Lance Armstrong and the Prisoners' Dilemma of Doping in Professional Sports

Lance Armstrong and the Prisoners' Dilemma of Doping in Professional Sports: Doping in professional sports?is back in the news, as the overwhelming evidence against Lance Armstrong led to his being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and more. But instead of focusing on the issues of performance-enhancing drugs and whether professional athletes be allowed to take them, I'd like to talk about the security and economic ...

Smart Cars, Pshaw: Dutch Designers Aim To Reinvent The Highway

Smart Cars, Pshaw: Dutch Designers Aim To Reinvent The Highway:
A five-step plan for modernizing European roadways is drawing attention from civil engineers worldwide.

Preschool can save the world

Planet Money did a fascinating podcast on a long-term study of preschool

We Have the Technology: Vehicle to Vehicle

In the future all of our cars will talk to each other and automatically coordinate to maximize traffic flow, travel speed, and fuel efficiency. And the future is now. The basic technology already exists.

How Germany Is Getting Cars to Talk to Each Other (And Traffic Lights): When you think of the "connected car" you're likely envisioning a smartphone interfacing with a vehicle to stream music, update your social media status and keep you up on the day's events. But that's one part of a much larger equation.

Volvo Promises Autonomous Tech by 2014

Volvo Promises Autonomous Tech by 2014: The Swedish automaker known for advanced safety is taking a big bet on autonomous vehicle technology, saying its next generation of products will be able to drive themselves in low-speed traffic.

Watch A Great Short Film On The Future Of Technology And Education

Watch it. No really, watch it!

But first, here's a taste:

"There’s a very big difference between access to information, and school. They used to be the same thing.”

“Knowing something is probably an obsolete idea. You don’t actually need to know anything. You can find out at the point when you need to know it. It’s the teacher’s job to point young minds towards the right kind of question. The teacher doesn’t need to give any answers. The answers are everywhere…learners who find the answers for themselves retain it better than if they’re told the answer.”

"everyday is going to surprise you…everyday is a surprise. Learning prepares you to cope with the surprises. Education prepares you to cope with certainty. There is no certainty."

Watch A Great Short Film On The Future Of Technology And Education:

We’re still teaching our kids using a 20th-century paradigm, but many visionaries--like the ones in this video--have plans to take our advances in computing and technology and use them to explode the idea of what education can be.

Dumplings Are a Good Thing in a Small Package

Dumplings Are a Good Thing in a Small Package: New York has been a dumpling town for a long time, but lately the two-bite delights are being executed with meticulous care — and stuffed, pinched and twisted into fresh manifestations.

Mark Bowden: Closing In

Closing In:
By: Dave Dilegge
Closing In. New York Times book review of  ‘The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden,’ by Mark Bowden. Review by Tara McKelvey.

Scenes From World War II Photoshopped Onto Today's Streets

History is everywhere. 

Scenes From World War II Photoshopped Onto Today's Streets:
A photography project reminds us that soldiers surrendered and prisoners marched on the same streets we walk along every day.

January 27, 1945, Auschwitz (Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse)
"It is a bit like painting with history," says Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse.
She got the idea for her project, "Ghost of History," a few years ago when she found some old negatives at a flea market in Amsterdam, where she lives. "I was very curious about these mysterious photos and wanted to find out who took them and where. So I started to walk around Amsterdam and made photos in the same spot where the old photos were made and combined them on the computer." She has been slowly building her collection online since 2007. At first the task was easy -- since she lives in Amsterdam she recognized the locations herself. But as her project has expanded to include other sites of World War II destruction, she's found that she can crowdsource the answers. "Sometimes I had to post a photo on the internet and ask people if they knew where it was. ... Now I also put a photo on facebook and ask people if they know where it is and if they can send me 'now' photos. This way I can also make the pictures about subjects in other countries far from where I live." Websites such as PhotosNormandie and Tom Timmermans' Battle Detective also let her use some of the photos they had located.
The process for making the images is pretty simple. "You put the old photo on top of the new photo, you make them line up and then you start removing parts," she says. "It is not about how you do it, because the computer does most of the work and it is not that hard to do. But it is about deciding what you want to show, what you want to remove and where you want the viewer to look at. If you make the right choice the combination tells a story, it makes people think." Here are the two photos she's used to make the image above:

Upper image unknown; lower image Tom Timmermans
The hope is to get people to "stop and think about history, about the hidden and sometimes forgotten stories of where they live." It wasn't all that long ago that Europe's streets were a battlefield.
One the images she believes is the most interesting is this one taken on Rue Armand Levéel in Cherbourg, France. "People walk there every day and don't realize that someone died there."

Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse
In this image, of soldiers running across a the Avenue de Paris in Cherbourg, she's made the last man of the bunch more transparent, as though to suggest that perhaps he didn't make it. "Also it to me sort of suggests the idea of someone being left behind, history hanging around and staying," she said to me via email.

Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse
I've collected a few more of her juxtapositions below. For the complete set, along with many of the original, un-edited images, visit her Flickr collection here and a Facebook page here.

People are waiting for the arrival of the allied forces in Duivendrech, Holland, in May 1945. (Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse)


German soldiers surrendering. Rue des Fossés Plissons in Domfront, Orne, France, 1944. (Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse)


German soldiers walking back to Germany after their surrender, passing a man with a Dutch flag. The Hague, May 1945. (Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse)


German prisoners of war being marched away by American soldiers. Cherbourg, 1944. (Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse)


Place Marie Ravenel in Cherbourg (Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse)


Update: If you find Teeuwisse's images powerful, you may also want to check out the work of American artist Shimon Attie whose Writing on the Wall series captured projections of World War II-era images onto their corresponding locations in modern-day Berlin. He has done other similar installations in Copenhagen, Rome, and the Lower East Side. Thanks to Tim Clifford for the pointer.

"slight improvement in the U.S.'s high-speed rail system"

111 MPH Test Run a Big Deal for Midwest High-Speed Rail: An Amtrak train ran at 111 MPH on a 15-mile section of track between St. Louis and Chicago, ushering in a slight improvement in the U.S.'s high-speed rail system.

What’s Wrong With Punishing Bad Predictions?

The Italians have finally lost it on this one.


What’s Wrong With Punishing Bad Predictions?:

(Photo: Alessandro Giangiulio)

In the heat of a Presidential campaign, it can be hard to pay attention to other news. But a small-seeming story out of Italy yesterday has, to my mind, the potential to shape the future as much as a Presidential election.
As reported by ABC, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere, an Italian court has convicted seven earthquake experts of failing to appropriately sound the alarm bell for an earthquake that wound up killing more than 300 people in L’Aquila in 2009. The experts received long prison sentences and fines of more than $10 million. (Addenum: Roger Pielke Jr. discusses the “mischaracterizations” of the verdict.)

TMQ Stat of the Week

#9: According to Gregg Easterbrook, "South Carolina held Florida to 183 yards of offense, and lost by 33 points."

How is this even possible?

Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test?

Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test?:
By Nancy Duarte at Harvard Business Review

An audience can't listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds.

Think of your slides as billboards. When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus - the road - to process billboard information. Similarly, your audience should focus intently on what you're saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them…

Stanford Ovshinsky, an Inventor Compared to Edison, Dies at 89

Stanford Ovshinsky, an Inventor Compared to Edison, Dies at 89: A self-taught scientist, who invented the nickel-metal hybrid battery and contributed to the development of many other devices, including solar energy panels, flat-panel displays and rewritable compact discs.

A Guy Who *Saw* Lincoln Get Shot Was on a TV Show in 1956 That Is Now on YouTube

A Guy Who *Saw* Lincoln Get Shot Was on a TV Show in 1956 That Is Now on YouTube:
On a 1956 game show, a man appeared who had been present at Ford's Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865.

The America of Lincoln and the Civil War can feel like distant history, but every now and then, through the appearance of what Jason Kottke has called a "human wormhole," we are confronted with the brevity of a century and a half.
The above video captures this phenomenon succinctly. Here is a man, elderly but still kicking, who witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Yet his setting -- the 1950s/1960s game show "I've Got a Secret" -- is completely recognizable as a modern media production. Sure, it's not in color, the hairstyles are a bit outdated, and a cigarette advertisement is prominently displayed, but those are subtle changes when compared with those this man saw in his lifetime.


Update 11:35 AM: Via Jason Gilbert, here is the newspaper article mentioned in the video.

H/t @justinjm1

What Iran is up to in Iraq: An assessment of its long-range shaping operations

What Iran is up to in Iraq: An assessment of its long-range shaping operations:

I asked
an American friend in Baghdad what Iran is up to there. This is his response:

Iranian activities in Iraq must be viewed in the context of regional considerations and multiple lines of effort.

Email Is The New Pony Express--And It's Time To Put It Down

Email Is The New Pony Express--And It's Time To Put It Down:
In early 2011, the CEO of a French IT company issued an usual memorandum. He banned email. Employees were discouraged from sending or receiving internal messages, with the goal of eradicating email within 18 months. Critics scoffed. Workers rebelled. But Thierry Breton, the CEO of Atos, has stuck to his guns, reducing message volume by an estimated 20%. His company, by the way, has 74,000 employees in 48 countries.
Email is familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today. I’ll admit my vendetta is personal. I run a company, HootSuite, which is focused on disrupting how the world communicates using social media. Yet each day my employees and I send each other thousands of emails, typing out addresses and patiently waiting for replies like we were mailing letters on the Pony Express.

Project Gazelle – Tag, Track, Xact

This is genius!
Project Gazelle – Tag, Track, Xact:

Project Gazelle is an effort by Tracking Point, a manufacturer of Precision Guided Firearms (PGFs) and Intelligent Digital Tracking Scopes for Hunting and Tactical Shooting.
tracking-point.com

Adaptability!

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change."

Well said, but not by Darwin.

The Economist's role

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” ― Friedrich von Hayek in The Fatal Conceit

Or according to the American Economic Association, "Economics is the study of how people choose to use resources.”
Boring.

There's No "Mister" in Baseball

Frank Deford: "Mister is to sports as crying is to baseball"
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126743511

Mark Bowden on The Hunt For “Geronimo”

The Hunt For “Geronimo”:
By: Dave Dilegge
The Hunt For “Geronimo” at Vanity Fair. In an adaptation from his new book, Mark Bowden weaves together accounts for the "full story" behind the raid that killed...

Dalton Fury's Leadership Secrets

The DF Dozen:
Leadership Secrets for Everyone
DF – Dozen Leadership Secrets
Dalton Fury is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man and a Delta Force Thriller series that chronicles the disgraced but resilient Kolt “Racer” Raynor. The series was launched in 2011 with Black Site. The second book in the series, Tier One Wild, is available 10.16.12.
www.daltonfury.com

What if Money Were No Object?

What if Money Were No Object?:
While this question may seem trite, it is truly valuable if we actually consider it: what would you like to do every day, if money were no object? What do you value and enjoy, absent issues of money? In this short video, philosopher and writer Alan Watts is quoted, matched with inspirational footage. This is worth watching and listening to. My favorite part (emphasis added):

When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.

I write about this in an upcoming book about how I managed to become a professional freelance writer — something that doesn’t seem like a sustainable career path to many people. A central realization, which Watts alludes to here, is that many of us are living our own worst-case scenarios. If you were to take a leap of faith and do the thing you love (in my case, writing), and you were to fail dramatically at it and not not have any money, what is the worst that would happen then? You’d probably go back to having a day job, at least for a while. So why would you remain at that day job now, proactively living out your own worst-case scenario? Take a listen:

There’s a transcript of this video if you’re curious.

A Wooden Adding Machine

A Wooden Adding Machine:
When I want to add two numbers, I use a calculator. Made of metal. But if you’re the awesome woodworker Matthias Wandel, you build a binary adding machine out of wood, then drop marbles into it in order to get your result. BEHOLD, THE WOODEN ADDING MACHINE:

My favorite part is when he gets to the bit representing the number 64 — the machine’s registers literally overflow, resetting the machine’s state. You guys, all those years of computer science classes suddenly make sense now.
Wandel has an extensive writeup of the machine’s creation, with photos. His main website is a woodworking paradise, including how-to articles on everything from making coat hooks to making a CD changer…out of wood.
(Via The Kid Should See This.)

Bogus Bonuses and C.E.O. Salaries

Bogus Bonuses and C.E.O. Salaries:
One of the most common justifications for hefty C.E.O. compensation packages is that if the leaders of industry are not paid well, the so-called best and brightest will no longer flock to fill the corporate ranks, and will instead go elsewhere. High salaries (and bonuses, etc) are said to both motivate and retain these brilliant minds.
While this sounds somewhat plausible, as it turns out, a new study shows that it’s just not true. One driver of executive pay, called the peer-group benchmark, compares the salaries of executives among ostensibly similar companies as a way of keeping salaries competitive and within reasonable market limits. The problem is, this measure assumes that a C.E.O. at one company could pick up and leave for greener pastures at another, which, as it turns out, is a false presumption.
The study, conducted by Charles M. Elson and Craig K. Ferrere, shows that many of the skills C.E.O.s possess are specific to the company in which they are acquired, and are not readily transferable to other companies. Their analysis shows that almost every attempted transplant at the top ranks has resulted in failure.
What this means is that all this benchmarking makes the market of C.E.O.s seem like a market with high mobility, allowing for C.E.O.s to move to other companies when in fact a C.E.O. who manages one company well is unlikely to be successful in another.  Therefore, a company looking for a C.E.O. cannot actually consider all C.E.O.s as potential candidates. Benchmarking, then, is little more than a way to inflate executive salaries by comparing jobs in markets that are essentially incomparable.
Ultimately this study shows that determining executive salaries needs to be reevaluated and reconfigured with an eye to empirical data, even if that means reducing C.E.O. pay. After all, we are all shareholders in these companies and they are giving away our money for what turns out to be no good reason.

This Weekend: The Longest Free Fall In History, Finally.

What Absolutely Cannot Go Wrong When Felix Baumgartner Attempts The Longest Free Fall In History:

Leaping Into The Unknown BASE jumper Felix Baumgartner plummets toward Earth in a spacesuit during a test skydive. The grand attempt will be a jump from 120,000 feet. Jay Nemeth/Red Bull Content Pool

On Monday, Baumgartner will attempt a record-breaking skydive from 23 miles up. Can he pull it off? And is it just a stunt, or does it stand to benefit science?

13 Little-Known Punctuation Marks We Should Be Using

13 Little-Known Punctuation Marks We Should Be Using:
Because sometimes periods, commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, hyphens, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks, brackets, parentheses, braces, and ellipses won’t do.

1. Interrobang

Self-Braking Cars Will Save Thousands of Lives

Self-Braking Cars Will Save Thousands of Lives:

Virginia Tech researchers demonstrate the value of safety systems that take action when a distracted driver doesn't

A New Rooftop Coating Makes Buildings 'Sweat' To Cut Cooling Costs

A New Rooftop Coating Makes Buildings 'Sweat' To Cut Cooling Costs:

Sweating Rooftops In tests on model homes using an infrared camera, the house on the right (covered in the "sweating" polymer) remains cool while the house on the left (covered in a regular polymer) absorbs heat and grows warmer. Rotzetter ACC et al. / Advanced Materials

By absorbing moisture when it rains and expelling it as vapor when it becomes warm, buildings can essentially sweat just like humans.
Researchers at ETH-Zurich are borrowing from biology to cool buildings in a novel way: by making them "sweat." They've developed a permeable polymer mat that can be spread across rooftops to absorb moisture like a sponge when it rains, locking it inside. But when heated to a certain temperature by the sun the material becomes hydrophobic and pushes the water out. Just as humans expel heat from the body by imparting it to sweat on our skins that then vaporizes to carry the heat away, so would these "sweating" buildings remain passively cool by imparting their heat to water evaporating into the atmosphere, shaving up to 60 percent off air conditioning loads.
[ETH-Zurich]

Bring Pencils on Planes, and Other Writing Advice From Margaret Atwood

Bring Pencils on Planes, and Other Writing Advice From Margaret Atwood: Stay limber, get a thesaurus, and eight further morsels of writerly wisdom

Public domain via Flickr

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MORE FROM BRAIN PICKINGS

• Wisdom from Iconic Architects
• Famous City Grids, Remixed
• Why It's Dark at Night

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In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian asked some of today's most celebrated authors to each produce a list of personal writing commandments.
After 10 from Zadie Smith and 8 from Neil Gaiman, here comes Margaret Atwood with her denary decree:

Maybe the Army gave you more than you gave to it

It is possible that your military service is a "gift" that keeps on giving. More support for the underground movement of veterans who quietly oppose their needy--and public--peers.

Does Military Service Increase Future Wages?:

In this month’s American Economic Journal, David Card and Ana Rute Cardoso explore the relationship between military service and future wages (abstract; PDF):

We provide new evidence on the long-term impacts of peacetime conscription, using longitudinal data for Portuguese men born in 1967. These men were inducted at age 21, allowing us to use preconscription wages to control for ability differences between conscripts and nonconscripts. We find a significant 4-5 percentage point impact of service on the wages of men with only primary education, coupled with a zero effect for men with higher education. The effect for less-educated men suggests that mandatory service can be a valuable experience for those who might otherwise spend their careers in low-level jobs.

Unintended Consequences

"when you pursue a goal, no matter how right-minded it may be, with the zeal of an advocate rather than the pragmatism of a skeptic, it’s easy to misfire." -  Stephen J. Dubner

This is from a recent Freakonomics blog post titled Consuming More Energy in the Pursuit of Saving Energy.

Meet The 2012 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Scientists

Meet The 2012 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Scientists:

Elissa Hallem MacArthur Foundation

A parasite-fighting neurobiologist, a pediatric neurosurgeon, two Brilliant 10 winners, and other scientists awarded a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship.
Every year, the MacArthur Foundation makes an investment--a $500,000 investment--in the future by handing out bags of money to people whose work shows promise. Of course that includes scientists doing world-changing research. The 2012 fellows were just announced, and here they are. Two of the winners have also been named one of PopSci's Brilliant 10: Maria Chudnovsky and Melody Swartz.

"The Princess Bride" And The Man In Black's Lessons In Competitive Strategy

"The Princess Bride" And The Man In Black's Lessons In Competitive Strategy:
What does the ancient Chinese classic The Art of War by Sun Tzu have to do with another classic, the 1987 movie The Princess Bride? Well, a key strategy from the Art of War is wonderfully illustrated in the movie's "Battle of Wits" scene between the villain Vizzini and the hero Westley (aka "The Man in Black"). More importantly, this approach can be applied to business to make your company more successful.
If you're not familiar with the scene (or just want to enjoy it again) you can watch it here.The Battle of Wits
The strategy from the Art of War that is exemplified is "Winning the Battle Before It Is Fought." Westley creatively illustrates this by having beforehand made himself invulnerable to the iocane poison through constant exposure. He then sets the terms of the contest to include it. Therefore it matters not which cup he drinks from, as either way he will win the battle.

Countdown to 'Fearless' Felix's Supersonic Skydive Begins

Countdown to 'Fearless' Felix's Supersonic Skydive Begins: Skydiver Felix Baumgartner has made some craaaaazy jumps over the years, including BASE jumping from Petronas Towers and the Tapei 101 skyscraper. Impressive, but nothing compared to his plan to skydive from 23 miles above the Earth next week.

How Bill Nye Became The Science Guy. And A Ballet Shoe Inventor. And a Political Voice

How Bill Nye Became The Science Guy. And A Ballet Shoe Inventor. And a Political Voice:
When Bill Nye tells a story about getting hit in the head, he stops to remind you about inertia, “a property of matter.” He’ll ask you how many electric switches are in your iPhone and casually chat about SpaceShipOne.

It seems as though Nye were born to play the role for which he is best known: “the science guy,” an amusing, bow-tie-wearing teacher with an entertaining experiment to go with every scientific phenomena.

Observation Deck: Designing Cities for People, Not Cars

Observation Deck: Designing Cities for People, Not Cars: Cities are not for cars. Well, OK, they sort of are -- with their wide, gridded streets and highways, crosswalks for pedestrians, and intermittent sidewalks. But it doesn't have to be this way. With London touting a plan to build skyways for bikes, it's worth thinking about the ways cities could rebuild parts of themselves. This week's Observation Deck contemplates how metropolises could be built for people, not cars.

Driverless Cars Would Reshape Automobiles *and* the Transit System

Driverless Cars Would Reshape Automobiles *and* the Transit System:
The big opportunity of robocars isn't the cars themselves; it's how they could create a far more efficient transportation system.

When I've thought about driverless cars, which if you believe Sergey Brin, will be available within "several years," I've tended to think of them as a drop-in replacement for our current automobiles. So, you'd buy a VW Automaton and it would sit in your driveway until you wanted to go somewhere. Then, you'd hop in, say, "Take me to Lake Merritt," and then just sit back and pop in the latest Animal Collective while the computer drove.