racing (he had connected to a network belonging to a well-known local kart-racing center). Martin, another café visitor, had been logged on to the network of Heathrow airport and the American airline Southwest. In Amsterdam, he’s probably staying at the White Tulip Hostel. He had also paid a visit to a coffee shop called The Bulldog.

“}}

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For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions – NYTimes.com

January 5, 2016

For Wealthiest…Tax System…Saves Them Billions http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-wealthiest-private-tax-system-saves-them-billions.html Since ’12 #tax for 1%ers flat at 24% v for top .1% down >3% to 18%

QT:{{"From Mr. Obama’s inauguration through the end of 2012, federal income
tax rates on individuals did not change (excluding payroll taxes). But
the highest-earning one-thousandth of Americans went from paying an
average of 20.9 percent to 17.6 percent. By contrast, the top 1
percent, excluding the very wealthy, went from paying just under 24
percent on average to just over that level.

“We do have two different tax systems, one for normal wage-earners and
another for those who can afford sophisticated tax advice,” said
Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego who
studies the intersection of tax policy and inequality. “At the very
top of the income distribution, the effective rate of tax goes down,
contrary to the principles of a progressive income tax system.”
"}}

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