Breaking News: Artificial DNA

I thought that this was good enough to include in these virtual annals.

Although this is a natural extension of the Human Genome Project, something that I figured about a decade-and-a-half ago would happen, it is amazing nonetheless.

A brief couple paragraphs from the full article.

"I see a cell as a chassis and power supply for the artificial systems we are putting together," said Tom Knight of MIT, who likes to compare the state of cell biology today to that of mechanical engineering in 1864. That is when the United States began to adopt standardized thread sizes for nuts and bolts, an advance that allowed the construction of complex devices from simple, interchangeable parts.

If biology is to morph into an engineering discipline, it is going to need similarly standardized parts, Knight said. So he and colleagues have started a collection of hundreds of interchangeable genetic components they call BioBricks, which students and others are already popping into cells like Lego pieces.

Keep in mind: From here on out the progress being made isn't arithmetic in nature, rather it is a geometric progression: In other words, instead of "1, 2, 3, 4..." so on and so forth, it is more akin to "1, 2, 4, 16..."

History in the making, right in front of our eyes!

Opportunity

I am a firm believer in the notion that we each know, at each point in time, that which we need to know. Yes, this is a point of view in which destiny is a key factor, something more than a random consideration.

I have stayed fairly busy as of late: Secretary and Treasurer on a couple nonprofit boards as well as taking on key managerial roles with each, running and operating in an executive capacity on a nonprofit which is my brainchild, a for-profit company, and other volunteer work in the discipline of IT consulting. This is not to mention my regular “9 to 5” job, as I refer to it. Also of note is that next month I begin college again towards a degree in Finance.

I have had at least a couple people worry about me stretching myself too thin in the last week. One had mentioned that the comment was made to them that perhaps I “am setting myself up for failure.” I have thought long and hard about this, trying to perceive it from an unbiased and logical, rational perspective.

I subsequently came across a quote in a movie:

"When a person prays for patience, do you think that God makes them patient, or gives them the opportunity to be patient? If he prays for courage, does He give him courage or the opportunity to be courageous?"

I applied this singular thought to my own situation. What I decided upon was that right now, right at this time, I am being challenged and simultaneously offered the opportunity to prove myself and to succeed in that which I have been working towards for years.

“Sometimes it seems so long, yeah, but his passion is so strong; and something makes him carry on… He'll do what he has to do, to be part of the game. Yeah, he knows what he'll have to go through, till the world knows his name.”

Part of what I’ve learned, so far, along this journey; something that’s just been reaffirmed for me, is that you get back that which you give: The more you give to other people, granted that they don’t “screw you over,” the more that you will receive in return. If you give to the absolute, you will receive in kind. If you are apt to take in the absolute, then you can expect the same of others.

Like a Good Bartender

For years I have held that, from a purist’s perspective, there are two types of functional individuals: Subject matter experts and professional managers. One should aspire to become one or the other or both in whichever industry they are in.

A subject matter expert, commonly referred to simply as SME, is one that is just that: An expert in the subject matter of their discipline. If this means that you are flipping burgers, be the best burger flipper than you can be. Subject matter expertise insists that you become technically proficient in a particular discipline or subset thereof. As a young soldier I found my expertise in the subject matter of soldiering, engineering, administration, personnel, information technology, and others. One by one, I knocked out the learning that was necessary to become practically proficient in each piece of subject matter as to create a promotion pathway for me. By the time I left the military I was working as a key individual in a personnel and administration section of an engineer headquarters.

The notion of subject matter expertise didn’t hit me as much, however, than it did when I worked with Cingular, now the new AT&T. As a receivables management agent, I took inbound calls from wireless phone customers using a handful or two of different systems. I was told that in order to progress, I needed to memorize policies and procedures for receivables management.

So, that’s exactly what I did. In between calls I spent my time going through the company’s knowledgebase and memorizing policies and learning procedures. As I progressed in these studies over a few weeks I started to learn how the system worked, how the system thought, so to speak. I became, at the time, the quickest-promoted person in history of the call center in which I worked. To this day I hold second place—a good friend of mine beat me by a matter of weeks; he entered the call center in which I worked from another division of the company which was even more empowered and difficult. We both rose to positions of prominence in the same call center because we took paths that others were not willing or able to travel, went the extra mile, and stood out amongst our peers.

We became subject matter experts in our field.

The professional manager, by contrast, is less focused on specific technical details and more focused on being a generalist. However, this isn’t exactly what it seems. In an earlier blog post I point out the fallacy of the “conventional wisdom” of the “jack of all trades, master of none.” It is my personal sentiment that this phrase was constructed by those more apt to be SMEs rather than the generalist that is more suited to being a professional manager.

If a subject matter expert is much like the Army’s warrant officer program—a special subset of the officer corps that was established and exists to operate and maintain the specialized technical systems of the modern military, the professional manager is a manager that adheres to a code similar to that of the Bushiddo—the warrior code that the samurai used in feudal Japan, not unlike portions of the code of chivalry used by the samurai’s European counterparts.

A professional manager uses the sub-disciplines of business and organizational theories and practicum and applies them to any situation: Accounting-Finance-Economics, Management, Information Systems and Information Technology, Sales-Advertising-Marketing, Human Resources, Law, Organizational Psychology, so on and so forth.

Like I said, the professional manager can apply managerial skills to any circumstance. In this regard they are akin to “Special Forces” of the managerial world: For the situations in which they find themselves will often only find it smelling like roses after they have entered themselves into the equation.

That is not to be said that subject matter experts aren’t like Special Forces. In fact, what each SME and Professional Manager should aspire to is to become both: Subject matter experts should learn the “soft skills” of management and associated disciplines to give them a broader perspective when it comes to the performance of their duties and professional managers should heighten and hone their component subject matters as well as others.

What does this mean for the rest of us? Basically just to start down one path or the other and find the other path along the way!

Monkey Comes Home

Following a successful campaign, Armani the pet capuchin monkey, is being returned to his home in Maryland!

Momentum from the Funk

After last week’s post, I couldn’t help but to think about how closely the words initiative and inertia are alike. Anyone reading my blog for any significant amount of time understands that part of my background is in physics, and therefore I like to apply the classic Galilean notion of the simple forces involved in a given system. In this instance the simple forces involved fall onto Sir Isaac Newton.

One of Newton’s assertions as a premier physicist, natural philosopher, of the time was that an object at rest tends to stay at rest: Once there, it doesn’t like to go anywhere. Sound familiar? People, I have come to realize, are much the same way. I’ve even heard it stated to go as far as that, after a couple weeks of stagnation, a person’s body chemistry can change to feed their sloth. Furthermore, without some sort of energy applied to the system…without even trying to do something to get out of such a funk…entropy ensues, chaos reigns, and it becomes even more difficult.

About a year ago several events transpired over the course of a few months, putting me into a depression of sorts. I thought it would pass, as certain times it tends to do, however it only got worse. Taking its toll on things, I holed myself up in my little world, tucked away in a comfort zone, and only interacted with the world on an as-needed basis. I hid from the remainder of it.

Fast forward to several months forward: I knew where I was at, I knew where I had been; I realized that I was in a low point in my life and the manifestations of that state of mind had begun to take its toll on things that were close to me and held dear. What did it take?

Energy applied to a system at rest will have a tendency to move it along a prescribed force vector. In other words, a kick in the pants got me going in the right direction—anywhere that was away from my present state of mind at the time. This process to gain momentum found me first reflecting through long and deep sessions of how events would transpire. What I came up with were things that were right under my nose all along, I just needed to watch and to listen, being mindful of opportunities.

Of course, throughout my affiliation in each of these places, tapping into my initiative, momentum has started to gain: Momentum that, I feel, given enough time and energy will result in the ultimate goal of my larger dreams being achieved…the grand scheme of things.

As I said last week, a personal mantra of yours when confronted with the notion of adversity between the “here” and the “there:” “If it is going to be…it is up to me.”

Monkey Mondays: Robotic Monkey Overlords!

Would you believe that brain signals from monkeys in North Carolina can control a pair of robot legs in Japan?

Read about it here!

If It’s Going to Be…

Imagine any one of the battles during, say, the Revolutionary War. Gentleman’s wars, at the time, consisted of two uniformed military elements marching towards one another and firing inaccurate rifles, cannons, and other instruments of destruction. When I saw my first movies depicting this form of warfare I was stunned, thinking that popular military theory for engagement at that time in history was grossly inefficient.

This mode went on through the 18^TH and 19^TH centuries—the War of 1812, the Civil War and such. It wasn’t until later in the 19^TH century that a new element started to find itself into the vernacular of warfare: Initiative. “In personal behaviour, initiative is the ability and tendency to initiate: to start an action, including coming up with a proposal and giving or helping without first being requested to do so.”

I’ve always equated the development of initiative with the period that John J. Pershing served actively in the United States Army. Born John Joseph Pershing on 13 September 1860, “Black Jack,” as he would come to be known, graduated from West Point in 1886, serving in the Spanish-American War, the Philippines Insurrection, and the Mexican Expedition through his service during World War I.

It was during the period of Pershing’s influence in the U.S. military and abroad that the concept of initiative would develop. Instead of lining up in columns and rows and marching towards another military unit lined up in the same fashion, initiative dictates that you do just what it suggests—move to the enemy, to contact. Oddly enough, the underlying concepts for the military doctrine of initiative can be seen in doctrines long before its coming of age in the 20^TH century. Sun Tzu is known to teach that the commander calculates, in part, battlefield conditions prior to entering armed foray. General Clausewitz popularized the notion of battlefield geometry amongst his contemporaries. General Nathanial Bedford Forest, from the (American) Civil War era put it simply: Be there “the firstest with the mostest.”

Initiative is a force multiplier—a single person’s dedication amplifies the efforts of many in a single group of people organized for the same purpose. It also sets the stage for higher levels of economics to take effect and add to the synergy of the team.

Continuing with the analogy, initiative built into a formidable concept after The Great War and morphed into something that helped General George S. Patton command his troops through Europe in World War II and gain more ground than any other army in history. He did this, in part, because of the indoctrination of initiative into formal military education and the manifestation of initiative into the main battle tank—an awesome feat of military weaponry if ever one existed. Initiative would go on and help form the basis for the Airland Battle doctrine that reigned during the Cold War…but that is a discussion for another time.

Remember this: Take the initiative…because if it is going to be, it is up to you to make it happen.

Monkey Mondays: Fun Times With Weapons

Gorillas have recently been spotted...with weapons.

"Gorillas Fight Human Invaders Using Weapons."

No Man is an Island

Imagine the first fax machine: A machine of which we know the capabilities today. What about the first one, though? What is the usefulness of this machine that can send a facsimile to other fax machines…when there are no other fax machines?

The point of a single fax machine is moot.

Now…add another fax machine. What is the usefulness of your fax machine now? Common sense indicates that it would double. This isn’t exactly true: The effect of these two fax machines is directly proportional to the number of fax machines—instead of being an arithmetic proportion, it is a geometric proportion. In other words the net result of the utility of these two fax machines is not 1+1, but rather 2^2, or 2 squared. The increase is so great because each user can either send or receive a document instead of the fax machine offering just a single purpose in relation to each other fax machine in the world.

In fact, there is a mathematical formula depicting this relationship: n * (n − 1) / 2 whereas n is the number of fax machines in the network.

Network. Networking. Networks. Thirty years ago this word meant much less than it does today. The man behind the power of this simple word, Robert Metcalfe, was half the man behind the technology called Ethernet. Ethernet, in short, is the largely the technology behind our home and business networks and the entire connectivity of the “wired” portion of the Internet (in contrast to the “wireless” portion). In selling his wares, Metcalfe grasped to his background as a trained engineer and businessman to inform his customer of the simple economies of scale involving his new networking peripheral. While their work may be able to take their businesses to a certain point, in order to grow past this point of critical mass, they would need something revolutionary—a force multiplier—to realize any newfound value.

This brings us to a more generalized definition of the network effect. From Wikipedia: “A network effect is a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer which depends on the number of other customers who own the good or are users of the service. In other words, the number of prior adopters is a term in the value available to the next adopter. One consequence of a network effect is that the purchase of a good by one individual indirectly benefits others who own the good — for example by purchasing a telephone a person makes other telephones more useful. This type of side-effect in a transaction is known as an externality in economics, and externalities arising from network effects are known as network externalities. The resulting bandwagon effect is an example of a positive feedback loop.”

How does this apply as wisdom? Think about applying such economics to your daily life. As I’ve said before, we can each consider ourselves a good wishing to perform services with other people (some more than others, sure) and from whom we look to offer our services—exchanges in the free market economy of life. Just as the 17^TH century poet John Donne wrote “no man is an island, entire of itself,” as individuals we have little value to anyone but ourselves, if that is to be of any real value at all. When we are able to offer our services to another, then our value as an individual increases because we are able to both offer of ourselves and receive what things of value the other person in this exchange can offer. The more people that we have in our lives, to whom we are able to offer something of value, the more we are able to use the networking effect—those things which we can accomplish, thusly, can grow as a square of the people in our lives with whom there can be reciprocating value.

At a glance, it might seem like a complex concept, but think of it in this way: It is often said that a fraction of total jobs available in a given market are advertised through traditional sources—newspaper, Internet, radio, job service, etc; whereas most jobs are assumed through “connections” that a person might have. This is a direct result of the networking effect.

Ever get a tip from a friend? Can you say that you’re a better person because of the people in your life? How about what you are able to offer to other people?

This falls in line with a quip of wisdom I’ve held for several years. Take two ice cubes: One in the shape of a cube, the other with the same amount of mass in the shape of a thin sheet. Which will melt first? Why? Certainly the ice sheet will melt before the cube because it has more surface area exposed to the environment. If we make the assumption was the preferred result of this process, wouldn’t your preferred result of your life be the success that you’d like from it? Increasing your “surface area” to the world, that is to increase the potential for interactions which you have, can thus increase your potential for reaching critical mass and, with help of the networking effect, geometrically grow into and past your hopes and dreams.

Warren Buffet Quote

He's been called "The Oracle of Omaha," but by many accounts his personality is just that of a farmer or other tradesman from the Midwest. Money has not inflated his ego at all. For a man who has been as liberal as he has, though, he certainly has a fiscally conservative view. Interesting.

“I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It's like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.”

Ever think that you might be better than most others on the road? You might be right.

A recent test administered GMAC Insurance indicates that most people wouldn't pass a driving test if they had to take it again.

• Drivers 35 and older were more likely to pass

• Illinois, Georgia, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were the least knowledgeable states overall, with average scores under 75 percent

• Fifty-five percent of the respondents didn't know how many feet before making a left or right turn to activate their turn signals

• The national average score was 77.1 percent

Monkey...Tuesday

Attack of the Monkeys!

Competence and Confidence

In our daily lives we tend to encounter all types of individuals. Some of them know what they are doing, some of them do not; others have the allusion of knowing something with great degree, but don’t necessarily have any competence to back it up.

The world is filled with all sorts of people with varying degrees of competence and confidence. Have you ever stopped for a moment to think of the relationship between these two things, though?

Competence: “The quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually.”

Confidence: “Assurance: Freedom from doubt; belief in yourself and your abilities.”

From our youngest years we either have skills forced upon us (learning to fold towels, clean our rooms, or take out the trash, for instance) or we actively seek them out (putting things together, taking things apart, drawing, etc). When I was in the military I became acquainted with the government model of assessment of one’s competencies: Knowledge, skills, and abilities; known simply as “KSAs.” The theory, I gathered, was that various bits of knowledge built upon one another towards the end of developing skills, combining to form greater abilities: The knowledge, for instance, of such things as telephony fundamentals work together to form the basis for skills to work with telephone platforms, switching equipment, and the like. These skills cohesively bind to form the ability to maintain, troubleshoot, and repair these systems.

In human resources the term “skill set” is thrown around to describe just that—particular sets of skills that go into various job domains or career fields. We seek education, training, and our own versions of the school of “hard Knox” to acquire the various skill sets which each of us possess.

Well, most of us, at least. Let’s look at the other side of the coin.

Confidence, as described above, is a function of assurance in oneself. Following this to a logical conclusion of “what happens if you have confidence, but no competence” we are left with a simple, glaring truth: Arrogance.

In a book in which he speaks about MBA graduates and their successes, Henry Mintzberg writes “confidence without competence breeds arrogance.” In this article he goes on to describe the relationship between confidence and competence:

“Imagine a 2 x 2 matrix of confidence and competence. The effective people have both, the sad ones neither. The unfortunate people have competence but lack confidence. They are worth worrying about, however, because a small boost in confidence can have great benefits. The dangerous people, especially in this hyped-up society, are the remaining group: those whose confidence exceeds their competence. These are the people who drive everyone else crazy.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

If you think Mr. Mintzberg has some good ideas, you can pick up the book here!

Programmer Search!

One of my side projects, The Phoenix Institute, is looking for volunteer programmers to program an open source game.

If you're interested, visit this page where you can submit your resume and qualifications.

Support This Website!

Instead of begging and pleading for your generosity this holiday season, I'm going to offer you some of the greatest deals of the season by offering you a link to the Black Friday deals of Amazon.com. In addition to some very, very cool things, you'll be helping me, this blog, and my website.

From Amazon:

Amazon.com Black Friday Deals

Next week is Thanksgiving, and Friday November 23rd is the biggest shopping day of the year - Black Friday. This represents a tremendous opportunity for you to earn referral fees by sending your site visitors to the deals and events available on Amazon.com. Your visitors are sure to find some great deals, and we have just released a brand new interactive Deals widget that will help you showcase the latest deals on your site in real time.

Black Friday Deals

On Black Friday Amazon.com won’t have a cold, dark parking lot to line up in, but we will have a bunch of great deals to help you and your site visitors get holiday shopping done for less. This year we’ve created a Black Friday page for holiday shoppers at www.amazon.com/blackfriday. Amazon.com will be offering hourly deals from 6am to 6pm PST along with thousands of products on sale for a limited time. Also, customers will get gift wrapping for $.99 per item. So, let your site visitors know that this year they shouldn’t fight the crowds when they can shop online at Amazon.com from the comfort of their own homes.

New Associates Deals Widget

We have launched a new interactive Amazon Deals Widget. Show your visitors exactly what the best deals on Amazon are at any and every time they visit your site. This widget lets you showcase Amazon.com's Gold Box Deals including Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals, and Our Best Deals in real-time on your site. We are offering Sidebar and Banner formats in a range of sizes to give you flexibility in placing this widget on your site.

On Black Friday the Amazon Deals Widget will pull in the hourly Lightning deals. But be sure to add this to your site as soon as possible to capitalize on the wave of shopping excitement that begins next week and runs through the rest of the holiday season.

Customers Vote - 6 rounds. 18 ridiculous deals.

Amazon Customers Vote is back for 2007. Each round of Customers Vote lets you and your site visitors vote for the deal you’d most like to have. Voting begins on Thursday, November 15th and continues through Monday, November 26th. There will be six rounds of voting this year with three products in each round. Beginning Thursday, November 22nd, each day the new winning product will be announced, and randomly selected customers will have the opportunity to purchase the item for which they voted at a great discount. Products this year will include:

• 1,000 Nintendo Wii Game Systems (see prices on Customers Vote page)
• 500 Panasonic 7.5MP Digital SLR Cameras, $499 (*normally $1,149.95)
• 1,000 Razor E100 Electric Scooters for $29 (*normally $89.99)
• 500 TiVo HD Digital Video Recorders, $89 (*normally $253.48)
• 500 Magellan Maestro 3140 Portable Auto GPS Systems, $99 (*normally $247.00)
• 200 Samsung 46” 1080p LCD HDTVs, $719 (*normally $1,899.98)

* “Normal” prices quoted above are accurate on release date but are otherwise subject to change at any time.

The other 12 products can be viewed on the Customers Vote page. To link directly to Amazon Customers Vote and earn referral fees on any subsequent qualifying purchases, use the following link, substituting your Associates ID:

We look forward to working with you to make this holiday shopping season a success. Happy Holidays to you and yours.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Associates Program

Just Give Up

Monkey Mondays: Clone the Monkey

For the first time, scientists have created dozens of cloned embryos from adult primates. But what are the implications of this technical breakthrough for the future of mankind?

A great breakthrough in cloning with monkeys!

I Will Hug It and Pet It and Call It Fuzzy Logic

We live in the era of the Fuzzy Logic Generation.

Throughout our educations in school we learned the mechanics of Boolean Algebra. It is the easiest of algebra to teach because it is linear: That is, with a few simple rules, one can logically see progressions that can easily be spotted and built upon: Two comes after one, positive numbers are greater in value than negative numbers, and odd numbers and even numbers are two completely separate things. Things generally make sense and the world is in order.

While Boolean Algebra is pretty great and wonderful, the real world can often not be described in such linear, or even binary terms. Enter fuzzy logic. In the real world where values don’t necessarily have a binary range of “true” or “false,” or “one” or “zero,” This form of Non-Boolean algebra can help in decision making with imprecise data.

With the background of a computer programmer, I can look at the world and give it a vast series of conditional formulas and craft it into a working model. However, the amount of formulas grows increasingly complex; while this isn’t impossible, the mandate of the wise engineer is to simply things as thoroughly as possible. When such a system hits the “real world,” unnecessary complexity tends to make things, well, more complex than they need to be. Fuzzy logic is great for being able to eliminate much of that complexity, solving problems with expert and realtime systems reacting in an imperfect environment that can be highly variable, unpredictable, and volatile.

In 1964 Lofti Zadeh, a former chairman of the electrical engineering and computer science department over at the University of California at Berkeley, was programming software to solve the handwriting recognition issue. Since traditional set theory didn’t work for him with the binary approach—“off or on—“that it applies, Dr. Zadeh needed something that applied more a “matter of degree” approach rather than the alternative.

From a page that describes Fuzzy Logic:

“Fuzzy logic manipulates such vague concepts as "warm" or "still dirty" and so helps engineers to build air conditioners, washing machines and other devices that judge how fast they should operate or shift from one setting to another even when the criteria for making those changes are hard to define. When mathematicians lack specific algorithms that dictate how a system should respond to inputs, fuzzy logic can control or describe the system by using "commonsense" rules that refer to indefinite quantities. No known mathematical model can back up a truck-and-trailer rig from a parking lot to a loading dock when the vehicle starts from a random spot. Both humans and fuzzy systems can perform this nonlinear guidance task by using practical but imprecise rules such as "If the trailer turns a little to the left, then turn it a little to the right." Fuzzy systems often glean their rules from experts. When no expert gives the rules, adaptive fuzzy systems learn the rules by observing how people regulate real systems.”

Short of being a mathematician, what is the point of Fuzzy Logic?

Try having a conversation with anyone under the age of 30; certainly anyone under the age of 20: They have grammars and use sentence structures which are laced with “like,” “kinda,” and “sorta.” How difficult is it to get someone to give you a straight, firm answer about anything?

Fuzzy logic doesn’t dictate a world that belongs or doesn’t belong; in other words, it doesn’t dictate bivalent sets: Cannot belong to both a set and its complement set or to neither of the sets—preserving logic to avoid any contradiction that a number can and cannot simultaneously be a part of multiple sets. Instead, the multivalent sets of fuzzy logic break these laws to some degree. According to fuzzy logic, the number 5 (for instance) can belong to both “odd” and “even” number sets. Imagine an air conditioner: While you may consider the air coming from it to feel “cool,” another person might consider it “just right.” The air coming out of the air conditioner can be measured as belonging to multiple sets. The boundaries of standard sets, those able to be manipulated by classic algebra, are exact while those of fuzzy logic, Non-Boolean Algebra are curved and can taper off, creating partial contradictions: The air coming from that air conditioner can be 25 percent cool and 75 percent not cool at the same time.

I’ve long held to this belief: While many, many things in the world can be described in black and white, it is things like human emotion that add color to our worlds. If you can cut past all of that, you might very well be able to simplify the situation.

“We’d rather miss a good one than hire a bad one.”

It's tough to find good help these days. That is why these companies are changing their tactics for finding good workers in a national economy with less-than-natural unemployment.

Do you play well with others?

Effective Habit Change: Five Things to Know

The title says it all.

Read about it here.

Get Rid of "Brain Drain"

Here are some of the signs you might be suffering from brain drain.

1. Mental exhaustion.
2. Irritation or drowsiness when thinking about what you have to do.
3. Putting off certain tasks because they are "too hard to think about."
4. Snipping at others who are not moving fast enough.
5. Feeling as if the harder you work, the farther behind you get.
6. Feeling depressed, stressed out, or as if you can't keep up mentally with your task list.

Have these symptoms? Learn tools to get past them here!

College?

While I'm a very big proponent of a higher education, it should be kept in mind that a higher education, namely college, isn't necessary for success. What is in you, rather, is the key to success.

15 Successful Entrepreneurs Who Didn't Need College

(Belated) Monkey Monday: A Babysitter for Bananas a Day!

A babysitter...for bananas a day!

The Ineffectiveness of Labor Unions

Remember a few weeks ago when the United Auto Workers had their strike fiasco with Chrysler?

Now, just weeks after that, Chrysler is cutting 12,000 jobs and models from their inventory.

This is the effectiveness of irrational greed in the marketplace, or lack thereof.

10 Debunked Myths on Cognitive Science

A fairly quick read that describes...exactly what the title says it does!

Read the article.

Today’s Gamer, Tomorrow’s Strategic Leader

An interesting article caught my eye through one of my news aggregators over at myadsl.co.za. From the article:

“Video games have become problem-solving exercises wrapped in the veneer of an exotic adventure.”

Certainly a first line that intrigues and piques one’s curiosity, let alone the affect the headline has on someone. Reading on:

“Video games have become problem-solving exercises wrapped in the veneer of an exotic adventure. In today's fast and rapidly-changing business environment, the strategic skills they teach are more important than ever.”

The article goes on to debate, through the perspective of the two authors of the book Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever. The authors state that instead of being like television where people are the bystander, gaming offers a suspension of disbelief and includes the gamer into the world of the game—they become a willing participant.

As such, the gamer must think strategically in interacting with their environment, propelled to win.

These skills, the article states, are indispensible to the business world. These traits are even more accentuated in multi-player online environments—the MMOGs like World of Warcraft—such that small team leaders need to leverage the abilities of their teammates in the execution of success.

This culminates in an important point:

“Games teach by trial and error. Consequently, gamers learn that failure is a necessary and unequivocal part of the path to success. This is a message that is often lost in the real world, because repetitions are few and far between and therefore the stakes are too high during each attempt. In games, repetition is high and immediate feedback is provided to the gamer. While failure in the real world is disheartening, in games it serves as an encouragement to try harder. This attitude towards failure eventually permeates life outside of the game. The result is that the gaming generation is willing to take more risks and be more entrepreneurial than previous generations.”

The kicker?

“80 percent of managers in the US under the age of 35 had significant video game experience and that gamers had a more positive outlook on life than non-gamers. Gamers tended to prefer multitasking to individual assignments, to stave off boredom.”

“Time Machine,” Two Races, and Spam

Ever get a spam email? Does the below sound like promises that they throw around frequently?

“Men will have symmetrical facial features, deeper voices and bigger penises, according to Curry in a report commissioned for men's satellite TV channel Bravo.

Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts, according to Curry.”

According to an evolutionary theorist from the London School of Economics…in several thousand years, this could be you! That is, unless, you end up being part of that other race.

The Silicon Ball of Finance

Recently I posted a story here about complex algorithms being used to predict acts of terrorism and advise military and state leadership in the conduct of matters of diplomacy. An obvious extension of using such sets of mathematical formulas would be to predict how to win the lottery, as I mentioned in that post.

My view of the lottery, though, has changed since I devised my original concept on the matter: The lottery is a tax on poor people and those with a lesser amount of economic and financial knowledge.

What the lottery-winning seeking public should do, instead, is to use the stock market.

So, without further ado…who is better in the game of investments: A computer or a person?

Let’s start by defining a couple types of investing: There are those that believe in and practice the fundamentals: Observing P/E ratios and, essentially, applying a series of formulas to a company, an industry, their stock picks, etc. Fundamentals’ investing is in my opinion, just that: The fundamentals of investing.

Take a man like Warren Buffet: He is the epitome of someone who believes in behavioral finance. When I was much younger I remember a commercial for some large Wall Street Trading firm which stressed that after they looked at a stock, they would go and investigate it in-depth: Interview managers, examine infrastructure, and perform other in-depth activities which filled in the blanks that a fundamental stock pick couldn’t do.

The comparison and contrast is a simple one: Fundamental investing is a very logical, linear, rational method of investing. Behavioral investing, on the other hand, has a million shades of human emotion involved and, therefore, is open to the irrationalities which we are prone to as humans.

And that’s it: A computer program which attempted to account for the human aspect a investing would need to be exceedingly complex.

The odd part of this whole stock market thing? The irrationalities which incite risk in the system is why the stock market goes up as much as it does over time and is why any money put into the stock market as a portion of Gross Domestic Product adds to GDP by factor of 400 percent; in other words, when constructing the value of GDP if you put $100 into it as a form of investments—anything in the stock market—it is calculated to increase as a portion of GDP at a rate of 4 to 1, making that $100 investment worth $400 in terms of GDP; contrast that against the 1:1 ratio of government spending.

The Science Sensei

I'm impressed and think you will be too.

He's funny, he's informative... he's the Science Sensei!

The Misnomer of Racism

“They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk: Why you ain’t, Where you is, What he drive, Where he stay, Where he work, Who you be… And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk.”

Bill Cosby has been making waves lately amongst certain parts of the populace with how he is fed up with, for lack of a better term coming to my head, “the Black Culture.”

Let me clarify before I continue. So often people whom criticize blacks are called racists; the same term can and will likely be applied to you if you are considered Caucasian and criticize anyone of another skin tone, color, or race. “Prejudice or discrimination based on an individual's race,” is the definition of racism. I am not racist. I could care less what your skin color is; it’s merely a sequence of genes arranged in such a fashion to allow a person to adapt better to their environment.

Bill Cosby makes remarks about a culture that permeates society, trending the most in certain geographic areas, ideologies, etc. In his latest rant he stresses that black people “can’t blame the white people anymore.”

I urge you to read the short piece. To coax you further, one more paragraph:

“Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different ‘husbands’ — or men or whatever you call them now. We have millionaire football players who cannot read. We have million-dollar basketball players who can’t write two paragraphs. We as black folks have to do a better job. Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us. We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.”

This phenomenon isn’t confined to any single race or culture, either. I can walk down to my local Wal-Mart and find the same kind of people—with any color of skin.

Wisdom of the Nerds: String Theory in About 2 Minutes

This was too good not to share with you:

The fundamentals of the underlying theory of the entire universe: String Theory.

...In about 2 minutes, complete with a rubber ducky!

Watch the video here!

Consider It Similar to America's "Area 51"

Baikonur, once one of the Soviet Union's most secret cities, is still closed to outsiders and surrounded by barbed wire. Armed soldiers at checkpoints guard dozens of launch pads, five tracking control centers and a missile test range.

A bit outside the theme of this blog, this is still a fascinating article nonetheless: A write-up on Russia's Baikonur, the center of the Soviet, now the Russian, space program.

Read the article here.

Monkey Mondays: Tiny Monkey Born in Great Britain!

The Sun online was invited down for a first, exclusive look at the pint-sized Primate - who's just three inches long.

Read the article and see the pics here!

It's a School Day: Do You Know Where Your Child Is?

“"From my own experience - this could get me in trouble - I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator. At least one," says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools. "It doesn't matter if it's urban or rural or suburban."”

That is the most shocking statement from the entire article, in my opinion.

Sexual Misconduct Plagues US Schools

The Seven Percent Solution

Feeling down? Would you consider yourself depressed? Research suggests that you should get a full-time job!

“The 7% figure isn’t news so much as the fact that if you don’t hold down a full-time job, that figure nearly doubles, to 12.7%. That is, 12.7% of people who don’t hold a full time job in the U.S. have reported an episode of depression from 2004 to 2006.”

That is, of course, if you don’t already have a full-time job.

7% of U.S. Workforce Depressed

What the 2007 Nobel Prize for Economics Can Teach Us

The 2007 Nobel Prize for Economics

“Three Americans -- including the oldest-ever Nobel Prize winner -- will share award for creating mechanism design theory.”

“Mechanism Design Theory,” a subset of Game Theory in which we can learn several things to enrich our lives. Some key points to take away:

· Auctions are the most efficient form of market transaction: Think cheap items on eBay.

· Double auctions are the best type, in fact: Think the Google IPO.

· There is often no good market solution to providing some goods, like uncrowded roads

The Algorithm Vs. The Unpredictable

$2.2 Million Grant Calls for Designing Computer Software to Predict the Unpredictable

You ever have one of “those ideas” which, later, someone else is able to make come to fruition? It happens to me all the time, and is one of the more frustrating things about my existence.

Years ago, while serving on active duty as an Air Security Officer I came up with the notion of how to win the lottery or predict the weather. They both could be manifest of the same theory. I hypothesized that an algorithm—or series thereof—could be devised with which to emulate the behavior of certain complex systems with discrete outcomes, eventually “catching up” with the behavior of the system and then outpacing it. Once the algorithm learned the dynamics of the system it could not only tell you what it was doing at this instant, but also it could predict what it would do.

This system could be applied to the lottery and meteorology, I speculated at the time. It’s been years since that thought had occurred to me, but when I read this article I realized that this had boundless opportunities in other fields.

In the post-September 11^TH world we are faced with terrorists and unstable regions of the world that rival similar parts of history during the Cold War, but even more savage. The implications of a set of algorithms which could “predict the unpredictable” could revolutionize many, many areas of the world in which we live.

Something to think about.

Food for Thought

What separates the winners from the losers?

"I'll try means I'll fail."

Epilepsy: The Human Brain Overheats Like a Computer

Researchers have crafted a theory for a "brain radiator" that would help with epileptic siezures:

In severe epileptic fits, over-excited brain cells fire at such a rate they can raise the brain's temperature in that area. This causes more nerves to fire in a feedback mechanism that makes the fit even worse. One way of preventing such escalating fits is to cool the area of the brain that is susceptible.

So Takashi Saito and colleagues at Yamaguchi University in Japan have developed a heat pipe that is surgically implanted into the affected region of the brain and then connected to a heat sink on the outside of the skull. This device carries heat away from the affected area, keeping

Monkey Mondays: KoKo.org

Monkeys and a site for them.

Friday Funnies (Belated)

Hardees/Carls Jr. is advertising its Frisco Burgers again. Only thing is, this time, the commercials are absolutely hillarious. Consider them to be a parody of Sir Mix a Lot's crossover rap hit of the early 90s.

Alan Greenspan: The Best Financial Authority of Our Times, Living or Dead?

John McCain made an interesting remark published today:

"If he's alive or dead it doesn't matter. If he's dead, just prop him up and put some dark glasses on him like, like 'Weekend at Bernie's,'" McCain joked. "Let's get the best minds in America together and fix this tax code."

Having served for 18 1/2 years as Fed Chairman, Greenspan is considered at the top of his field of central banking. Obviously some politicians consider him in even much higher regard.

Some recent video of Mr. Greenspan:

Follow-Up: Go Figure

Go figure. The previously-mentioned editor of a student-ran university newspaper in Colorado gets to keep his job.

The punishment was one of the least severe the board could impose. The only lesser penalty was to dismiss the allegations against McSwane.

America's Youth: What We Have to Look Forward to

This isn't indicative of all of them, just a subsect of the next generation which is frightful enough in and of itself.

A screaming 15-year old girl who is resisting arrest after violating a curfew law.

Monkey Mondays: Matthew the Monkey

Animal rights activists campaigning to get Pan, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, legally declared a person vowed Thursday to take their challenge to Austria's Supreme Court after a lower court threw out their latest appeal.

A provincial judge in the city of Wiener Neustadt dismissed the case earlier this week, ruling that the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories had no legal standing to argue on the chimp's behalf.

What Kind of World...

What kind of world do we live in when Britney Spears is ordered to give her kids to ex-husband Kevin Federline?

Come on, I know Britney is the role model for (among other things) being a bad parent...but Kevin Federline...better?

Wow.

The Fall of Languages

Some fascinating stuff about languages around the world.

“a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."

A physics principle and a math principle applied to linguistics: Half lives and the 80/20 principle. Great stuff!

What Printers Taught Me about Me

While I’ve been working with computers since before the fourth grade, I’ve only been working in the realm of printer repair for about a year and a half. While I came into the job with a background for the mechanical—I served as an engineer in the U.S. Army and spent many of my formative years on a farm—I was coming into what is now my current position in which I repair printers and work with other aspects of Information Technology from what was part administrative, part support, part customer service position with Cingular (now the new AT&T) and my level of confidence in conducting my job was lower than when I had started other job roles.

“Arm yourself because no one else here will save you.”
—Chris Cornell, “You Know My Name”

It took me several months for a printer not to become daunting, while I gathered my courage and developed my confidence. When confronted with an issue with a printer I found myself, sometimes, reacting like a child struggling in the water, thrown in for one of his or her first times. It wasn’t until I learned to stop panicking and rely on myself to solve the problem.

Because, that’s one of my core competencies: The ability to solve a problem.

Of course, the best way to do this, in my experience, is to learn as much as possible about an issue and the all bodies of knowledge surrounding it until such time that you can come to a resolution. Appearing contrarian to my perspective of “perfect information” on the surface, this has developed itself over the years in that I try to find the “perfect amount of information” surrounding an issue instead of going in with so much information as to develop prejudices about conclusions that might not be the case. In any situation, however, I develop a core set of scenarios in which I ensure that I have parts available to be able to repair things on sight.

Yeah, something the Boy Scouts taught me: Always be prepared.

There are those situations, though, that I found where I would be confronted with an unruly piece of equipment which would require repair while I was there, even if it worked only partially or temporarily, so that the primary users would have the printer or other piece of equipment at their disposal to print checks, do reports, or whatever else their hearts or jobs desired. I started learning “field expedient” fixes which would carry something until such time that I could see to a proper repair.

That was something the Army taught me.

After I got it through my head something of my own advice—That I am not much more or less than the sum of my experiences—I realized that the best way to solve a problem was to have me be part of it. Why rely on fate, outside circumstances, chaos, or random circumstances dictate what the variables in a given situation would be? Why should I allow for something to turn out in a fashion that was counterintuitive—and counterproductive—to the way which I wanted a situation to turn out?

I learned that in any given situation—be that an office machine or a land war in Eston—if I made myself the determining piece in the situation, then I would have a much better chance of resolving it into my favor.

Rely upon yourself, because you’re the element in your life which makes the most difference.

Monkey Mondays...on Tuesday

The magic monkey tree.

Bananas, peanuts and peaches have been left as offerings to please the monkey god, sacred in Chinese mythology and Hinduism. A wheel-like device which kneeling gamblers turn by hand in front of the tree to spit out numbered balls has helped fuel the mania.

Freedom of Speech and Abusing the Right

Dateline Fort Collins, Colorado: The Colorado State University campus there. An editorial ran recently:

"Taser this ... F*** Bush."

The expletive was spelled out.

An article covering it reads: ""I think they went over the line a little bit, but it's free speech and they're allowed to write what they want," one student told 7NEWS."

Yes, because everyone has a right to free speech. I have nothing wrong with free speech or anyone practicing any other rights. But where do those rights end?

Two places:

1. When the practice of that right becomes something that inhibits someone else from living their life or pursuing liberty or happiness.

2. When they abuse that right.

I will stand up any day for any person to practice their rights, but when they violate one of the above I take a step back and take a look at the real character of the person practicing their right.

Moral of the story: Rights are only such because they don't infringe on everyone else or when it is an abuse.

Friday Funnies: Ninja on Decision-Making

Going and Graduating From College: How Does Your Country Stack Up?

A brief piece over at The Economist offers some insight into college entry and graduation rates at a cross section of countries. Check it out!

Shovel the Snow, Form the Habit

Tonight we’ll be taking a look at some wisdom from elsewhere: How forming a walking path through snow is much like self-engineering a set of favorable habits.

“The process of forming habits [is] as walking home through fresh snow. The first person to go through the snow has to forge a path through the snow, and it’s difficult … but others will follow in that path and it gets easier and easier.

Forming a habit is a matter of forging that initial path until it’s harder not to take the path. Who wants to forge a new path through the snow?

But let’s take that concept a little further: what if you engineered it so that even the initial person forging through the snow would rather take that path than another, because it would be harder not to take the path.

Engineer your habit change so that it’s harder not to form the habit.”

Read the full article here.

The ebook, though not free, can be found here.

It Doesn’t (Necessarily) Take an MBA

Many people in recent decades have been incessantly taught that college is the right way to go: Get a good job, retire, so on and so forth. While in this conventional wisdom lie some very valid points—education is completely worthwhile, there are diminishing returns in some scenarios. The classic picture of an Ivy League education being responsible for making one’s way up the corporate ladder and into the corner office isn’t necessarily the one that is based in reality.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports:

“Most CEOs of the biggest corporations didn't attend Ivy League or other highly selective colleges. They went to state universities, big and small, or to less-known private colleges.”

In fact, I know for a fact (as the article reports), went to Pittsburg State University in the small community of Pittsburg, KS: A place where I resided for a small time. An accounting major there, H. Lee Scott ascended to the top spot in the world’s top corporation: Certainly no small feat.

In fact, the “Oracle of Omaha,” the third-richest man in the world Warren Buffett, is quoted as saying “I don't care where someone went to school, and that never caused me to hire anyone or buy a business.”

Following the line of logic that this allows, let’s take a look at Gabriel Hammod, a Johns Hopkins student who had his mind set on law school. During the course of his undergraduate years there, however, he traded stocks, placing $1000 on Caterpillar. Finding he had a knack for it, Gabriel decided to join Goldman Sachs as a stock analyst. Instead of going to business school for an MBA, like many of his colleagues, he chose to raise $5 million and start his own hedge fund, Alerian Capital Management. Three years into it, his company now manages $300 million from New York and Dallas. Gabriel, on the other hand, at the age of 28, enjoys a seven-figure salary.

What was his logic?

“Like other young people on the fast track, Mr. Hammond has run the numbers and figures that an M.B.A. is a waste of money and time — time that could be spent making money. “There’s no way that I would consider it,” he says.”

The finance world is rife with these sorts of stories.

“At funds that manage $1 billion to $3 billion, people with just a few years of finance experience will make $337,000 this year, Mr. Zoia says, and those with five to nine years of experience will average $830,000, up 6 percent from last year. These estimates include analysts and researchers but not portfolio traders, who can make much more because they sometimes share in profits.”

The moral of this story is clear: While extrinsic qualifications such as college degrees and other pieces of paper are good, intrinsic qualifications such as leadership skill, are the make-or-break critical factor in success.

Monkey Mondays: Rare Monkey-Picked Tea

“This wild tea was considered so delicious that other people began to train monkeys to collect this rare wild tea. Nowadays the practice of monkeys picking tea has all but died out, except in one small remote village where they still continue this remarkable tradition. No monkeys are harmed or mistreated in order for us to bring this rare brew to you! In fact the monkeys and their ancestors before them have been doing this job for generations”

Rare Monkey-Picked Tea