Thursday, April 07, 2016

Blues: What Works

"The sight of the blue haze from the eucalyptus oil arising from the bush in the mountain ranges west of Sydney gave the Blue Mountains their name."
~Bathroom Quote

“The silence caught you by the throat, made sadness press into your thoughts."
~ East Latitude Quote  Some of us are at either ends of the political spectrum. But on this we agree...

After one of her first interviews with a family who'd lost a child to suicide, Rory Linnane got into her car and called her best friend. They talked, and Linnane cried, during the two-hour drive through Wisconsin farm land. The signal kept dropping. Linnane kept calling back. She just needed to cry and for someone to listen.  How 10 Wisconsin newspapers teamed up to address the state’s youth suicide problem

“A new book by Harvard University professor Iris Bohnet, What Works: Gender Equality By Design, argues that tweaking the ways companies identify, develop and promote talent can improve equality and diversity at a “shockingly low cost and high speed.” In the following article, [email protected] reviews key takeaways from Bohnet’s book.”

“U.S. corporations spend $8 billion annually on diversity training. Yet a meta-review of almost a thousand studies finds a “dearth of evidence” about their efficacy. As Bohnet concludes in the title to the book’s second chapter “De-biasing minds is hard,” attempting to raise awareness about the possibility of bias can be ineffective, or even counter-effective.”

Till death do us part: the love story of Olive and Fred Bagnall 

It took Nabokov to remind us that snow is blue and Housman to notice the same of hills. Good writers are corrective lenses. They don’t exactly boost visual acuity, but do remind us how much we’ve failed to see by pointing out the easily dismissible and making it new. Thanks to XL. in A Shropshire Lad  -- “What are those blue remembered hills, / What spires, what farms are those?” – I have seen blue hills in the Finger Lakes of New York, in the Hill Country of Texas and in Provence. But more than a geographical feature, blue hills suggest something elusive and ultimately irrecoverable. Live long enough and you will know blue hills. `Straight to the Essence of the Human'

Lifting the veil on sex: Can males be less expensive? PhysOrg

A recent article in The Atlantic highlighted how libraries are changing from being a space where knowledge is consumed to a place where things are created. Five years ago the Fayetteville Free Library in New York brought a 3D printer into the library. That was the start of the first modern makerspace. Today that space has evolved into a 2,500-square-foot Fab Lab and a Creation Lab for Teens. 

Thomas De Quincey's journey from riches to rags to posthumous fame as an opium eater began on a cheerless Sunday in 1804 ...




Andrew Sullivan is back via his long email:  This email is to let you know that I’m going back to long-form journalism, as I hoped to, at New York Magazine, edited by the incomparable Adam Moss (with whom I’ve worked, on and off, since the late 1980s). I start today and am already working on an essay on Trump. I’ll also be blogging the Democratic and Republican conventions – two discrete, unmissable moments for bloggery in real time. I know, I know. But if I keep the blogging restricted to two bouts of four days each, I’m hoping I won’t relapse.
My other news is that I’ve also committed to two new books. The first, with the working title of “Keeping Faith,” is a spiritual memoir and theological argument about the future and meaning of Christianity in the 21st Century. The second, called “Thinking Out Loud,” is a collection of my essays and reviews and posts over the last thirty years. I’m excited to be published by Simon and Schuster, with Ben Loehnen as my editor. I’ll keep you posted as these projects unfold.

A London-based dental boutique YourDentist.co.uk is changing dentistry’s reputation by offering nervous patients a luxury experience that includes a Bentley car service, a concierge lounge, and accommodation in 5-star hotels.The high-end practice — which claims to be one of the world’s only 7-star dental boutiques on its website — was established in 2013, and moved to its flagship location on Harley Street in 2015. The surgery also partners with clinics across the UK that “fit within a luxury private practice environment,” and considers its business model as “very similar to Uber or Airbnb.”
The story is The Story of My Teeth

Herculaneum scrolls reveals papyri ink contained METAL centuries earlier than thought Daily Mail

“Researchers found that introverts were more likely than extraverts to rate people as poor potential housemates if their spelling or grammar was bad. There were other findings – agreeable people, perhaps unsurprisingly, were easygoing when it came to grammos. Conscientious people tended to see typos as a problem.”  The Guardian

Responding to the nation’s first Royal Commission into Family Violence, the government promised to implement all 227 recommendations, likely to cost billions of dollars, reports The Herald Sun.

The Motley Fool, Here Are the Odds of an IRS Tax Audit:
The IRS publishes an annual Data Book that shows how many returns were filed, and how many returns received additional scrutiny. With this information, we can roughly quantify your odds that the IRS audits your 2015 tax returns. ...

Tim Cushing at TechDirt examines curious patterns in how the courts of Contra Costa County, California, in the Bay Area, have repeatedly been used to generate search engine takedowns affecting so-called gripe (consumer complaint) websites.


Mint on Sunday, Mar 2016. Incentives do matter, but how people respond depends as much upon how incentives are designed as on the context

Jack Townsend, Ruminations on Inconsistent Verdicts. “The issue of inconsistent verdicts is a big issue.”

“Language, like everything else that matters to human beings, cannot be understood as a kind of semantic Lego, where we acquire individual words with firm, clear shapes and string them together to form sentences, paragraphs, essays and books. Language is shaped by the culture that has produced it, which means that it, in turn, shapes those who go on to use it.” Prospect

“Start by treating The Divine Comedy not as a book, with a coherent, beginning, middle, and end, but rather … treat the poem as Dante the character treated his journey, something to be undertaken step by step.”The American Scholar



Professional Planner, 21/3/16. ASIC has today released a report outlining its findings of an extensive review of the conflicts management practices in vertically integrated businesses in the funds management industry.


A psychological study spanning 23 countries links tax evasion and political fraud to individual truth-stretching.

How do you turn a $100 million cost blowout into a $10 million saving? If you're the NSW government, focus on the positives. Red tape savings 

How to Spot an NYPD Cop Car Disguised as a Yellow Cab Gizmodo

"Ted Frank: Lightning Rod for Class Settlement Storms." Steven M. Sellers of Bloomberg BNA has this report.

In Akerlof and Shiller’s view “companies exploit human weaknesses not necessarily because they are malicious or venal, but because the market makes them do it.” Corporations seek to maximize their profits and in most cases will exploit every opportunity to do so.

Even the region’s flight paths have come to influence how criminals use the city. The heavily restricted airspace around Los Angeles International Airport, Burdette pointed out, has transformed the surrounding area into a well-known hiding spot for criminals trying to flee by car. Los Angeles police helicopters cannot always approach the airport because of air-traffic-control safety concerns. Indeed, all those planes, with their otherwise-invisible approach patterns across the Southern California sky, have come to exert a kind of sculptural effect on local crimes across the city: Their lines of flight limit the effectiveness of police helicopter patrols and thus alter the preferred getaway routes.
That is from an interesting Geoff Manaugh NYT piece on aerial surveillance in Los Angeles. Here is Manaugh’s forthcoming book A Burglar’s Guide to the City,
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.Vfj7Yn5X.dpuf

Even the region’s flight paths have come to influence how criminals use the city. The heavily restricted airspace around Los Angeles International Airport, Burdette pointed out, has transformed the surrounding area into a well-known hiding spot for criminals trying to flee by car. Los Angeles police helicopters cannot always approach the airport because of air-traffic-control safety concerns. Indeed, all those planes, with their otherwise-invisible approach patterns across the Southern California sky, have come to exert a kind of sculptural effect on local crimes across the city: Their lines of flight limit the effectiveness of police helicopter patrols and thus alter the preferred getaway routes.

William Perez, Reviews of 18 Tax Preparation Software Programs