Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
Healthcare is like AJAX
Topic: High Tech Developments
10:32 am EST, Dec 21, 2007
In January 2007, Adam Bosworth addressed the team at Google's New York Office on why AJAX failed. Now, nearly a year later, Bosworth has left Google, and is helping people to live healthier lives by working with the health community. Bosworth will discuss how America's healthcare system, analogous to AJAX, can be successful through an alignment of physics, speed and psychology.
From Bosworth:
We are currently spending over 16% of our GDP on healthcare whereas France is around 8% and our overall health is worse.
Al-Qaeda's media arm, al-Sahab, has invited individuals, organisations and journalists to submit questions for an open interview with Ayman al-Zawahiri.
If an analyst in al-Qaeda's intelligence services or a journalist friendly to al-Qaeda were asked to compile a roundup of news stories from 2007 that supported his sympathies, here is what he would write. It would be a reasonably effective and sophisticated bit of open-source reporting (or what some might even call disinformation) that would be carefully slanted to the author's agenda, and al-Qaeda might itself publish or distribute the article as evidence of the decay of the West.
Given the well-documented challenges and issues we are facing as a nation, as a culture, how can it be that there are no science books (and hardly any books on ideas) on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year list; no science category in the Economist Books of the Year 2007; only Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker's list of Books From Our Pages?
Instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world—of having a unity in which scholarship includes science and technology along with literature and art—the official culture has kicked them out. Science and technology appear as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities have nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum—and out of the minds of many young people, who, arriving at their desks at the establishment media, have so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action. Clueless, they don't even know that they don't know.
But science today is changing our understanding of our universe and species, and scientific literacy is indispensable to dealing with some of the world’s most pressing issues. Fortunately, we live in a time when third culture intellectuals—scientists, science journalists, and other science-minded writers—are among our best nonfiction writers, and their many engaging books have brought scientific insight to a wide audience.
We are pleased to present a list of books published in 2007 by Edge contributors (and others in the science-minded community) for your holiday pleasures and challenges.
Professors Could Take Performance-Enhancing Drugs for the Mind
Topic: Society
10:31 am EST, Dec 21, 2007
While caffeine reigns as the supreme drug of the professoriate, some university faculty members have started popping "smart" pills to enhance their mental energy and ability to work long hours, according to two University of Cambridge scientists who polled some of their colleagues ...
Concentration is essential for creative work - certain stages of the creative process require single-minded focus on the task in hand. When we’re really in the zone, we experience ‘creative flow’ - the ‘almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness’ that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has identified as characteristic of high- level creative performance. Interruptions, multi-tasking and the anxiety that comes from trying to juggle multiple commitments - these are in danger of eroding the focused concentration that is vital for your creativity.
If you’re worried about the effect of all those interruptions, frustrations and distractions on your creative work, this e-book is for you. Over the next seven chapters I will offer you some principles and practical methods for maintaining your creative focus under pressure, and for managing the stream of information and demands so that it informs and stimulates your creativity instead of drowning it out.
What really goes on in the back rooms of car dealerships across America?
What does the car salesman do when he leaves you sitting in a sales office and goes to talk with his boss?
What are the tricks salespeople use to increase their profit and how can consumers protect themselves from overpaying?
These were the questions we, the editors at Edmunds.com, wanted to answer for our readers. But how could they really know that our information was accurate and up-to-date? Finally, we came up with the idea of hiring an investigative reporter to work in the industry and experience, firsthand, the life of a car salesman.
It is more important for a critic to be interesting than to be right. To truly interest the reader, a critic must risk something and be prepared for the embarrassment that follows a questionable enthusiasm or the contrition that's the result of an ill-considered pan.
