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Saturday, April 20, 2013
Fwd: Handpicked: Earth Day Films
Friday, April 19, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
The Common Denominator in Gun Massacres Is Military-Style Weapons Championed for Profit
The Common Denominator in Gun Massacres Is Military-Style Weapons Championed for Profit
Thursday, 11 April 2013 09:12By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
Thursday, 11 April 2013 09:12By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
In the battle for reducing gun violence in America, Tom Diaz, author of The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It, points to the culture wars of white male gun owners and the firearms industry, which tends to stay lurking in the background, signing the checks.
It is the gun industry, he contends, which has turned the once basic revolver and rifle into a marketing machine for highly lethal militarized weapons.
...
Bitcoin Explained on Devour.com
Bitcoin Explained on Devour.com:
and...
http://www.bitsforme.com/
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/1/4154500/mt-gox-barons-of-bitcoin
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/engineering-the-bitcoin-gold-rush-an-interview-with-yifu-guo-creator-of-the-first-asic-based-miner
Follow us: @motherboard on Twitter | motherboardtv on Facebook
and...
http://www.bitsforme.com/
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/1/4154500/mt-gox-barons-of-bitcoin
The virtual currency Bitcoin isn’t backed by any assets or central authority. It’s only three years old and its exact origin is a mystery. And yet, for some reason, tens of thousands of people have determined that a single Bitcoin — essentially a unique sequence of letters and numbers — hit $105 US dollars earlier today, the most in its short history. At a time when the euro seems increasingly unstable, financial publications like Businessweek are asking if Bitcoin may be the world’s last economic safe haven.
In the early days of Bitcoin, the price was decided by a small community of users who traded the currency on forums. Today users use real-world currencies ranging from the US dollar to the Polish zloty to buy Bitcoin on real-time exchanges. These exchanges determine Bitcon’s price based on what people are willing to pay. The largest of these exchanges, by far, is Mt. Gox.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/engineering-the-bitcoin-gold-rush-an-interview-with-yifu-guo-creator-of-the-first-asic-based-miner
A month after it reached a new all-time high, the rollercoaster ride that is bitcoin continues to thrill and confound after a series of events helped propel the virtual currency to stratospheric new heights, more than doubling its market value with the digital currency now trading at over $70.
Over in Europe, the threat of financial Armageddon gave citizens new reason to consider the viability of cyberpunk alt-money. As Cypriot officials put 100 euro limits on withdrawals, the tiny Mediterranean island will soon welcome its first bitcoin ATM.
Here in the U.S., Silicon Valley venture rich-guys continued to bet on the promise of this burgeoning internet-of-finance disruption, while the department of the U.S. Treasure that combats money laundering, FinCEN, for the first time, issued guidance on decentralized virtual currencies, tacitly giving bitcoin the legal thumbs up but also paving the way for impending regulations.
And quietly in the background, a company called Avalon shipped the first ASIC-based bitcoin miners, custom-built rigs with specially-designed chips for efficiently printing the market’s hottest commodity, ushering in what can be considered the internet’s first gold rush. (Someone recently paid $20,000 for a $1,500 miner from batch two on eBay. At the time of this writing, another auction has a batch two Avalon miner going for over $19,000.)
After opening up its third batch of 600 miners for sale yesterday, customers from around the world from countries like Argentina, the UK, and even Egypt (although the majority of orders came from the big three of the U.S., Russia, and China) made sure Avalon’s units sold out in fifteen minutes. We had the chance to sit down with Avalon’s founder, Yifu Guo to talk bitcoin, mining, and the future.
Read more: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/engineering-the-bitcoin-gold-rush-an-interview-with-yifu-guo-creator-of-the-first-asic-based-miner#ixzz2QYVj4E00Follow us: @motherboard on Twitter | motherboardtv on Facebook
Breakout Labs: Resources
Breakout Labs: Resources: a cool list of "Go For It!" Labs.....from the world of Thiel
A listing of interesting, useful, and like-minded organizations dedicated to pursuing science and technology innovation.
Bay Area Science Festival Unleash your inner scientist
Bay Bio
Dedicated to advancing life sciences innovation in the California Bay Area
BioCuriousA hackerspace for Biotech
BioFabThe world's first biological design-build facility
Boston Open Source Science LabA community-powered wetlab
CAMBIA/Institute for Open Innovation
Enabling innovation
DIYbio
An institution for the amateur biologist
Eureka Fund
Lets you directly support the innovation that will lead us to a cleaner safer future
Genspace
New York City's community biolab
iGEM
Synthetic biology based on standard parts
Mass Challenge
Start up accelerator with no strings attached
Mendeley
It’s time to change the way we do research
NSF Innovation Corps
Guiding promising research with commercial potential out of university laboratories
Open Science Summit
Science in the 21st century using distributed innovation to address humanity's greatest challenges
Prescience International
Business support and education for innovators and entrepreneurs
Public Library of Science
Leading a transformation in research communications
QB3 Garage/Innovation Network
Incubators that allow very small companies access to modern laboratory space
Science Commons
The building blocks of a new collaborative infrastructure to make scientific discovery easier by design
Science Exchange
The easiest way to get experiments conducted by researchers in top core facilities and institutions
Singularity Summit
The premier dialog on the singularity
Singularity University
To assemble, educate, and inspire leaders who strive to understand and develop exponentially advancing technologies to address humanity's challenge
A listing of interesting, useful, and like-minded organizations dedicated to pursuing science and technology innovation.
Bay Area Science Festival Unleash your inner scientist
Bay Bio
Dedicated to advancing life sciences innovation in the California Bay Area
BioCuriousA hackerspace for Biotech
BioFabThe world's first biological design-build facility
Boston Open Source Science LabA community-powered wetlab
CAMBIA/Institute for Open Innovation
Enabling innovation
DIYbio
An institution for the amateur biologist
Eureka Fund
Lets you directly support the innovation that will lead us to a cleaner safer future
Genspace
New York City's community biolab
iGEM
Synthetic biology based on standard parts
Mass Challenge
Start up accelerator with no strings attached
Mendeley
It’s time to change the way we do research
NSF Innovation Corps
Guiding promising research with commercial potential out of university laboratories
Open Science Summit
Science in the 21st century using distributed innovation to address humanity's greatest challenges
Prescience International
Business support and education for innovators and entrepreneurs
Public Library of Science
Leading a transformation in research communications
QB3 Garage/Innovation Network
Incubators that allow very small companies access to modern laboratory space
Science Commons
The building blocks of a new collaborative infrastructure to make scientific discovery easier by design
Science Exchange
The easiest way to get experiments conducted by researchers in top core facilities and institutions
Singularity Summit
The premier dialog on the singularity
Singularity University
To assemble, educate, and inspire leaders who strive to understand and develop exponentially advancing technologies to address humanity's challenge
Seven Rules for Managing Creative-But-Difficult People - Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic - Harvard Business Review
Seven Rules for Managing Creative-But-Difficult People - Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Harvard Business Review:
Harvard Business Review:
Seven Rules for Managing Creative-But-Difficult People
Moody, erratic, eccentric, and arrogant? Perhaps — but you can't just get rid of them. In fact, unless you learn to get the best out of your creative employees, you will sooner or later end up filing for bankruptcy. Conversely, if you just hire and promote people who are friendly and easy to manage, your firm will be mediocre at best. Suppressed creativity is a malign organizational tumour. Although every organization claims to care about innovation, very few are willing to do what it takes to keep their creative people happy, or at least, productive. So what are the keys to engaging and retaining creative employees?
1. Spoil them and let them fail: Like parents who celebrate their children's mess: show your creatives unconditional support and encourage them to do the absurd and fail. Innovation comes from uncertainty, risk, and experimentation — if you know it will work, it isn't creative. Creative people are the natural experimenters, so let them try and test and play. Of course, there are costs associated with experimentation — but these are lower than the cost of NOT innovating.
2. Surround them by semi-boring people: The worst thing you can do to a creative employee is to force them to work with someone like them — they would compete for ideas, brainstorm eternally, or simply ignore each other. That said, you cannot surround creatives with really boring or conventional people — they would not understand them, and fall out. In line with this, recent research indicates that teams made up of diverse members who are open to taking each others' perspective perform most creatively.
The solution, then, is to support your creatives with colleagues who are too conventional to challenge their ideas, but unconventional enough to collaborate with them. These colleagues will need to pay attention to details, mundane executional processes, and do the dirty work: Messi needs Busquets and Puyol; Ronaldo needs Alonso and Ramos.
3. Only involve them in meaningful work: Natural innovators tend to have more vision, research I've done indicates. They see the bigger picture and are able to understand why things matter (even if they cannot explain it). The downside to this is that they simply won't engage in meaningless work. This all-or-nothing approach to work mirrors the bipolar temperament of creative artists, who perform well only when inspired — and inspiration is fueled by meaning. This rule can also be applied to other employees: everyone is more creative when driven by their genuine interests and a hungry mind.
As novelist John Irving said, "the reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me". At the same time, in any organization there will be employees who are less interested in, well, doing interesting work; they are satisfied with simply clocking in and out, and are incentivized by external rewards. Companies should ensure that trivial or meaningless work is assigned to these employees.
4. Don't pressure them: Creativity is usually enhanced by giving people more freedom and flexibility at work. If you like structure, order and predictability, you are probably not creative. However, we are all more likely to perform more creatively in spontaneous, unpredictable circumstances — because we cannot rely on our habits. Don't constrain your creative employees; don't force them to follow processes or structures. Let them work remotely and outside normal hours; don't ask where they are, what they are doing or how they do it. This is the secret to managing Don Draper, and why he never went to work for a bigger competitor. This is also why so many top athletes fail to make the transition from a small to a big team, and why business founders are usually unhappy to remain in charge of their ventures once they are acquired by a bigger company.
5. Pay them poorlyDon't overpay them: There is a longstanding debate about the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Over the past two decades, psychologists have provided compelling evidence for the so-called "over-justification" effect, namely the process whereby higher external rewards impair performance by depressing a person's genuine or intrinsic interest. Most notably, two large-scale meta-analyses reported that, when tasks are inherently meaningful (and creative tasks are certainly in this condition), external rewards diminish engagement. This is true in both adults and children, especially when people are rewarded merely for performing a task. However, providing positive feedback (praises) does not harm intrinsic motivation, so long as the feedback is perceived as genuine. [Editor's note: This is clearly a controversial point; Dr. Chamorro-Premuzic has expanded on it in his new article, "Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research." In line with his comments in the thread below, we've also updated the header on this section to be more accurate.]
The moral of the story? The more you pay people to do what they love, the less they will love it. In the words of Czikszentmihalyi, "the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake." More importantly, people with a talent for innovation are not driven by money. Data from our research archive, which includes over 50,000 managers from 20 different countries, indicates quite clearly that the more imaginative and inquisitive people are, the more they are driven by recognition and sheer scientific curiosity rather than commercial needs.
6. Surprise them: Few things are as aggravating to creatives as boredom. Indeed, creative people are prewired to seek constant change, even when it's counterproductive. They take a different route to work every day, even if it gets them lost, and never repeat an order at a restaurant, even if they really liked it. Creativity is linked to higher tolerance of ambiguity. Creatives love complexity and enjoy making simple things complex rather than vice-versa. Instead of looking for the answer to a problem, they prefer to find a million answers or a million problems. It is therefore essential that you keep surprising your creative employees; failing that, you should at least let them create enough chaos to make their own lives less predictable.
7. Make them feel important: As T.S. Eliot noted, "most of the trouble in this world is caused by people wanting to be important". And the reason is that others fail to recognize them. Fairness is not treating everyone the same, but like they deserve. Every organization has high and low potential employees, but only competent managers can identify them. If you fail to recognize your employees' creative potential, they will go somewhere where they feel more valued.
A final caveat: even when you are able to manage your creative employees, it does not mean that you should let them manage others. In fact, natural innovators are rarely gifted with leadership skills. There is a profile for good leaders, and a profile for creative people — and they are rather different. Steve Jobs had better relationships with gadgets than people, and most Google engineers are utterly disinterested in management. One of the reasons for the rapid plateau of start-ups is that their founders tend to remain in charge. They should learn from Mark Zuckerberg who brought in Sheryl Sandberg to make up for his own leadership deficits. Research confirms the stereotypical view that corporate innovators — intrapreneurs — exhibit many of the psychopathic characteristics that prevent them from being effective leaders: they are rebellious, anti-social, self-centered and often too low in empathy to care about the welfare of others. But manage them well, and their inventions will delight us all.
Hiring Our Heroes: Fast Track | U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Hiring Our Heroes: Fast Track | U.S. Chamber of Commerce:
Yes! There are jobs for our veterans!...Take a look
Yes! There are jobs for our veterans!...Take a look
City:
Seattle, WA
Industry:
-
Total Jobs:
275
Top Industries:
Uncategorized (247) | Manufacturing (7) |Transportation (5) | Retail (4) | Entertainment/Media(4)
Uncategorized (247) | Manufacturing (7) |Transportation (5) | Retail (4) | Entertainment/Media(4)
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Mikamar Publishing. The Third Version..... What really happened.
http://www.mikamar.biz/default.htm (Central Site to Relevant Discoveries)
The Electric Sky Donald E. Scott, Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering)
...(ever so briefly...)
~A.
The Electric Sky Donald E. Scott, Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering)
...(ever so briefly...)
There is a revolution just beginning in astronomy/cosmology that will rival the one set off by Copernicus and Galileo. This revolution is based on the growing realization that the cosmos is highly electrical in nature. It is becoming clear that 99% of the universe is made up not of "invisible matter", but rather, of matter in the plasma state. Electrodynamic forces in electric plasmas are much stronger than the gravitational force.
Mainstream astrophysicists are continually “surprised” by new data sent back by space probes and orbiting telescopes. That ought to be a clue that something is wrong. New information always sends theoretical astrophysicists "back to the drawing board". In light of this, it is curious that they have such "cock-sure" attitudes about the infallibility of their present models. Those models seem to require major "patching up" every time a new space probe sends back data.
Astrophysicists and astronomers do not study experimental plasma dynamics in graduate school. They rarely take any courses in electrodynamic field theory, and thus they try to explain every new discovery via gravity, magnetism, and fluid dynamics which is all they understand. It is no wonder they cannot understand that 99% of all cosmic phenomena are due to plasma dynamics and not to gravity alone.
When confronted by observations that cast doubt on the validity of their theories, astrophysicists have circled their wagons and conjured up pseudo-scientific invisible entities such as neutron stars, weakly interacting massive particles, strange energy, and black holes. When confronted by solid evidence such as Halton Arp's photographs that contradict the Big Bang Theory, their response is to refuse him access to any major telescope in the U.S.
Instead of wasting time in a futile battle trying to convince entrenched mainstream astronomers to seriously investigate the Electric/Plasma Universe ideas, a growing band of plasma scientists and engineers are simply bypassing them. A new electric plasma-based paradigm that does not find new discoveries to be “enigmatic and puzzling”, but rather to be predictable and consistent with an electrical point of view, is slowly but surely replacing the old paradigm wherein all electrical mechanisms are ignored.
This web site is dedicated to explaining the basis of this ongoing scientific shift. The left-hand column of links below contain descriptions of the contents of various chapters in The Electric Sky. These pages are designed to be read through in order, starting with the Introduction. If you do this, the background information needed for understanding any given page will have been presented in an earlier page. However, each of the topics below is discussed in a reasonably self-contained way for anyone who just wants to pick and choose. Enter the site by clicking on the Introduction in the left column below.
The right-hand column below contains links to papers and comments written by Dr. Scott and others. At the center of the bottom of this page there are links to some videos on this topic.
New or updated indicated by an asterisk *Last update 3/6/2013The Electric Sky (Mikamar Pub.)
Other interesting sites
Videos
~A.
