Hidden method of reading revealed:
Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case.
[...]
The team’s results demonstrated that both eyes lock on to the same letter 53% of the time; for 39% of the time they see different letters with uncrossed eyes; and for 8% of the time the eyes are crossing to focus on different letters.
Are humans born to run long distances or short sprints?
One of the most intriguing genes discovered, ACTN3 encodes a protein that governs metabolism in “fast twitch” muscle fibres, which generate force at high speed.Around 18 percent of the world’s population has a truncated variant of the gene which blocks this protein. The stubby variant, called R577X, is common among successful endurance athletes, previous research has found.
On the other hand, elite sprinters, who need explosive speed, are likelier to have the reverse — a functioning variant of ACTN3.
[...]
The apparent reason for this: the loss of ACNT3′s protein was compensated by a different protein, called alpha-actinin-2, which shifted muscle metabolism towards a smoother, more efficient, aerobic pathway.
[...]
North’s team also looked through genetic profiles from individuals of European and East Asian descent and found that there was remarkably little sign of mutation in the wider stretch of genetic code in the vicinity of R577X.Such similarity is a telltale sign of what evolutionary experts call positive selection. Genes which help the fight for survival get lastingly incorporated in the human genome, whereas those that encumber it get weeded out.
[...]
According to North’s calculations, R577X took root among populations in central Europe around 15,000 years ago and in East Asia around 33,000 years ago.
Now this is Girl Power:
At 17 going on 37 (at least), Ashley is very much an Internet professional. In the less than two years since Whateverlife took off, she has dropped out of high school, bought a house, helped launch artists such as Lily Allen, and rejected offers to buy her young company. Although Ashley was flattered to be offered $1.5 million and a car of her choice — as long as the price tag wasn’t more than $100,000 — she responded, in effect, Whatever. :) “I don’t even have my license yet,” she says.Ashley is evidence of the meritocracy on the Internet that allows even companies run by neophyte entrepreneurs to compete, regardless of funding, location, size, or experience — and she’s a reminder that ingenuity is ageless. She has taken in more than $1 million, thanks to a now-familiar Web-friendly business model. Her MySpace page layouts are available for the bargain price of…nothing. They’re free for the taking. Her only significant source of revenue so far is advertising.
According to Google Analytics, Whateverlife attracts more than 7 million individuals and 60 million page views a month. That’s a larger audience than the circulations of Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and CosmoGirl! magazines combined. Although Web-site rankings vary with the methodology, Quantcast, a popular source among advertisers, ranked Whateverlife.com a staggering No. 349 in mid-July out of more than 20 million sites. Among the sites in its rearview mirror: Britannica.com, AmericanIdol.com, FDA .gov, and CBS.com.
This is ludicrous:
Business associates may forget that she is 17, but Detroit’s Wayne County Probate Court has not. She’s a minor with considerable assets — “business affairs that may be jeopardized,” the law reads — that need protection in light of the rift her sudden success has caused in an already fractious family. In January, a probate judge ruled that neither Ashley nor her parents could adequately manage her finances. Until she turns 18, next June, a court-appointed conservator is controlling Whateverlife’s assets; Ashley must request funds for any expense outside the agreed-upon monthly budget.
From the land of haiku comes a new poetry for the modern age, Pecha Kucha — pronounced peCHAH k’CHAH — which might be summarized as “Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down”:
Let us now bullet-point our praise for Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects who have turned PowerPoint, that fixture of cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed pecha-kucha (Japanese for “chatter”), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That’s it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down. The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.The duo — Dytham is British, Klein Italian — invented pecha-kucha four years ago to help revive a struggling performance space they owned. The first presentations were such a hit that they began hosting monthly pecha-kucha events, boozy affairs at which Tokyo architects and designers showcased their streamlined offerings to crowds of hundreds. Now there are pecha-nights in 80 cities, from Amsterdam and Atlanta to San Francisco and Shanghai. Why? Dytham believes that the rules have a liberating effect. “Suddenly,” he says, “there’s no preciousness in people’s presentations.” Just poetry.
The writer, Daniel Pink, shares his own pecha-kucha presentation on an usual topic:
Jonathan (of Chicago Boyz) shares his Quote of the Day, from Richard Munday in The Times:
We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun — rifle, pistol, or machinegun — without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.
Wired shares Three Smart Things You Should Know About Genomics:
Now this is Girl Power:
At 17 going on 37 (at least), Ashley is very much an Internet professional. In the less than two years since Whateverlife took off, she has dropped out of high school, bought a house, helped launch artists such as Lily Allen, and rejected offers to buy her young company. Although Ashley was flattered to be offered $1.5 million and a car of her choice — as long as the price tag wasn’t more than $100,000 — she responded, in effect, Whatever. :) “I don’t even have my license yet,” she says.Ashley is evidence of the meritocracy on the Internet that allows even companies run by neophyte entrepreneurs to compete, regardless of funding, location, size, or experience — and she’s a reminder that ingenuity is ageless. She has taken in more than $1 million, thanks to a now-familiar Web-friendly business model. Her MySpace page layouts are available for the bargain price of…nothing. They’re free for the taking. Her only significant source of revenue so far is advertising.
According to Google Analytics, Whateverlife attracts more than 7 million individuals and 60 million page views a month. That’s a larger audience than the circulations of Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and CosmoGirl! magazines combined. Although Web-site rankings vary with the methodology, Quantcast, a popular source among advertisers, ranked Whateverlife.com a staggering No. 349 in mid-July out of more than 20 million sites. Among the sites in its rearview mirror: Britannica.com, AmericanIdol.com, FDA .gov, and CBS.com.
This is ludicrous:
Business associates may forget that she is 17, but Detroit’s Wayne County Probate Court has not. She’s a minor with considerable assets — “business affairs that may be jeopardized,” the law reads — that need protection in light of the rift her sudden success has caused in an already fractious family. In January, a probate judge ruled that neither Ashley nor her parents could adequately manage her finances. Until she turns 18, next June, a court-appointed conservator is controlling Whateverlife’s assets; Ashley must request funds for any expense outside the agreed-upon monthly budget.
I can’t help but think that the popularity of HBO’s Big Love spurred the New York Times to print this article. Boys Cast Out by Polygamists Find Help:
Over the last six years, hundreds of teenage boys have been expelled or felt compelled to leave the polygamous settlement that straddles Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah.Disobedience is usually the reason given for expulsion, but former sect members and state legal officials say the exodus of males — the expulsion of girls is rarer — also remedies a huge imbalance in the marriage market. Members of the sect believe that to reach eternal salvation, men are supposed to have at least three wives.
State officials say efforts to help them with shelter, foster care or other services have been frustrated by the boys’ distrust of government and fear of getting their parents into trouble.
Network, from 1976, has a reputation for being eerily prescient, depicting reality television and news-as-spectacle long before it reached its modern form.
I finally watched Network for the first time last week, and it is chock full of memorable quotes, including this news patter that starts the story rolling:
Howard Beale: I would like at this moment to announce that I will be retiring from this program in two weeks’ time because of poor ratings. Since this show is the only thing I had going for me in my life, I’ve decided to kill myself. I’m going to blow my brains out right on this program a week from today. So tune in next Tuesday. That should give the public relations people a week to promote the show. You ought to get a hell of a rating out of that. 50 share, easy.
Beale — who later says, “This is not a psychotic breakdown; it’s a cleansing moment of clarity” — goes on to earn his own show, where he “articulates the rage” being felt by common Americans:
I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot — I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.
You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being, God damn it! My life has value!” So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Some of the easiest targets of satire come from the TV programming department:
Barbara: These are those four outlines submitted by Universal for an hour series. You needn’t bother to read them; I’ll tell them to you.
The first one is set at a large Eastern law school, presumably Harvard. The series is irresistibly entitled “The New Lawyers.” The running characters are a crusty-but-benign ex-Supreme Court justice, presumably Oliver Wendell Holmes by way of Dr. Zorba; there’s a beautiful girl graduate student; and the local district attorney who is brilliant and sometimes cuts corners.
The second one is called “The Amazon Squad.” The running characters include a crusty-but-benign police lieutenant who’s always getting heat from the commissioner; a hard-nosed, hard-drinking detective who thinks women belong in the kitchen; and the brilliant and beautiful young girl cop who’s fighting the feminist battle on the force.
Up next is another one of those investigative reporter shows. A crusty-but-benign managing editor who’s always gett…
[Diana cuts her off]
As a child I was fascinated by Howard Pyle’s beautifully illustrated Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.
(Aside: I cannot believe publishers are issuing new editions of Pyle’s work without his illustrations. He is one of the great illustrators of all time.)
Oddly, I have only the vaguest memories of seeing the Errol Flynn classic, The Adventures of Robin Hood, on TV.
Last night I saw it for the first time in my adult life, and I know I speak treason — fluently — when I say this, but I found it laughably bad, with all the depth of an episode of He-Man.
In fact, the characters routinely stated something not funny at all, clapped the victim of their wicked jape on the back, and threw their heads back in uproarious laughter — not at all unlike Saturday-morning cartoon characters at the end of the episode.
Far more interesting than the on-screen movie is the archery of Howard Hlll, the bow-hunter who performed all the trick-shooting for the movie:
Hill shot coins flipped into the air, apples off people’s heads, etc. — and he made the most famous shot from the film:
His role as stunt archer in the film The Adventures of Robin Hood (in which Errol Flynn plays the title character) allowed for a famous shot of the movie, in which Robin Hood splits an arrow from nock to tip. In an episode of MythBusters, nobody was able to replicate the complete splitting of an arrow, and it was revealed that Howard Hill was able to accomplish this only because the arrow to be split was made of bamboo, not wood.
The stunt men on the movie were paid $150 per arrow to get shot by Hill — while wearing padding underneath a steel breastplate overlaid with some balsa wood to absorb the impact of the arrow.
I may have to order a copy of his African-hunting movie, Tembo, because the included extra, Points on Arrows, is one long demonstration of his bow skills.
So, I’ve been discussing Eli Goldratt’s It’s Not Luck, in which our hero desperately seeks out-of-the-box ways for his three companies to dramatically improve their profits. What do the three companies do?
When last we looked, Pete was lamenting the fact that his printing company did not have the bigger, better, faster machines of his competitors. The obvious solution to his problem: focus on small jobs. The bigger, faster machines are only better for big jobs; they have a longer setup cost.
The not-so-obvious solution goes further. It involves recognizing that customers don’t actually want to order candy wrappers in huge quantities; they just want the low prices that come with ordering in huge quantities. In fact, Pete digs up some statistics from an industry journal showing that customers who order a six-month supply of wrappers only use the whole six months’ worth about 30 percent of the time. Most of the time, something changes — an ingredient, a promotion, a legal labeling requirement — before they’ve used up their whole stock.
So Pete’s company can offer its customers a two-month supply of wrappers, which gets completely used 90 percent of the time, for less per usable unit than the big printers can provide a six-month supply, once obsolescence gets factored it.
And that’s the deal that saves the company.
Bob’s cosmetics company, meanwhile, comes up with a solution based on the fact that its customers, the stores, have to discount obsolete products, are often out of the products that consumers want, and have difficulty making payments to their suppliers — companies like Bob’s.
Since these stores are given discounts for ordering in bulk, they tend to order in bulk — which explains why they didn’t take advantage of the new distribution system. So Bob shifts the discount policy to work off of the dollar amount the store orders per year, not per order. Further, Bob shifts to daily replenishment. The stores were ordering two to six months’ stock.
But that’s just the beginning. The big change is giving the merchandise to the stores on consignment — no obligation when it ships, just when it sells. The stores, which are perpetually short on cash, are delighted, but they actually end up paying sooner, because they have to pay to get their stock replenished.
Stacey’s pressure-steam company comes up with its own solution: selling pressure-steam as a service, for a monthly and per-unit-of-steam fee, not as a machine with high-margin spare parts. This means that they bring all spare parts in-house, rather than asking clients to pay huge mark-ups on a lot of safety stock. After all, it costs the pressure-steam company much, much less to maintain aggregated safety stock for all of its clients.
Ah, another win-win deal.
I’ve been meaning to buy and read security-expert Bruce Schneier‘s Beyond Fear for some time. A couple days ago I perused a copy at the bookstore and stumbled across this passage:
Hollywood likes to portray stagecoach robberies as dramatic acts of derring-do: The robbers gallop alongside the fleeing horses and jump onto the careening coach. Actually, it didn’t happen that way. Stagecoaches were ponderous vehicles that couldn’t negotiate steep hills without everyone getting out and pushing. All the robbers had to do was find a steep hill and wait. When the defensive systems — staying inside the coach, being able to gallop away — failed, the robbers attacked.
Then, yesterday, I caught a showing of 3:10 to Yuma — in which the robbers gallop alongside a careening ironclad coach. A careening ironclad coach with a mounted Gatling gun. I guess that hurt the film’s credibility for me.
I haven’t seen the 1957 version, but I understand that it added its own twist to the original Elmore Leonard story.
Modern Britain is a strange island, if you’re a Vanuatuan native:
In March this year, a British TV company invited a small tribe called the Kastam, from the tiny South Pacific island of Tanna, to send a delegation to England, a country none of its people had ever visited before. They spent a month living here, learning our customs, and making a film about the way the strange and alien inhabitants of a modern western democracy live.
[...]
The five reverse anthropologists are engaged in nothing less splendid than fulfilling a religious prophecy: that the Son of God will one day meet with them and agree to return to live with his brothers in the South Pacific. The men believe, to adapt a song from the football terraces they have visited (to study sporting culture) only days earlier, that the Duke of Edinburgh is finally about to be coming home. Watching a group of Kastam come to terms with our customs is both instructive and very, very funny. Many of the things you’d expect to leave them flummoxed duly do: at meal-times, for example, the group struggle to cope with sitting at table, and using plates, knives and forks (they are used to dining with their hands, cross-leggeed on the floor). In one early scene, when they attend a dinner party, Yapa tucks into the contents of the butter dish, with some gusto. He is either too polite, or too confused, to stop until the entire slab is finished.In another, the group attends a rural pub on a Friday evening, which they describe as the white man’s version of the “nakamal”, or village meeting place. They are perturbed by how noisy it is. JJ remarks that the white man’s fire-water (Adnams bitter) makes everyone behave in a strangely boisterous manner. Yet although the Kastam are uncomfortable with drunkenness, they turn out to be extremely handy at another English pub tradition: darts.
Concussions Hurt Benoit’s Brain — enough to drive him to kill his wife and child?
The tests, conducted by Julian Bailes of the Sports Legacy Institute, show that Benoit’s brain was so severely damaged it resembled the brain of an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient.Bailes and his research team say that this damage was the result of a lifetime of chronic concussions and head trauma suffered while Benoit was in the wrestling ring.
As I mentioned earlier, I just read Eli Goldratt’s It’s Not Luck, and I found the concrete business solutions more intriguing than Jonah’s abstract and jargon-laden Thinking Processes.
As our story opens, Alex Rogo, our hero, has just turned around three companies — divisions within a larger conglomerate, really — and he has to take them from barely profitable to very profitable. They are a printing company, headed by Pete, a cosmetics company, headed by Bob, and a pressure-steam company, headed by Stacey.
The printing company prints cereal boxes and candy wrappers, and Pete has just turned it around by implementing the changes Alex learned about in The Goal — letting non-constraint resources go idle, reducing work-in-process inventory, elevating constraints, etc. At this point Pete is lamenting that his competitors have bigger, better, newer machines that have much greater economies of scale. (Hmm…)
At the cosmetics company, Bob has just turned things around by rationalizing his distribution system — just in time too, because the cosmetics industry is changing, and they’re expecting to introduce a new product line every year, which would be a disaster with three months’ obsolete product in the distribution pipeline.
Under the old system, even with three months’ inventory, with over 600 products, they were always missing something from a customer order, to the point that they were only able to deliver complete orders 30 percent of the time, and they’d have to ship missing items later.
Under the new system, they can respond to customers in one day, and they are able to deliver complete orders 90 percent of the time — all while holding just six weeks’ inventory in the system, half as much as before.
Under the old system, plants were treated as profit centers, and they recorded any production as a sale as soon as it was shipped to the regional warehouses, where it became somebody else’s responsibility.
Under the new system, stock stays at the plant, which acts as a central warehouse, with just 20 days’ stock at the regional warehouses, replenished every three days. This allows the plant to aggregate the forecast demand across all 25 regions — and when you aggregate demand across 25 regions, you do not get 25 times as much volatility (standard deviation); you get five times as much volatility. (Five is the square root of 25.) When demand is higher than expected in one region and lower in another, those errors cancel out — but only when aggregated.
Reducing inventory in the distribution pipeline doesn’t just reduce your carrying costs and obsolescence costs. When you have three months’ inventory in the distribution pipeline, that means you’re producing based on three-month-old forecasts.
Anyway, although the company has moved to its new distribution system, its customers, the shops, are still ordering in bulk, which puts a bigger strain on the system than if they ordered in smaller, more frequent batches.
Bob notes that they choose their inventory buffer size in the same way they’d set a buffer in front of a bottleneck in a manufacturing plant, based on expected consumption and expected replenishment time. What he does not mention is that real-life goods often have very different demand volatilities — or, more specifically, very different coefficients of variation of demand — so that 20 days’ average demand in one good may offer more than enough protection or far too little. Also, different goods present very different ratios of costs of overage (from holding too much inventory) to costs of underage (from holding too little inventory), especially when you realize that you’re not supplying independent goods but whole orders. You might want 99.9-percent safety on cheap parts that might hold up larger orders.
Which brings us to Stacey’s pressure-steam company. The pressure-steam company, like others in its industry, sells its pressure-steam equipment to manufacturing plants at cost, or thereabouts, and makes its money buy selling spare parts at high margins later — because the customers are locked in then. The pressure-steam company keeps the necessary spare parts at the client site, and it requires over 95-percent safety on those parts, because, when it needs a part, that means the client’s whole plant is down until the fix gets made. (Hmm…)
I wonder what the three companies will do…