Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule for deliberate practice is wrong: Genes for music, IQ, drawing ability, and other skills. Mahmoud Raouf Mahmoud/Reuters A decade ago, Magnus Carlsen, who at the time was only 13 years old, created a sensation in the chess world when he defeated former world champion Anatoly Karpov at a chess tournament in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the next day played then-top-rated Garry Kasparov—who is widely regarded as the best chess player of all time—to a draw.
Carlsen’s subsequent rise to chess stardom was meteoric: grandmaster status later in 2004; a share of first place in the Norwegian Chess Championship in 2006; youngest player ever to reach World No. 1 in 2010; and highest-rated player in history in 2012. What explains this sort of spectacular success? What makes someone rise to the top in music, games, sports, business, or science? This question is the subject of one of psychology’s oldest debates.
Illustration by Robert Neubecker. These findings filtered their way into pop culture. What are these other factors? Take the example of intelligence, as measured by IQ. Colorado teen birthrate drops 40% Women have many choices when it comes to avoiding pregnancy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 99% of sexually active women from 2006 to 2010 used at least one contraceptive method at some point. Here's a look at a variety of birth control methods and how they each work. An intrauterine device, or IUD, is a T-shaped flexible device that's inserted by a doctor into a woman's uterus. The devices blocks sperm and changes the lining of the uterus, which may keep a fertilized egg from attaching. Pregnancy is prevented from three to 12 years, depending on the type. Approved in 1960 by the U.S. Condoms aren't just for men.
The diaphragm also fits inside the vagina, but only covers the cervix, where it blocks sperm from entering the uterus. The cervical cap is similar to a diaphragm, only smaller in size and made out of rubber instead of silicone. Implants are flexible, matchstick-size devices that are surgically inserted into a woman's arm. A woman's choice The pill. Carl Bass: I’d happily sacrifice all of Autodesk patents if the rest of software would follow. By Sarah Lacy On October 13, 2014 I don’t know if you’ve been following our sponsored monthly podcasts – er, Pandocasts– with Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk. We’ve made fun of Oracle’s presence at Maker Faire. We’ve talked about crowdfunding gone wrong. And we’ve talked about how the cult of “knowing nothing” doesn’t exactly qualify you to build a successful company.
This month we talked about a topic everyone loves to hate on: Software patents. Where the conversation got interesting was when Bass declared that there is no justification for big companies “playing the game” on patent offense because “don’t hate the player” and all that. That lead into an even juicier conversation about the rite of passage entrepreneurs go through when they start to get hit with obnoxious or frivolous law suits. If you’ve listened to the series, I predict this one will be your favorite. NSA’s “Core Secrets” suggests agents inside firms in US, abroad. The U.S. National Security Agency has worked with companies to weaken encryption products at the same time it infiltrated firms to gain access to sensitive systems, according to a purportedly leaked classified document outlined in an article on The Intercept. The document, allegedly leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, appears to be a highly classified summary intended for a very small group of vetted national security officials according to details included in The Intercept article, which was published this weekend.
The document outlines six programs at the core of the NSA's mission, collected under the name Sentry Eagle. The Intercept claims the document states "The facts contained in [the Sentry Eagle] program constitute a combination of the greatest number of highly sensitive facts related to NSA/CSS’s overall cryptologic mission. " The NSA has infiltrated a number of critical companies as part of its strategy of target exploitation, or TAREX.
‘A Diamond is Forever’ and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration by Andrew M. Francis, Hugo M. Mialon. Andrew M. Francis Emory University - Department of Economics Hugo M. Mialon Emory University - Department of EconomicsSeptember 15, 2014 Abstract: In this paper, we evaluate the association between wedding spending and marriage duration using data from a survey of over 3,000 ever-married persons in the United States. Number of Pages in PDF File: 17 Keywords: wedding expenses, engagement ring, marriage duration, divorce JEL Classification: J12, Z1, D1 working papers series. What monkeys and the Queen taught me about inequality. When travelling in impoverished regions in galling luxury, as I have done, you have to undergo some high-wire ethical arithmetic to legitimise your position. If you can’t geographically separate yourself from poverty, then you have to do it ideologically.
You have to believe inequality is OK. You have to accept the ideas that segregate us from one another and nullify your human instinct for fairness. Edward Slingerland, a professor of ancient Chinese philosophy at Stanford University, demonstrated this instinct to me with the use of hazelnuts. The answer was actually quite complex. We then watched a clip on YouTube where monkeys in adjacent cages in a university laboratory perform the same task for food. Slingerland explained, between great frothing gobfuls of munched hazelnut, that this inherent sense of fairness is found in humans everywhere, but that studies show that it’s less pronounced in environments where people are exposed to a lot of marketing.
I’m getting angry again. The Scablands: A scarred landscape as strange as fiction. EASTERN WASHINGTON—Traveling from the verdant, mossy coastal belt of the Pacific Northwest, one could be forgiven for feeling that the defining characteristic of Eastern Washington is its dryness. It's a land seemingly starved of rain in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains. But the dry landscape known as the “Scablands” actually tells a story about excess—excess of water, water that was torrential and sudden. The Scablands are essentially wounds, still unhealed by time and erosion. They cut through the land and down into the rock after a series of unfathomably large floods unleashed by the catastrophic draining of great glacial lakes—half the volume of Lake Michigan splashed onto the land in less than a week.
If you can imagine that, you’ve got us beat. Inflation of the modern American vernacular has devalued superlatives like “awesome” and “epic,” but we’re going to need them where we’re going. Our protagonist There are plenty of odd things to notice about the gorge. Scott K. Scott K. Tesla’s latest earth-shattering, life-changing, epoch-defining announcement is coming. Here’s what to look for. “D” probably stands for driverless. Or dual-motor. “Something else” could be either of those—or actually something else completely. Nobody knows for sure, but all will be revealed in a few hours. Of course, I am referring here to Tesla’s big announcement, expected to happen later tonight, which CEO Elon Musk foreshadowed in a cryptic tweet last week.
There’s also speculation that Musk, in a frenzy of cross-brand promotion, will strap a Tesla onto a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and demonstrate the vehicle’s zero-G capabilities and solar recharging panel in orbit. In any case, after some wild initial theories, the balance of opinion among analysts and observers points to dual-motor, or all-wheel-drive version of the Model S being announced. But this prediction is not unanimous. This could give the Model S autonomous capabilities.
The ultimate beneficiary of the inexorable shift into self-driving cars might be the companies that make self-driving technology, like Mobileye. Bionic arm restores sense of feeling. 8 October 2014Last updated at 21:56 ET By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website Igor Spetic and his new prosthetic hand Advances in bionic hands have restored a sense of touch to two patients for more than a year, report US scientists.
The men can now delicately pluck the stalks out of cherries. Sensors on the artificial hand are used to send signals directly to the nerves, the study, published in Science Translational Medicine, said. Meanwhile, a Swedish team has made a separate breakthrough in artificial limbs - anchoring bionic arms directly on to the bone to improve control. One of the beneficiaries of the American work was Igor Spetic, who lost his right hand in an accident four years ago. He was fitted with a bionic replacement, but it was incapable of feeling the world around him. He had to carefully watch what he was doing and judge by eye whether he was squeezing too hard.
The team could send different patterns of electronic stimulation to the nerves using a computer. History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. Home | FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry. Kids.gov: The U.S. Government's Official Web Portal for Kids. Chicago from high above. UOdiR5u.jpg (JPEG Image, 1002 × 670 pixels) Alibaba Could Buy Yahoo for Free. Here is a dumb trade: Alibaba acquires Yahoo for a mix of cash and stock.
Specifically, 0.39 Alibaba shares and $7.25 in cash per Yahoo share. By my math, that's worth about $42 per Yahoo share, about an 8 percent premium to the current price. That's it. So that trade gets Yahoo shareholders out of their stock at a premium. A smallish premium but still. Like, here is the math: It is dumb math, but there it is. This is a good trade. Also for all I know they're right and the stuff is worth more than zero. But this shouldn't obscure the essential point of the math, which is that Alibaba is in some pure sense the highest bidder for the Alibaba shares locked up in Yahoo and that those shares are the biggest thing going at Yahoo. But Alibaba, uniquely, won't care. So if this isn't going to happen, what can you do with that information?
The trade that I'd love to see, as a financial engineer manqué, is one in which Alibaba intermediates a sale of Yahoo. Everyone wins! Get it? Common “Debt Traps” That Keep You Living Paycheck-to-Paycheck. Paper Towels vs. Hand Dryers (and Which is Actually More Hygienic) Carbon map – which countries are responsible for climate change? | Environment. How our botched understanding of 'science' ruins everything. cNLoTtd.gif (GIF Image, 499 × 352 pixels) 5850032167_51b0436772_o.jpg (JPEG Image, 2000 × 1330 pixels) - Scaled (51%) Out in the Open: The Site That Teaches You to Code Well Enough to Get a Job. Wanna be a programmer? That shouldn’t be too hard. You can sign-up for an iterative online tutorial at a site like Codecademy or Treehouse. You can check yourself into a “coding bootcamp” for a face-to-face crash course in the ways of programming.
Or you could do the old fashioned thing: buy a book or take a class at your local community college. But if want to be a serious programmer, that’s another matter. That’s where a site called Exercism.io is trying to help. It’s a simple idea. Click to Open Overlay Gallery Software developer Katrina Owen created Exercism.io while she was teaching programming at Jumpstart Labs in Denver, Colorado. To solve the problem, she created a site last year that presents the practice problems and prevents students from being able to move on to the next ones without submitting a solution to the previous problem. But it didn’t stop there.
Go Back to Top. Liberia signs 'transformational' deal to stem deforestation. This Man Has 100 Orgasms A Day. Beyond Angkor: How lasers revealed a lost city. Deep in the Cambodian jungle lie the remains of a vast medieval city, which was hidden for centuries. New archaeological techniques are now revealing its secrets - including an elaborate network of temples and boulevards, and sophisticated engineering. In April 1858 a young French explorer, Henri Mouhot, sailed from London to south-east Asia. For the next three years he travelled widely, discovering exotic jungle insects that still bear his name. Today he would be all but forgotten were it not for his journal, published in 1863, two years after he died of fever in Laos, aged just 35. Mouhot's account captured the public imagination, but not because of the beetles and spiders he found. Readers were gripped by his vivid descriptions of vast temples consumed by the jungle: Mouhot introduced the world to the lost medieval city of Angkor in Cambodia and its romantic, awe-inspiring splendour.
Today Cambodia is famous for these buildings. Their secret? The findings were staggering. Meet the man who built the awesome online attendance system for India’s government officials. Ram Sewak Sharma is a silver-haired, straight-talking bureaucrat who spent much of the last five years working out of an office near New Delhi’s Connaught Place. Next door to him sat Nandan Nilekani, the former Infosys CEO. Together, the two men built the world’s largest biometric identification programme, Aadhaar. Nilekani was chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) till he left to join politics, while Sharma served as director general and mission director. Now, 59-year old Sharma is building an attendance system for India’s central government employees that is inexpensive, publicly available on the internet—and potentially, a simple tool that could revolutionise governance in the country.
Based on the Aadhaar platform, attendance.gov.in is already online and currently undergoing testing with the attendance data of almost 50,000 government employees in New Delhi available online, in real-time. Made in Ranchi The idea was straightforward. Modified in Delhi. Judith Meyer's answer to Are Germans proud to be German? Marc Hoag's answer to Why doesn't the U.S. have freeways, like the German Autobahn, with no general speed limit? Antikythera wreck yields new treasures. PlexiDrone - Control a Swarm & Capture Stunning Aerial Film! CsYpxzU. Jackie Chan sharing about his first experience working with Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. 10 Most Reliable Ways to Fund a Startup. One of the most frequent questions I get as a mentor to entrepreneurs is “How do I find the money to start my business?” I always answer that there isn’t any magic, and contrary to popular myth, nobody is waiting in the wings to throw money at you just because you have a new and exciting business idea.
On the other hand, there are many additional creative options available for starting a business that you might not find when buying a car, home or other major consumer item. If you have the urge to be an entrepreneur, I encourage you to think seriously about each of these, before you zero in on one or two, and get totally discouraged if those don’t work for you. Related: Entrepreneurship Is a High-Stakes Game. Know Your Odds Going In. (Infographic) Of course, every alternative has advantages and disadvantages, so any given one may not be available or attractive to you. 10. 9. This is most often called bartering your skills or something you have for something you need. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. U.S. Stocks Rally After Fed Minutes - WSJ. The Voice of a Generation. Don't like trucks? Online.wsj. The Underground Secret Battlestation Workspace. Justices Will Decide Whether Workers Must Endure Unpaid Inconvenience. Employees pack copies of the new book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for shipment in July 2007 at an Amazon fulfillment center in Fernley, Nev.
Workers at the center filed a suit in 2013, seeking compensation for time spent in a mandatory security line after their shifts. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption itoggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Employees pack copies of the new book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for shipment in July 2007 at an Amazon fulfillment center in Fernley, Nev. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The U.S. Integrity Staffing Solutions Inc. is a temp agency that hires workers for many of Amazon's warehouses. Paul Clement, a solicitor general during the Bush administration, led off the argument on behalf of Integrity. Justice Elena Kagan interrupted with a question: Suppose you have an employer with an "extensive process for closing out cash registers" to protect against theft. Clement readily agreed to the suggestion, but Kagan did not. Newyorker. The simple image sharer. The Mermaid's Tale: The height of folly: are the causes of stature numerous but at least 'finite'?
Smartphone Assistants Go Head to Head, Google Now Comes Out On Top. 8HGQnhw. 11 Differences Between Being In A Relationship At 18, 25, And 30. Jeremy Renner here, AMAA. : IAmA. Bitcoin evangelist Andreas Antonopoulos wows Canada’s Senate Committee on Banking. Walter Mischel, The Marshallow Test, and Self-Control. QpZ2TZb. Drop in jobless claims points to labor market strength.
How a massive avalanche changed B.C.’s backcountry culture — and shattered one guide’s life. Lyft Office Tour - Business Insider. A Troubled American Moment. 5kbRzGY. How A One-Word Email To 29,000 UCL Students Led To The Funniest Reply-All Thread Ever. Electronista Mobile. Careful with that Buffer… | OS/2 Museum. Is the App Ecosystem Sustainable? e5ly4oZ.jpg (JPEG Image, 1200 × 900 pixels) - Scaled (85%) Secret Service officers struggle behind the scenes. Makes its Products Free for Students | JetBrains Company Blog. Walking off depression and beating stress outdoors? Nature group walks linked to improved mental health. A lip-smacking look at the day that drinking straws got bigger. On America’s Front Lines by Christopher Jencks. 33 Pictures That Will Take All Brits Right Back To Their Childhoods. Are all the ants as heavy as all the humans? Germany to impose rent-rise caps on inner-city properties | World news. Ed Miliband promises £2.5bn funding boost 'to save NHS'
30 Awkward Moments Every Short Girl Understands. The Only One: A Talk With Shonda Rhimes : Monkey See. X8yt3MC.jpg (GIF Image, 409 × 230 pixels) Obama: 'There’s A Sense ... The World Is Spinning So Fast and Nobody Is Able To Control It' Astrologer Susan Miller On Why You Should Pay Attention to the Lunar Eclipse | TIME. Scrap Metal Hulk. Eating Comfort Foods May Not Be So Comforting After All. n0BuQep. Adobe’s e-book reader sends your reading logs back to Adobe—in plain text [Updated] Will today’s allies become, yet again, tomorrow’s enemies? • Inside Story. U.S. markets jump, dollar falls on Fed minutes. Facebook’s Josh Miller Confirms He’s Built Something, But It’s Not Just About Anonymity. Wal-Mart to End Health Insurance for Some Part-Time Employees - WSJ. The Conservative Anti Net-Neutrality Movement That Wasn't | Motherboard. Citi: Future Opportunities, Future Shocks - Business Insider. Src/usr.bin/head/head.c - view - 1.18. Silicon Alley 100 2014 - Business Insider.
China Overtakes US As World's Largest Economy. FBI questions the security researcher who discovered Yahoo’s Shellshock problem. 20 years of blogging. How Predictive Keyboards Work (and How You Can Train Yours Better) In Defense of Obama | Rolling Stone. Comcast: Treatment of upset former customer “completely unacceptable”
The Danger of Letting Monsters Pass As Internet Trolls. IamA The guy who was paralyzed four years ago and can now squat over 100kg AMA! : IAmA. Glut of postdoc researchers stirs a quiet crisis in science. Why New Zealand is a lifestyle superpower. Startups Anonymous: A misfit, celebrity or naivete — Which one are you? Facebook’s dual-minded approach to identity shows the risk of trying to be all things to all people. To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child. Quartz coins “the Venmo Line”: Reminding us that the under-30 crowd lives in a totally different digital world.
The Lies of Adolf Eichmann.