"No fighter pilot is ever going to pick up a girl at a bar by saying he flies a UAV."

How do you persuade a grown man to get circumcised?

If you’re out of caviar, use a slightly bent pickle.

Now you can access every last drop of mayonnaise!

"I added that third, green tube for fun. The higher you turn it up, the more it bounces up and down."

"I saw bodies eaten by fire." "I noticed many dead bodies of women and children, including a totally burned body of a child. He was no more than 5 years old."

"The behavior of Iraqi security forces was uncivil," said the spokesman, Ahmed Al-Shakarji. "People were trying to rescue their relatives and friends ... but the security forces opened fire on them."

Unlike the Banana War, the Vodka War is strictly a civil war.

"Their insides were all coming out," said Noor Islam, 22. "We were very upset."

"No one wants to sit by and see mass killing," Hillary said.

"I have no Plan B," Mr. McCain said.

"What keeps me awake?" he asked recently. "Car keys."

So, w... [ Read More (2.9k in body) ]

It all comes down to control.

We keep focusing on doing the same thing better rather than trying something new. It is as if we are wearing blinders that let us see only one path and not the alternatives. ... There is little chance, much less financing, for the wild idea that might prove revolutionary. Organizations that give out "innovator" and "pioneer" awards claim to want to support new ideas but end up giving money to better ways of doing the same thing.

Misdiagnosis is "a window into the medical mind," revealing "why doctors fail to question their assumptions, why their thinking is sometimes closed or skewed, why they overlook the gaps in their knowledge."

Older media, with their entrenched infrastructures, are not crying out for innovation — at least not from an outsider. But that will not stop Google from trying.

There are few things in this world so stirring as a man who neither hates it nor imitates it, but in the name of what is best in it resists what is worst in it. The good man in a dark time is the unrepresentative man. He has the honor of an anomaly. He marks the distance that still has to be traveled. And how much, after all, can a single individual accomplish, all the uplift notwithstanding? Heroes are not policies.

"Unless you've been through it, you have no idea what it is like to live year-round in your second home."

Random drug tests have become routine, like pop quizzes for a student's body.

Spaniards are said to be the most enthusiastic brothel-goers — and cocaine users — in Europe.

"We call it the 'physical hyperlink.'"

There is precision in the fluff.

"Why wouldn't you want to harness that history?" Professor Bluestone said. "People going to do their work in that building would have that in the back of their min... [ Read More (2.1k in body) ]

We have analyzed the fully anonymized headers of 362 million messages exchanged by 4.2 million users of Facebook, an online social network of college students, during a 26 month interval. The data reveal a number of strong daily and weekly regularities which provide insights into the time use of college students and their social lives, including seasonal variations. We also examined how factors such as school affiliation and informal online "friend" lists affect the observed behavior and temporal patterns. Finally, we show that Facebook users appear to be clustered by school with respect to their temporal messaging patterns.

Rhythms of Social Interaction: Messaging within a Massive Online Network

Amapedia is a community for sharing information about the products you like the most.

Amapedia introduces a new way of organizing products we call “collaborative structured tagging”. In a nutshell, it makes it easy for you to tag products with what they are and with their most important facts, and for others to search, discover, filter, and compare products by those tags.

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Check out our new features, like advanced search and side-by-side comparisons, or jump to a random article.

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The White House still avoids the label, but by any reasonable historical standard, the Iraqi civil war has begun. The record of past such wars suggests that Washington cannot stop this one -- and that Iraqis will be able to reach a power-sharing deal only after much more fighting, if then. The United States can help bring about a settlement eventually by balancing Iraqi factions from afar, but there is little it can do to avert bloodshed now.

Foreign Affairs - Iraq's Civil War - James D. Fearon

Controversies over the war in Iraq and U.S. unilateralism have overshadowed a more pragmatic and multilateral component of the Bush administration's grand strategy: its attempt to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy and international institutions in order to account for shifts in the global distribution of power and the emergence of states such as China and India. This unheralded move is well intentioned and well advised, and Washington should redouble its efforts.

Foreign Affairs - The New New World Order - Daniel W. Drezner

This archive, provided by Columbia University, offers access to the complete range of free content developed for Fathom by its member institutions. Columbia encourages you to browse this archive of online learning resources, including lectures, articles, interviews, exhibits and free seminars.

There is a wide variety of stuff on offer here. A sampling:

Playing the Game: The Economics of the Computer Game Industry
The Basics of Screenwriting
Networks and Netwar: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy
The Life and Works of Vladimir Nabokov
Writing Effective Business Plans and Raising Capital

Fathom :: The Source for Online Learning

Engineers have developed a system for taking anonymous cell-phone location information and turning it into an illuminated traffic map that identifies congestion in real time. The system takes advantage of the steady stream of positioning cues -- untraced signals all cell phones produce, whether in use or not, as they seek towers with the strongest signals. It is the first traffic-solution technology that monitors patterns on rural roads and city streets as easily as on highways.

New technology uses cell phone positioning data to report traffic tangles

The Best Way to Keep Track of Your Stuff
Social Tagging - Share with Friends - Groups - Reviews

Stuffopolis

For more than a year, Joe Roth has been hearing the Hollywood gossips predict the demise of his six-year-old movie studio, Revolution Studios. Now that they are right, he wants to set the record straight.

The Rise and Fall of Revolution - New York Times