Since the Wright brothers, Americans have viewed the airplane as the future and trains as the past. These days, it looks more like the other way around. If we were meant to fly, we weren't meant to suffer this much for it. If we mean to get somewhere, we'll develop a high-speed rail system.

High-speed rail solution for chronic sky troubles

Donald MacKenzie:

Of course, the credit crisis has increased the risk of systemic economic failure. But the existence and rising price of the end-of-the-world trade indicate something beyond that. The crisis isn’t just about the bursting of the US housing bubble and dodgy sub-prime lending. Nor is it merely a reflection of the perennial cycle in which greed trumps fear to create a euphoric disregard of risk, only for fear to reassert itself as the risk becomes too great. What is revealed by the end-of-the-world trade is that the current crisis concerns the collapse of public fact.

End-of-the-World Trade

MATHEMATICIANS have long tried, and failed, to solve the Riemann Hypothesis, a stubbornly unyielding math problem. Good luck to whoever tries to figure it out. For the first correct proof, a $1 million prize will be awarded by the Clay Mathematics Institute.

Similarly, two successive Microsoft chief executives have long tried, and failed, to refute what we might call the Single-Era Conjecture, the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras. Good luck to Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive since 2000, as he tries to sustain in the Internet era what his company had attained in the personal computing era.

The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits

Their crime lab would count as sophisticated if run by a police force. But this one, incongruously, is owned by a retail chain. The $63 billion (revenues) Target got into forensics as a way to combat shoplifting and such crimes but has taken its skills far beyond the department store. Its seven-person team of investigators, most of them former law enforcement officials, spend 70% of their time fighting theft, fraud and personal injury cases involving Target's 1,600 stores. But the lab is also frequently tapped by city, state and federal law-enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to solve big cases.

CSI: Target

Paul Graham:

Procrastination feeds on distractions. Most people find it uncomfortable just to sit and do nothing; you avoid work by doing something else.

So one way to beat procrastination is to starve it of distractions. But that's not as straightforward as it sounds, because there are people working hard to distract you. Distraction is not a static obstacle that you avoid like you might avoid a rock in the road. Distraction seeks you out.

Disconnecting Distraction

I was sure I'd recommended this before ...

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time.

Structured Procrastination

Why do advertising campaigns and new products often fail? Why do consumers feel that companies don't understand their needs? Because marketers themselves don't think deeply about consumers' innermost thoughts and feelings. Marketing Metaphoria is a groundbreaking book that reveals how to overcome this "depth deficit" and find the universal drivers of human behavior so vital to a firm's success.

Marketing Metaphoria reveals the powerful unconscious viewing lenses--called "deep metaphors"-- that shape what people think, hear, say, and do.

Drawing on thousands of one-on-one interviews in more than thirty countries, Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman describe how some of the world's most successful companies as well as small firms, not-for-profits, and social enterprises have successfully leveraged deep metaphors to solve a wide variety of marketing problems. Marketing Metaphoria should convince you that everything consumers think and do is influenced at unconscious levels--and it will give you access to those deeper levels of thinking.

Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers

A lack of consistent and transparent regulations governing concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) is underscored by a report released today by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (PCIFAP) and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). The report is entitled Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations: A Survey of State Policies.

The survey is just one aspect of PCIFAP’s 2½-year study of the effects of industrial farm animal production on public health, the environment, rural communities, and animal welfare. Because of its familiarity with state regulatory issues, the Commission asked NCSL to conduct a 50 state survey of the appropriate state regulatory agencies in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the regulations already on the books, as well as whether the states have the resources available to implement those mandates.

“State and local governments have developed a patchwork of regulations typically using federal regulations as a basic guideline that can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. That may result in imbalanced and ineffective enforcement,” said John Carlin, Commission chairman and former Kansas Governor.

The survey highlights the patchwork of regulation from state to state, and in many cases, a complete lack of regulation in areas that are essential to protecting public health and the environment. While many states do have regulations beyond federal requirements, it is clear that the regulation has not caught up with the CAFO model of food animal production. Kentucky, for example, is contemplating whether or not to even continue regulating CAFOs. And other states, like New Mexico, have limited policies on animal feeding operations and rely on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate CAFOs in their states. What is actually being done to regulate CAFOs within the EPA delegated states is obscure. South Dakota refused to respond to the survey and Mississippi responded only minimally. It should be noted that all information requested from state agencies is supposed to be available to the public.

The survey also revealed that several states have made strides in their attempt to mitigate the potential threats posed by CAFOs. Oregon, for example, has gone beyond regulating just those facilities that fit the federal definition of a CAFO, and thus regulates more than double the number of animal feeding operations that federal law requires. California, a state that faces ongoing water quality issues, appears to be working diligently to curb any runoff from CAFOs into water sources. While this survey showed that some states appear to be setting comparably robust examples of CAFO regulations, the survey did not address the actual enforcement of their respective policies.

Putting Meat on The Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America

Rising populations. Skyrocketing commodity prices. Strains on natural resources. Is this our Malthusian moment?

The Age of Scarcity?

Was this crisis avoidable?

George Soros: I think it was, but it would have required recognition that the system, as it currently operates, is built on false premises. Unfortunately, we have an idea of market fundamentalism, which is now the dominant ideology, holding that markets are self-correcting; and this is false because it's generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble. Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three.

Each time, it's the authorities that bail out the market, or organize companies to do so. So the regulators have precedents they should be aware of. But somehow this idea that markets tend to equilibrium and that deviations are random has gained acceptance and all of these fancy instruments for investment have been built on them.

There are now, for example, complex forms of investment such as credit-default swaps that make it possible for investors to bet on the possibility that companies will default on repaying loans. Such bets on credit defaults now make up a $45 trillion market that is entirely unregulated. It amounts to more than five times the total of the US government bond market. The large potential risks of such investments are not being acknowledged.

The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros