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A gunman in Valparaiso, Ind., took hostages at a real estate office this morning and held them several hours before releasing them late in the afternoon, police say. He told officers an agent owed him money. Police said he shot himself twice in the head as a SWAT team was preparing to enter, and died later at a hospital. Update at 8:37 p.m. ET : The unidentified gunman died tonight at a local hospital, Valparaiso police Sgt. Michael Grennes tells the Associated Press.
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So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints. Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Google’s 8-Point Plan to Help Managers Improve - NYTimes.com
Joshua Foer. Marco Grob for The New York Times to the page, goes a long way toward explaining the unexpected spot in which I found myself in the spring of 2006.
Secrets of a Mind-Gamer - NYTimes.com
Good Experience: customer experience, user experience
Readers of a certain age may remember the late-80s college-rock hit "Birth, School, Work, Death" – a memorable, if stark, rumination on the stages of life. It's actually helpful in the business world, too: the customer experience a company offers is often related to its life cycle – specifically, where it is in the continuum of birth, growth, maturity, and decline.
About TED
The two annual TED conferences, in Long Beach/Palm Springs and Edinburgh, Scotland, bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less). On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free . More than 900 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license , so they can be freely shared and reposted. Our mission: Spreading ideas.
One film did receive an NC-17 last year, if only fleetingly: “Blue Valentine,” a bruising independent drama about a marriage that goes south starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. The scarlet letters were for what was vaguely described as “explicit sexual content,” words interpreted to mean that the ratings board had freaked out at the realism or perhaps intimacy of the sex, including an instance of oral sex and another scene in which the unhappy couple make uncomfortable, crushingly sad love. The movie’s combative distributor, Harvey Weinstein, successfully appealed the NC-17, and the rating was changed, without cuts, to an R (for its “strong graphic sexual content, language and a beating.”)
Whatever Happened to Sex in Movies? - Critics Notebook - NYTimes.com
With Valentine’s Day around the corner, this seems the proper moment to ask whether being in a relationship changes how you exercise and, perhaps even more intriguing, whether relationships affect how exercise changes you. That latter possibility was memorably raised i n an elegant series of experiments conducted not long ago at Princeton University. The researchers were trying to replicate earlier work in which the brains of mice given free access to running wheels subsequently fizzed with new brain cells, a process known as neurogenesis, and the mice performed better on rodent intelligence tests than those without access to wheels. To the Princeton researchers’ surprise, when they performed the same study with rats, “which are a little closer, physiologically, to humans,” said Alexis Stranahan, the lead author of the Princeton study, running did not lead to neurogenesis. The rats’ brains remained resolutely unaffected by exercise.
Phys Ed: Does Loneliness Reduce the Benefits of Exercise? - NYTimes.com
Illustration: Marcos Chin In February 2010, Jane McGonigal completed another level in her quest to become America's new guru of gaming. She delivered a talk at TED , the annual California conference that's an obligatory stop for anyone peddling a Big Idea, from Al Gore to Bill Gates to David Byrne. McGonigal's was that video games can fix the planet's toughest problems.
Wii Shall Overcome | Mother Jones
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It used to feel worthwhile to commit to an annual membership at an everything-and-the-kitchen sink gym featuring high-spirited classes, top-of-the-line cardio machines, weights — and perhaps a shot at striking up a conversation with Ms. Lithe sipping a post-workout smoothie. But these days, the idea of a full-service gym is as stale as yesterday’s sweat-soaked towel.
Full-Service Gyms Feel a Bit Flabby - Skin Deep - NYTimes.com
Wine critic Mike Steinberger tries a '47 Petrus in awkward company. - By Mike Steinberger - Slate Magazine
Wilf was talking sotto voce , and he didn't bring the rest of the table into the discussion. Nor did my article ever come up, except obliquely; Johnnes, indulging in a little gallows humor, asked me at one point, "So, Michael, how did you sleep last night?" Yuk, yuk, yuk. Although Sokolin and I were seated next to each other, I didn't want to put him on the spot by asking him to respond to the article; I figured if he had something to say, he'd volunteer it.A man walked into the produce section of his local supermarket and asked to buy half a head of lettuce. The boy working in that department told him that they only sold whole heads of lettuce. The man was insistent that the boy ask his manager about the matter. Walking into the back room, the boy said to his manager, “Some idiot wants to buy a half a head of lettuce.” As he finished his sentence, he turned to find the man standing right behind him, so he added, “and this gentleman kindly offered to buy the other half.” The manager approved the deal and the man went on his way.
Schott?s Vocab - Schott's Vocab Blog - NYTimes.com
Our picks for the top ten releases of the year.