Bharthruhari Subhashitalu

thiviri isumuna thailambu theeya vachchu
dhavili mrugathrushna lO neeru thraga vachchu
thirigi kundheti kommu sandhimpa vachchu
chEri mUrkhula mansu ranjimparAdu

Granite Countertops A Health Threat ?

If you have granite countertops in your home, you might consider testing them for the amounts of radon gas they give off, experts say, due to the potential that those amounts are above levels considered safe.
 
But marble manufacturers say flat-out that, "Radiation in granite is not dangerous."

Radon is "a cancer-causing natural radioactive gas that you can’t see, smell or taste," the Environmental Protection Agency explains on its website. "Its presence in your home can pose a danger to your family’s health. Radon is the leading cause of lung cancer among non-smokers. Radon is the second-leading cause of lung cancer in America, and claims about 20,000 lives annually."

Granite Countertops A Health Threat ? | Chitramala - Movies

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Seth's Blog: I need to build a house, what kind of hammer should I buy?

what kind of hammer should I buy?

If you want to do something worth doing, you'll need two things: passion and architecture. The tools will take care of themselves. (Knowledge of tools matters, of course, but it pales in comparison to the other two.)

Sure, picking the wrong tools will really cripple your launch. Picking the wrong software (or the wrong hammer) is a hassle. But nothing great gets built just because you have the right tools.

My approach is to make an assertion about tools early in the process, and then move on to a solid draft of the good stuff. "Given: that we can make a computer do what xyz.com makes it do. Or, given: we can make a piece of titanium do what Frank Gehry makes it do." Then, go design something, imagine it, spec it, flesh it out and fall in love with it. Now you can ask Jimmy Wales what sort of software to use.

Seth's Blog: I need to build a house, what kind of hammer should I buy?

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Brown Alumni Magazine - It's Not Time Yet

“He put his arm around my shoulders, and we went for a little walk, and he said, ‘Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life.’ What a great way to tell you you’re a jerk,” Pausch marveled.


Then he returned to Carnegie Mellon, where he and his team developed Alice, free 3-D software designed to reverse the shrinking numbers of computer science majors and graduate students by teaching middle school and high school students how to create programs. They recently persuaded the game company Electronic Arts to let them use the Sims 2 characters. Reasoning that younger children, especially girls, would be more attracted to creating programs that told stories, one of his graduate students created a version of Alice based on narratives.

Brown Alumni Magazine - It's Not Time Yet


While he recently became a household name with The Last Lecture, he was a longtime proponent of gaming as a vehicle for computer science education. His work at CMU, and partnerships with Disney and Electronic Arts, helped legitimize gaming and play in the university, and brought the university into the video game industry. Even before The Last Lecture anyone who had the chance to study with him or just chat with him for a few minutes knew they were talking with a man with a passion for play, technology and life, and a lifelong sense of wonder we can all emulate. Three cheers for Randy Pausch!

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=625987&cid=24336169

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Can we learn from errors? What if we're running a nuclear power plant?

There appears to be what I call a 'cognitive loop' involved in the act of (code) creation: idea -> design -> implement -> test -> idea. That is, testing a creation that reveals errors feeds back into refining the idea and therefore the subsequent steps in the repeat loop. But the process is limited by available cognitive resources and the time it takes to complete one circuit of the loop - needing too many cognitive resources or if the loop time is longer than short term memory limits significantly interferes with the ability to notice and learn from the mistakes.

Traditional waterfall models of software development have shown a serious problem in that their cognitive loop is corporate not personal, and its duration is the product cycle, so the process is incredibly sensitive to correctness in requirements and specification. And unless the project is one of automating existing well-known processes (banking, chemical plant, etc) it is fundamentally impossible to actually know in advance what the requirements or specifications really are. Plus, on a personal note, my whole reason for being in this field is the joy of exploration, of doing what by definition has not been done before, of continuous learning OTJ.

Which brings me back to the small stuff: the everyday experience of a programmer. How to balance how much code to write before syntax checking, test harness runs, operational test. These decisions are modulated by the cost of doing each part. And this cost is implicit in amongst other things the tool set available. The traditional model is edit - compile - test - edit. Which can be quite a long loop - long enough to get a cup of coffee during the compile step (maybe). I have found that (for me) an exploratory model is much more productive - continuous course correction, continuously running and demo-able code, small increments. The biggest factor has been developing a programming environment that eliminated the compile step - suddenly the cognitive loop is closed at the edit stage and course-corrected motion towards the final product becomes more like swimming than run-wait-fear jerky progress. And the environment proved also to be accessible to non-programmers; our marketing VP said "I like VNOS because it makes me feel smart", and he wrote himself a weekly alarm applet that played an mp3 at happy hour on Fridays.

Summing up: the shorter the cognitive loop the better the learning, the surer the corrections; a lesson is learned only if the mistake is visible both as what is wrong with the result and why it went wrong and how to fix it and advance. Don't choke the student.

Cognitive Daily: APS 2008: Can we learn from errors? What if we're running a nuclear power plant?

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Linux Utilities

Games
http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20080530054213402/CommercialGames.html

GNUCash

Wine

Crossover

http://www.linux.com/feature/141546

IT jobs will drop in 2009

IT staff jobs are at increasing risk -- both for contractors and in-house workers -- according to a survey of top CIOs by Goldman Sachs & Co. released last week. Global services companies will also feel the pinch because of the slowing economy.

A second survey showed that basic PC and network hardware, as well as professional services providers, would bear the largest proportion of spending cuts. It also showed that CIOs planned to emphasize economizing measures over investments in new technologies, with cloud computing emerging as the last item on their priority lists, despite the hype around it.

"Demand for discretionary IT projects dropped to its lowest point" in the 41-study history of the Goldman Sachs staffing survey, which asked 100 managers with strategic decision-making authority (mainly CIOs at multinational Fortune 1,000 companies) about their IT staffing plans for 2009.

The Sachs report states that "in a cost-constrained IT budget scenario, CIOs will most likely look to cut their resources first from lower-value augmented [contract] IT staff." The company also describes its survey as "an early warning flag" for service providers' 2009 bookings of new projects.

These intended cutbacks are a change from last fall. When the managers were asked in October which area of IT service delivery resources they would cut for application-related development or maintenance work, the answer was 0% for in-house employees. However, with a declining economy, 8% of respondents in a February survey said in-house IT programming staffers would be cut. In April, 15% of respondents said in-house staffers would be cut. That dropped to 11% in the June survey (the most recent).

But contract employees fare much worse. In the survey, 48% of the respondents said that those staffers would be cut. And 30% of the responders said on-site third-party service provider staffers would also be cut for application-related development or maintenance work. Twelve percent of the managers said they would cut employees from offshore third-party service providers.

Study: IT jobs will drop in 2009

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Oil and Commodities

I have to counter with the fact that the pump up in oil prices is artificial, and was started when the money ran out of the mortgage and hedge fund markets. This money needs to make money, and is always looking for a bull market. It found oil and other commodities.

While we'll also agree that oil consumption is overall a bad thing, and has done great damage to the environment, it is an artificial crisis, and bears no resemblance to supply and demand other than the limitations imposed on oil refinery capacity in the US. The limited capacity has the effect of amplifying the current trend, and every oil/political news sparrow fart of an RSS alert drives the price up. That's because there's a huge lump of money that needs to be making money as long as it is perceived that we'll continue to buy. No, it's not natural supply and demand. It's a squeeze job.

Look at what happened when GB the elder left office. Oil dropped in 1993 dramatically, to under $1/gal in most places. At the end of his term, it shot up, but nothing like what happened in late 2001. It dipped, then followed war. When the war in Iraq was artificially over, it dropped again as the mortgage and hedge funds were pumped (after all, there were no dot-coms to fund with exaggerated exuberance).

That money started leaving in 2006 because of all of the negative signs and that's when oil started to rise in price. Any old explosion in Nigeria or bellowing from a Venezuelan blow-hard president-for-life would cause a nice little bump up. Sneeze in the currency market? Bump. Look at the sneezes, follow the money.

You've been seduced by the pimps of the oil companies and the US press, which plays along like a lapdog with their huge benefactors, just as Washington, Inc., does.

But my sig represents not only the economy of peace, also the morality of it. I long for the day of great energy that doesn't pollute, but also a world that plans for the resources of the many that don't get to eat at night, or sleep under a roof, or get to know the luxuries of what we in the west call 'the basics'.

IT Jobs To Drop In 2009

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My outsourced Life - Esquire

Every call ends the same way: I thank her, and she replies, "You are always welcome, Jacobs." I'm starting to like her a lot.

One task for which Honey is thankful is e-mailing my colleagues. I've begun to refuse to communicate with them directly. Why should I? Honey can be my buffer from the unpleasant world of office politics. I'll be aloof and mysterious, like the pope or Mark Burnett. This morning, I ask Honey to pester my boss about an idea I sent him a few days ago: an article on modern gold prospectors.

Mr. Granger,

Jacobs had mailed you about the idea of "gold prospecting." I am sure you would have received his mail on this. It would be great if you could invest your time and patience on giving thought about his plans. Do revert and let Jacobs know about your suggestions on the same. As you know that your decision would be accepted with utmost respect.

Jacobs is awaiting your response.

Thanking you, Honey Balani

Another advantage to this strategy: My boss can't just e-mail a terse "No," as he might to me. Honey's finely crafted e-mails demand a polite multisentence response. The balance of power has shifted.

My outsourced Life - Esquire

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Women's brains different from men's

Men and women show differences in behaviour because their brains are physically distinct organs, new research suggests. Male and female brains appear to be constructed from markedly different genetic blueprints.

The differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages inside them are so great as to point to the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two, according to recent neurological studies.

Men may be from Mars and women may be from Venus, and since the American psychotherapist John Gray wrote his famous book, in 1992, on the idea, it has been a commonplace to think of men and women as being from different planets in terms of their emotional responses.

But until recently, these differences were often explained by the action of adult sex hormones, or by social pressures that encouraged males and females to behave in a certain way.

Increasingly, however, these assumptions are being challenged, according to a review of recent neurological research appearing in this week's New Scientist magazine, and it is becoming clear that the brains of men and women show numerous anatomical differences.

Some of these divergences, the review by Hannah Hoag suggests, could explain a number of mysteries, such as why men and women are prone to different mental health problems, why some drugs work well for one sex but have little effect on the other, and why chronic pain tends to affect women more than men.

One area of research concerns the brain's pain-suppressing mechanisms, and points to the fact that they may be organised differently in men and women. This would explain why women can suffer long-term pain more, and why there can be sex differences in response to opium-derived painkilling drugs. The study notes: "Women get more relief from the opioid painkiller nalbuphine compared to men, whereas in men morphine is more effective and nalbuphine actually increases the pain intensity." It is possible these findings could lead to new painkillers being developed that are tailored to be more effective in women – but that is some way off.

Mental health is another area where real brain differences may offer explanations. Women are diagnosed with depression twice as often as men, and this may be linked to relative levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Boys, on the other hand, are more likely than girls to be diagnosed with autism, Tourette's syndrome, dyslexia, attention-deficit disorder and early-onset schizophrenia. The review reports that Margaret McCarthy of the University of Maryland in Baltimore believes that hormone-like substances called prostaglandins, which help masculinise the male brain around the time of birth, may be partly to blame.

Women's brains are different from men's – and here's scientific proof - Science, News - The Independent

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Free online courses

Free online courses from great universities & colleges

Small Business Is Latest Focus in Health Fight

As the number of people without health insurance continues to rise, many states and Congress have begun to focus on one of the biggest causes: the growing number of small business owners and their workers who are unable to afford coverage.

Of the 47 million uninsured people in this country, at least 20 million are employed by small businesses or work for themselves — a figure that has increased by an average of more than 500,000 a year since 2000. That is why, even as the presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama are floating ideas for making insurance easier to obtain by individuals, there are also efforts under way to address the needs of small businesses.

Small Business Is Latest Focus in Health Fight - NYTimes.com

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Patent Gridlock Suppresses Innovation

It's true that defining intellectual property is hard at a time when new technologies upset the traditional ways of protecting rights, as debates over digital piracy make clear. But in the case of patents, poorly defined property rights for inventions are leading even the biggest companies to take desperate measures, including banding together to protect themselves against claims of increasingly broad and vague patents.

Both sides may be right. New empirical research by Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer, reported in their book, "Patent Failure," found that the value of pharmaceutical patents outweighed the costs of pharmaceutical-patent litigation. But for all other industries combined, they estimate that since the mid-1990s, the cost of U.S. patent litigation to alleged infringers ($12 billion in legal and business costs in 1999) is greater than the global profits that companies earn from patents (less than $4 billion in 1999). Since the 1980s, patent litigation has tripled and the probability that a particular patent is litigated within four years has more than doubled. Small inventors feel the brunt of the uncertainty costs, since bigger companies only pay for rights they think the system will protect.

These are shocking findings, but they point to the solution. New drugs require great specificity to earn a patent, whereas patents are often granted to broad, thus vague, innovations in software, communications and other technologies. Ironically, the aggregate value of these technology patents is then wiped out through litigation costs.

Information Age - WSJ.com

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How Sysco came to monopolize most of what you eat.

Like any retailer, chefs need wholesalers that distribute goods cheaply and efficiently, and Sysco's 400,000-plus item catalog conveniently sells everything a cook needs to run an eating establishment. A little more than half of their products are brand names like Parkay and Lucky Charms. The rest are Sysco-packaged items like 25-pound bags of rice, half-gallons of salsa, boxes of plastic gloves, beer mugs, dish-washing detergent, not to mention 1,900 different fresh and frozen chicken products. Whatever a cook orders is delivered straight to the kitchen door at bottom-barrel prices: One Sysco invoice I got my hands on has a 25-pound bag of Uncle Ben's Converted Rice selling for $20.95, or about 84 cents a pound, while a 1-pound box bought through Amazon Grocery costs $2.09.

All of that seems relatively innocuous—restaurants need to make a profit, after all. But Sysco also hawks pre-packaged food. While chefs have long relied on shortcuts like freezing and using canned goods like beans and tomatoes, it's entirely different to pass off one of Sysco's thousands of ready-made items—ground beef burritos, vegan tortellini, quiche Lorraine pie, tiramisu cake—as homemade.


Restaurants make a mint from serving these pre-prepped foods, since the meals can be purchased in bulk and stored in a freezer for months. A box of 36, 4-ounce chicken Kievs, for instance, can be kept in an icebox for up to 180 days. And the savings from labor costs are considerable. Each reheated Angus country fried steak will bring in almost $5 in profits. In the words of Sysco, these meals require nothing more than the ability to "heat, assemble, and serve."

Some obvious food trends have helped Sysco's rise to Wal-Mart-like dominance. In 1970, households spent 34 percent of their food budget on dining out, compared to almost 50 percent today.

How Sysco came to monopolize most of what you eat. - By Ulrich Boser - Slate Magazine

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Drivers cut back by 30B miles

Americans drove 22 billion fewer miles from November through April than during the same period in 2006-07, the biggest such drop since the Iranian revolution led to gasoline supply shortages in 1979-80.

The numbers released Wednesday may reflect more than a temporary attitude change in consumers toward high gas prices, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said. Previously, she said, "people might change their pattern for a short period of time, but it almost always bounced back very quickly. We're not seeing that now."

The decline in total miles traveled, though only 1%, means that many drivers are cutting back far more because the number of drivers and vehicles grows by 1% to 2% a year. Americans are driving about the same number of miles as in 2005, when the USA had 8 million fewer people, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Federal Highway Administration data. The declines are sharpest on rural roads, indicating that people are cutting back on long-distance and vacation trips.

Drivers cut back by 30B miles - USATODAY.com

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Why San Francisco Is No. 1

The City by the Bay outshined the rest of the field in attracting alumni from the nation's top schools. More of the class of 1998 from Harvard, Stanford, Rice, Princeton, Duke and Northwestern picked San Francisco as home, 10 years out of school, compared with any other metro. These are graduates with the skills to work virtually wherever they want, and this measure is an indicator of where high-caliber professionals have decided to settle, based on a combination of job and lifestyle factors.

Why San Francisco Is No. 1 - Forbes.com

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YouTube - Bruce Wasserstein: Gouging Grandma

"Bruce Wasserstein: Gouging Grandma", follows Robin Berson, the daughter of an Atria resident, and Dino Vallenes, a maintenance worker at an Atria facility, as they travel to Bermuda to speak out at Lazard's annual shareholder meeting.


Lazard paid Bruce Wasserstein $41 million for 2007 and, on the same day, gave him a new five-year deal worth about another $100 million. Average pay for Atria workers is $8-$10 an hour, and workers report that the costs of company-offered healthcare puts it well beyond their reach. At the same time, elderly residents and workers have cited wide-ranging concerns, such as poor patient care, poverty wages for employees and skyrocketing rent increases, at Atria facilities. In response to complaints from residents, legislators in CA and NY have called on Atria to stop gouging residents and respect its employees.

YouTube - Bruce Wasserstein: Gouging Grandma

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Fighting patents

Dear Ms. Tarzian:

Here's another idea I've had: Weight Beaters.

Weight Beaters are a method of encouraging participants to lose weight. A participant who does not lose the desired number of pounds in a month is beaten up. This negative feedback can, of course, be combined with more traditional positive-feedback weight-loss mechanisms.

http://cr.yp.to/patents/tarzian.html#2003.12

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Don't publish with IEEE!

The bottom line is that IEEE is refusing to accept public-domain papers except from government authors. IEEE has no justification for this position. IEEE's action is a blatant attempt to maintain control over papers that would otherwise have been freely available to the public. Unfortunately, at least in this student's case, the attempt succeeded: a paper that was accepted by IEEE's scientific referees, and that would have been in the public domain without IEEE's pressure, is now part of IEEE's copyright portfolio.

http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html

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Why are social sciences not scientific?

To begin to appreciate the plausibility (if not the truth) of my claim, ask yourselves the following question: why are the so-called ‘social sciences’ different from the natural sciences? I mean to say, why have the social sciences not developed the way natural sciences have? There must have been many geniuses in the social sciences; the mathematical and logical sophistication in some of the social sciences is simply mind-bending; we have computers and we can simulate almost any thing. Comparatively speaking, it is not as though the social sciences are starved of funding or personnel. Despite all this, the social sciences are not progressing. Why is this? (When you have, say, a problem in a love-relationship, you do not open a text book on psychology; you look for a w ise friend or an understanding uncle.) There are many answers provided in the history of philosophy and many of you may have your own ‘favourite’ explanation. Here is my answer: you cannot build a scientific theory based on theological assumptions. What you will get then is not a scientific theory, but an embroidering of theology. -- Balagangadhara.

Via RK.

Slashdot | Best Chair For Desktop Coding?

"Can someone give me recommendations for a desk chair to give my husband as a Father's Day gift? He currently uses a cheap one he got from Office Max, but I want him to have a really comfortable one. He spends his life in this chair (coding and lurking on Slashdot). I don't have time to research good chairs on the internet today (I'm chasing my 10 month old around, and she seems to get into the most mischief when I'm staring at the computer screen), so I figured a few folks here might share their personal recommendations."

Slashdot | Best Chair For Desktop Coding?

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Before we start - The Pledge of the Network Admin

The Pledge of the Network Admin

This is my network.

It is mine
or technically my employer's,
it is my responsibility
and I care for it with all my heart

there are many other networks
a lot like mine,

but none are just like it.

I solemnly swear

that I will not mindlessly paste
from HOWTOs.

Before we start

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Apache ActiveMQ -- Enterprise Integration Patterns

http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/toc.html

Version 5.0 onwards of Apache ActiveMQ comes complete with full support for the Enterprise Integration Patterns (from the excellent book by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf) via the Apache Camel library.

You can easily add any of the supported Enterprise Integration Patterns into ActiveMQ (either on the JMS client or in the broker process) to support smart routing, transformation and a whole host of other powerful patterns. You can of course just embed Camel library directly into your application, such as via Spring as well..

This also means you can cleanly integrate all of the Camel Components into ActiveMQ so you can easily integrate with CXF, Files, JBI, JPA, Mail, MINA, Quartz, XMPP and many other protocols and transports!

Apache ActiveMQ -- Enterprise Integration Patterns

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Welcome to the Aperi Blog

The Aperi project announces the first release of the Storage Network Simulator. The simulator is a tool that enables you to simulate a storage area network (SAN) through software. You can create a SAN configuration, add devices to the SAN, create arbitrary connections between devices, and remove connections between devices. Using this tool to create a simulated SAN environment can help when you:

• Have limited or no access to hardware and software when developing and testing SRM applications

• Have "off-line"' access to SAN devices without impacting the performance of the real network (such as the SNIA lab or any SAN in the world).

• Need to perform "what-if" analysis before you plan to extend or reconfigure your SAN

The SAN Simulator provides an increase in productivity and efficiency for Aperi development and testing by removing the dependence on device availability.

Welcome to the Aperi Blog

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Don't convert to marry, says Muslim seminary

An Islamic seminary in Muzaffarnagar has issued a fatwa saying that conversion of a woman to Islam for the purpose of getting married with someone from the faith is illegal and against the Shariat.

The fatwa was issued in response to a question posed before the Darul Uloom Deoband asking whether the conversion of a non-Muslim woman into Islam for the purposes of marriage was justified.

Don't convert to marry, says Muslim seminary

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Ray tracing (graphics)

In computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane. The technique is capable of producing a very high degree of photorealism; usually higher than that of typical scanline rendering methods, but at a greater computational cost. This makes ray tracing best suited for applications where the image can be rendered slowly ahead of time, such as in still images and film and television special effects, and more poorly suited for real-time applications like computer games where speed is critical. Ray tracing is capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflection and refraction, scattering, and chromatic aberration.

Ray tracing (graphics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Be more productive

Hard work isn't supposed to be pleasant, we're told. But in fact it's probably the most enjoyable thing I do. Not only does a tough problem completely absorb you while you're trying to solve it, but afterwards you feel wonderful having accomplished something so serious.

So the secret to getting yourself to do something is not to convince yourself you have to do it, but to convince yourself that it's fun. And if it isn't, then you need to make it fun.

Storage Management - Green IT not green

Note that the term “under storage” is substituted for “under management.” Truth be told, data management in distributed computing environments is extraordinarily lax. The best analogy for distributed storage is a huge and growing junk drawer. This point is underscored by data collated by Sun Microsystems after performing nearly 10,000 storage assessments at client facilities. Per Sun’s statistics, for every hard disk deployed by a company, roughly 30 percent of its capacity contains useful data accessed regularly as part of day to day operations. Another 40 percent must be retained for reasons of historical value, regulatory or legal compliance, or because it is intellectual property. Rarely referenced, this data belongs in an archive, preferably tape or optical because they consume far less kilowatt hours than do disk-based systems.

The balance of the space on each hard disk, some 30 percent of total disk capacity, comprises orphan data (whose owner of record no longer exists at the company), contraband data (collections of MP3 files, videos or pictures downloaded from the Internet), and good old fashioned wasted space that has been reserved by an application or file system, but never used. This capacity could be freed up through a combination of data hygiene and good storage resource monitoring and management. If that were done, and archiving was implemented, companies could return up to 70 percent of the capacity of every spindle they own today, deferring the need to invest in more storage and exacerbating the storage acquisition trend that IDC projects will total 300 percent by 2011.

This point is never brought up in the articles you read in the trades. Instead, vendors posit a number of hardware and software value-add solutions as silver bullets for Green IT. Virtualization, de-duplication, compression, re-driving arrays with larger disk drives, leveraging MAID (massive arrays of independent disk, a portion of which spin down when not in use), and thin provisioning are just a few of the green panaceas that are being discussed. Most involve plugging additional hardware into the wall, which is hardly an intelligent way to reduce power consumption.

All of these techniques deliver tactical value at best: unmanaged data will continue to grow over time and eliminate whatever short term power reductions that the new technologies deliver. They are simply re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Getting to green in IT ultimately and strategically comes down to managing data better. It costs a company virtually nothing to sort out their data junk drawer, to apply processes for classifying data so that it can be migrated over time into an archive, and to deploy storage resource management tools to spot wasted space, ownerless files and junk data in their repositories.

beliefs

Most of us, when overcome by those unmistakable feelings of disconnectedness from our surroundings, experience a sense of inner agitation of a peculiar kind. When human affairs are pressed beyond the ordinary, such as when at war, these moments of disconnectedness steer us to identify things that are “right” or “wrong.” Soon these moments turn into beliefs. Then we become emphatic about these beliefs. Then we suddenly find it easy to relate our normal day-to-day occurrences to these beliefs.

But this disconnect, the inner agitation, doesn't go away. It seems to persist despite our emphatic beliefs of right and wrong. This feeling, instead of getting resolved, dissolved, disappear and reassure us in the staunch positions we take on the issues of political importance, seems to go right past our ordinary day-to-day beliefs and is still left dangling, in search of home.

Textbooks and The Teaching Company

Regardless of how it is either in U.S. or whatever (because they are all screwy), if we ask ourselves a question: “How would you address this text book problem from a business point of view, so that you are both solving a real problem and making money by doing that?” we should at least see one aspect rightaway: that the printing costs are not really a big issue here. The distribution costs are, on the other hand, a big problem (as expected).

-- CrazyFinger


The Teaching Company

The Teaching Company brings engaging professors into your home or car through courses on DVD, audio CD, and other formats. Since 1990, great teachers from the Ivy League, Stanford, Georgetown, and other leading colleges and universities have crafted over 200 courses for lifelong learners. We provide the adventure of learning, without the homework or exams.

What we've done:

• With input and feedback from our customers since 1990, we've found the top 100 teaching professors in the country.
• With those great professors, we have produced 250 great courses�over 3,000 hours of material in literature, philosophy, history, fine arts, the sciences, economics, and religion.
• We have delivered millions of lectures to hundreds of thousands of people we are proud to call our customers.

this game is rigged

At lunch we were discussing how ass-backwards the sales approach has been this quarter. I said, with my usual animation, "When you are falling from a 100-story building, until 50th floor it feels like flying."

CrazyFinger.

IT Employment Surges in May

While the unemployment rate jumped to 5.5 percent last month and job losses were widespread through many sectors of the economy, IT employment growth accelerated in May, according to the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses (NACCB), which tracks monthly IT employment.

The association reported IT employment reached 3,899,800 in May, which was a gain of nearly 37,000 jobs from the previous month. So far this year, IT employment has grown by more than 80,000 jobs. IT employment is up 8.6 percent, or more than 300,000, from May 2007.

http://www.naccb.org/employment-index/june2008_it_release.pdf