March 2012
92 posts
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Amazon Adds That Robotic Touch
In the battle between man and machine, the robots just scored a victory in the world of e-commerce.
Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.25% said Monday it is buying Kiva Systems Inc., which makes robots used in shipping centers. The $775 million acquisition comes as Amazon continues its heavy spending on fulfillment centers to help fuel its business.
While the Seattle-based retailer has used some...
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Legitimization of the Access Economy
By Lesley Lammers
“Sharing is caring,” or at least that is what they teach you in kindergarten. With the advent of such service platforms as Craigslist, Netflix and ZipCar, one might say that tech and social entrepreneurs took this lesson to a whole new level. But the idea of sharing the commons for the common good is nothing new. Community development resource-sharing initiatives like bike...
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HOLDING COURT
by Jeffrey Toobin
The legal challenges to ACA, which the Supreme Court will hear next week, center on its key provision, the individual mandate. The mandate essentially requires all adults to obtain health insurance, either through their employers or by buying it themselves. (There will be subsidies for those who cannot afford it.) The idea of a health-insurance mandate first came to wide...
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George and Mitt Romney & the Death of Moderate GOP
Mitt’s father, George, was once the great hope of moderate Republicans., Art Shay / Polaris
by David Frum
The moderate Republicans of the 1960s were supporters of the free-enterprise system. They distrusted the then-overwhelming power of trade unions. They disliked the bureaucracy of the New Deal spending programs. Yet they did not altogether oppose social insurance. They favored...
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Fanatics and Fanciers
By Stephen L. Carter
There is a kind of fan who is indeed a fanatic, for whom every call against his team represents an occasion to doubt the competence or impartiality of the officials. Then there is the kind of fan who is a fancier, who may root for a team but whose real passion is for the sport itself. The fanatic is the one who screams at the referee that the receiver was pushed out of...
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Timing is Everything: On The Limits of...
by John Cassidy
The reputations of our Presidents often turn on economic factors beyond their control. The Great Depression was a global event. The contractions in the early nineteen-eighties and in the early nineteen-nineties were driven by the Federal Reserve, as Paul Volcker sought to bring down inflation and Alan Greenspan sought to head it off before it got established. Sometimes changes...
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“[The central idea of the book is that religion supplies lots of useful and...”
– Alain de Botton
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To Cut The Risk Of A High-Fat Meal, Add Spice
No need to be stingy with spices. Research from Penn State finds heavily spiced meals — think chicken curry with lots of turmeric, or desserts rich in cinnamon and cloves — may do the heart good.
“Elevated triglycerides are a risk factor for heart disease,” explains researcher Sheila West.
Her study found that a spicy meal helps cut levels of triglycerides, a type of fat, in the...
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We Are All Born Believers
The vast majority of humans are “born believers”, naturally inclined to find religious claims and explanations attractive and easily acquired, and to attain fluency in using them. This attraction to religion is an evolutionary by-product of our ordinary cognitive equipment, and while it tells us nothing about the truth or otherwise of religious claims it does help us see religion in...
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Study: Exercise can lead to female orgasm, sexual...
Findings from a first-of-its-kind study by Indiana University researchers confirm anecdotal evidence that exercise — absent sex or fantasies — can lead to female orgasm.
While the findings are new, reports of this phenomenon, sometimes called “coregasm” because of its association with exercises for core abdominal muscles, have circulated in the media for years, said...
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Fun with Trends
by Richard Heinberg
Because projecting future magnitudes according to current trends requires relatively simple math, and because doing so sometimes enables analysts to make accurate short-term forecasts of things like population, sales volumes, and commodity prices, trend watching can confer a sense of mystical power. We can predict the future—and maybe even profit by doing so!
But, as...
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Murder Is Not an Anomaly in War
By Chris Hedges
The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy,...
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Automation of the Fourth Estate
The world of modern finance is increasingly dependent on automated trading, with sophisticated computer algorithms finding and exploiting pricing irregularities that are invisible to ordinary traders.
Meanwhile, Forbes—one of financial journalism’s most venerable institutions—now employs a company called Narrative Scienceto automatically generate online articles about what to expect from...
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Right Minds
By Samuel Goldman
The French Revolution was not the first revolution in human or even European history. Mobs had ruled the streets before; princes had often enough been deposed. Yet Burke insisted that that the Revolution was “the most astonishing thing that has hitherto happened in the world.” What was so astonishing about it?
Burke’s answer was that the French Revolution was the consequence of...
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Nanopills Release Drugs Directly from the Inside...
Researchers at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) have created nanoparticles which could release drugs directly from the cells’ interior. The technology, which has been named “nanopills,” was licensed to the firm Janus Developments of the Barcelona Scientific Park, which verified its tolerance by administering it in vivo.
UAB researchers developed a new vehicle to release...
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Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail
By Matt Taibbi
It’s been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes – some elaborate and brilliant in their conception, some so crude that they’d be...
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“If you took the greed out of Wall Street all you’d have left is pavement. The...”
– Robert Reich
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Return of the Commons
The commons is a key piece of building a sustainable, healthy and fair society. At the Story of Stuff Project, we’re concerned about the hyper-individualization and consumer-mania that has taken over our society. It’s a problem because we’re consuming more resources than the planet can produce each year and creating more waste than it can assimilate. The Global Footprint Network says we’re using...
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The President and the Pump
The average American motorist is now paying $3.80 a gallon, a record for the time of year. As prices have risen, all the Republican candidates have been selling the idea that the blame for this rise belongs primarily with Mr Obama—not with the market’s fear of a war with Iran, climbing demand in China or any other more plausible explanation. Unhappily for the president, many voters appear to be...
