Some Neanderthals may have been redheads:
The researchers homed in on the MC1R gene linked to hair and skin color and used DNA analysis to find a variation that produced the same kind of pigmentation changes as in humans with red hair and pale skin.
Arnold Kling notes that we use the same formula to raise prices in both health care and education: (a) Subsidize demand; (b) Restrict supply using accreditation rules.
Video Game Shown to Cut Cortisol — by 17 percent:
Prof. Baldwin and his team — McGill PhD graduates Stephane Dandeneau and Jodene Baccus and graduate student Maya Sakellaropoulo — have been developing a suite of video games that train players in social situations to focus more on positive feedback rather than being distracted and deterred by perceived social slights or criticisms. The games are based on the emerging science of social intelligence, which has found that a significant part of daily stress comes from our social perceptions of the world.In a 2004 study of 56 students, a standard reaction-time test showed that the game, called the Matrix, helped people shift the way they processed social information. The researchers next conducted several studies to see whether the effects of the game would translate into lower stress levels in a high-pressure context.
In one of their recent studies, they recruited 23 employees of a Montreal-based call centre to play one of their games, which involves clicking on the one smiling face among many frowning faces on a screen as quickly as possible. Through repetitive playing, the game trains the mind to orient more toward positive aspects of social life, said Prof. Baldwin.
The call-centre employees did this each workday morning for a week. They filled out daily stress and self-esteem questionnaires and had their cortisol levels tested through saliva analysis on the final day of the experiment. These tests showed an average 17-percent reduction in cortisol production compared to a control group that played a similar game but without the smiling faces. The cortisol levels were tested by Jens Pruessner of the Montreal Neurological Institute’s McConnell Brain Imaging Centre and Douglas Hospital Research Centre, a co-author of the study.
The Economist‘s Setting the bar high revolves around a very USA Today graphic:
Jim Dunnigan explains Why Blackwater is Invulnerable:
Iraqis are upset with Blackwater International, the security firm that provides protection for American diplomats (and many other VIPs) when they travel about. Blackwater recruits experienced military veterans, especially commandos, to do the job. When Blackwater is attacked, they attack right back. Blackwater’s aggressiveness and competence is well known in Baghdad, and Iraqi police and civilians stay out of the way. As a result, Blackwater has never lost any of the State Department people they have escorted. But 30 Blackwater personnel have been killed, along with hundreds of Iraqis (armed and unarmed, the terrorist attacks often use civilians for cover). American politicians, who are opposed to the Iraq war, are joining in to attack Blackwater, and accuse it of misbehavior. The State Department remains silent, but is unwilling to give up Blackwater. There are enough experienced people inside the State Department who understand that Blackwater is professional and effective, and you can’t beat a perfect record when it comes to security. Considering what high value targets U.S. diplomats are, and the success of Blackwater in defeating hundreds of attacks, the State Department cannot afford to abandon Blackwater. But the diplomats cannot afford to openly defend Blackwater either, lest they anger Democratic politicians who run Congress. So the media circus will play out, and life goes on.
These Japanese manhole covers are so very, very Japanese.
(Hat tip to Drawn!)
Clark Aldrich has what he calls a Style Guide for Serious Games and Simulations, and on it he provides a Summary of Simulation Genre Examples:
mini games: one note really is better than none: Small, easy-to-access game built to be simple and addictive, which often focuses on mastering an action and can provide awareness of more complicated issues.
- editorial ([Take Back Illinois]);
- explanation ([Binary Numbers], [building and throwing paper airplanes], [Tips On Tap], [Dean for America game], or [Disney for Kids on Running a business]); and
- marketing/messaging ([Dr. Pepper Speedway Rush], [General Electric's Ecomagination], or [Monster.com Climbing the Corporate Ladder]).
interactive spreadsheets: they are wonk-ariffic! Simulation in which students typically try to impact critical metrics by allocating resources along competing categories and getting feedback of their decisions through graphs and charts.
- Two Forio interactive spreadsheet examples: [here] and [here].
- A more complicated interactive spreadsheet example on [global warming].
- Business school issues such as policy, supply chain management [McDonald's game], but with a satirical twist.
game based models: no one wants to take a test, but everyone wants to be in a game show: Students engage familiar games and puzzles such as Wheel of Fortune®, solitaire, or memory, with important pieces of awareness or task-based content replacing trivia or icons.
- Participants play [California's Flex You Power] game to raise awareness of power issues and gain some tips.
branching story: where a little interactivity that goes a long way: Simulation in which students make a series of decisions via a multiple choice interface to progress through and impact an event.
- First Person Sample Branching Story from [Performance Development Group] (you may have to load it twice; I always get hung up the first time on the “loading screen.”)
- Third Person Example from [WILL Interactive]
practiceware: if you need results, or even just want them: Real-time, often 3D sims that encourages participants to repeat actions in high fidelity situations until the skills become natural in the real-world counterpart
- Click on the entry and watch the two available YouTube hosted videos.
Virtual product or virtual lab: A series of challenges/puzzles to be solved using on-screen representations of real-world objects and software.
- Go to the gallary of [this site] and click around.
All of the above can be considered game activities for soft skills classes.
Enjoy this Rare Bill Watterson Art — from before Calvin and Hobbes:
While a student at Ohio’s Kenyon College, Bill drew cartoons for the school newspaper The Kenyon Collegian and for the yearbook. Thanks to the generosity of Nat D., a schoolmate of Bill, here are scans of Bill’s work from that era.
Joel Spolsky explains Five Easy Ways to Fail when managing a big software project:
Mistake No. 1: Start with a mediocre team of developers.
Designing software is hard, and unfortunately, a lot of the people who call themselves programmers can’t really do it. But even though a bad team of developers tends to be the No. 1 cause of software project failures, you’d never know it from reading official postmortems. In all fields, from software to logistics to customer service, people are too nice to talk about their co-workers’ lack of competence. You’ll never hear anyone say “the team was just not smart enough or talented enough to pull this off.” Why hurt their feelings? The simple fact is that if the people on a given project team aren’t very good at what they do, they’re going to come into work every day and yet — behold! — the software won’t get created. And don’t worry too much about HR standing in your way of hiring a bunch of duds. In most cases, I assure you they will do nothing to prevent you from hiring untalented people.Mistake No. 2: Set weekly milestones.
Say you’re remodeling your kitchen. That guy you hired to do the work has done a lot of kitchens before, and can estimate the cost of the job without having detailed blueprints. But software developers are building things that they’ve never built before. If they had, they’d just sell you another copy of the CD-ROM. So rough estimates are impossible. They need to draw up detailed plans before they start writing code. Whether you’re the customer or the developers’ manager, your job is to make sure they come up with that blueprint. When you ask developers for one, however, many of them will respond by creating a schedule that breaks pieces of the process into weeks. This may seem perfectly reasonable, but it’s not. If you let a software team submit a schedule with big chunky estimates of time (by big I mean more than two days of work), you can be almost certain that they’re not considering every detail that needs to be implemented, and those details will add up to a huge delay.Mistake No. 3: Negotiate the deadline.
What’s worse than accepting a schedule that breaks down a software project by the week? Demanding that a team commit to completing its work much sooner than forecast. In my experience, most developers are optimists and will take your cue and engage in split-the-difference bargaining. You’ll have a nice, agreed-upon schedule that you’ll never stick to.Think of it in these terms: Mama walruses deliver their calves at the end of a 15- to 16-month pregnancy. You might ask the mother to commit to 15 months and she might say, “No problem!” Or you might say, “Fifteen months? Are you crazy? We need this in eight months!” Of course, haggling like this can’t possibly make things happen any faster, and even if you get the walrus to agree to an eight-month timetable, I’ll let you in on a little secret: It’ll never happen. You can have a schedule that says 11 months, but you’ll still ship in 15 months, because that is how long it takes to make a baby walrus. Sixteen, sometimes.
Mistake No. 4: Divide tasks equitably.
Here’s a great way to torpedo any project. Make a list of all the work people have to do, and then reassign things to different people to balance the project. If Mary has too much work, give some of her tasks to John. This sounds completely sensible, so you won’t be challenged.But I promise you, in the long run it’s sure to cause problems. That’s because when one developer steps in to replace another, it’s reasonable to assume that the new one will work at about one-tenth the speed. John’s going to have to spend untold hours figuring out all the things that Mary already knows about her area of code. And John can’t fix Mary’s bugs as fast as Mary can because Mary knows where all the hidden traps are.
Mistake No. 5: Work till midnight.
Let’s say a project should take six months at 40 hours a week to complete. If you told everybody to work 60 hours a week, you could finish the development in four months flat. The software team might even embrace this challenge because it will make them look like heroes (“How great is that Walrus team? They’re here every weekend!”). This should work, right? Guess again. There’s a whole body of literature establishing that working more hours doesn’t produce software any faster. Edward Yourdon, the software entrepreneur and author, dubbed this kind of project the “death march.”Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them.
Compelling them to spend even more hours sitting in front of a computer won’t really translate into more output–or if it does, it will be the wrong kind of output. When their brains are completely fried, software developers are almost certainly going to do more damage than good, writing unusable code and introducing bugs galore. And if you do ban the Internet and multiplayer games to force them to keep writing code past their natural bedtimes, well, they’ll probably start quitting on you. Running a death march is not the only way to make a project late and a budget buster. But it is a surefire way to do so.
Flight of the Conchords – The Complete First Season comes out on DVD November 6.
I just thought you’d like to know.
The Wall Street Journal notes that MySpace is seeking to create a destination for casual gamers by hiring Oberon Media.
Casual games are very popular, but they aren’t bringing in as much money as “hardcore” games yet, because they’re typically free:
Casual games accounted for just $380 million in revenue last year in the U.S., compared with $4.78 billion in sales of console games, according to estimates by Pacific Crest Securities and NPD Group Inc.The growth rate for the business is more than double that of the console business, with casual-games revenue expected to jump 35% to $512 million this year, predicts Pacific Crest.
The New York Times notes that New to Being Dry, the South Struggles to Adapt:
The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.
That last bit seems like it comes straight from The Simpsons.
In An Anglosphere Future, Christopher Hitchens cites a speech by Arthur Conan Doyle in Detroit during a tense period in Anglo-American relations:
You Americans have lived up to now within your own palings, and know nothing of the real world outside. But now your land is filled up, and you will be compelled to mix more with the other nations. When you do so you will find that there is only one which can at all understand your ways and your aspirations, or will have the least sympathy. That is the mother country which you are now so fond of insulting. She is an Empire, and you will soon be an Empire also, and only then will you understand each other, and you will realize that you have only one real friend in the world.
BusinessWeek notes that the South is in hot water about water:
The Southeast is thirsty. Because of a record drought, Atlanta now has 87 days of drinking water left if rain doesn’t fall soon. Raleigh, N.C., has 97 days. Some restaurants in Atlanta aren’t offering drinking water unless asked. Farmers in North Carolina are so low on hay that they’ve begun selling cattle. And dams along the Savannah River have gotten to such low levels this summer they’ve fallen short of generating the hydropower promised to help keep the region’s air conditioners blasting.Most of the blame at the moment is falling squarely on historically low rainfall. But an equally important culprit has been the unbridled growth of the Southeast in the past 50 years. The region’s abundance of cheap water has long fueled development.
The region has moved from abundant cheap water to scarce cheap water — which isn’t quite how things should work:
Still. water remains a consumer’s cheapest utility, with bills averaging $25 per month across the country, and sewage $20, compared with $60 to $100 per month for cell-phone service, notes Francesca McCann, water industry analyst for Houston-based Stanford Group Co. That has created a false sense of the resource as being low in value, she says, and will make it hard to come up with the half-trillion dollars the Environmental Protection Agency estimates will be needed in drinking water and sewage upgrades nationwide over the next 20 years.
I found these stats interesting:
Population growth and water use in the region have both outstripped the national average in recent years. According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, water consumption in the Southeast grew 15% from 1990 to 2000, compared with 2% nationwide. The population rose by 20%, vs. 13% for the country as a whole, and the South has added 4.4 million people since 2000. Demand from traditionally large water customers, including ranches, mines, and factories, actually declined during that period. But that drop was overshadowed by increasing demand for tap and lawn water.
In Warning: Fun ahead, Peter Hartlaub says, “Safety first, yes, but today’s overprotected kids need to live a little”:
Every time I buckle my son into his car seat — positioned between the side impact air bags and above the antilock brakes in our five-star safety-rated automobile — I think about my preferred mode of travel in the summer of 1983.I spent that season at the Connecticut wilderness home of a friend from elementary school, who was moving from the Bay Area to the East Coast. When it was time to drive the station wagon down the mountain road, his father would often give us a choice: Would we like to ride in the backseat or on the roof of the car?
In retrospect, this was probably a really bad idea. If two 12-year-olds were seen traveling on the roof of a car in 2007, it would likely trigger an Amber Alert, four dozen cell phone calls to Child Protective Services and a viral YouTube video to be played endlessly on “Nancy Grace.” But I’m sort of glad it happened. Being perched on the top of that slow-moving Ford Country Squire was a small risk (remember, this was the pre-Ford Taurus 1980s, when station wagons had giant luggage racks that were practically made for passenger travel), but there was also a reward. Riding on the roof of that car made me a little bit less of a wuss.
The wussification of American children is a relatively recent phenomenon, but a very real one. We pamper our kids, over-schedule them, overemphasize fairness in competition (the score ends in a tie … again!) and keep them indoors too much, to the point that we’re doing them a huge disservice. Kids aren’t learning how to get hurt, lose, fend for themselves, find their balance and discover minor dangers on their own — all important parts of growing up.