January 2004
Wednesday, 28 January 2004
Tuesday, 27 January 2004
Power Rangers: “Britain lost its North American empire through a common mistake: it misunderstood the nature of its power. In particular, it confused the power it had on paper – its claims to sovereignty and dominion – with the nature of the control it exercised on the coast of North America.”
Monday, 26 January 2004
As Fed Holds Rates Down, Investors Face Tough Choice: “The result is that the gulf between short-term and long-term interest rates is extraordinarily wide. And that phenomenon feeds on itself: A slick way to make money today, if you’re a professional bond investor, is to borrow short-term at 1% and invest the money in long-term bonds that pay 4%. Your return: 3%.”
Saturday, 24 January 2004
Atkins diet works simply by ‘filling you up’: “Prof Donnelly said that after two weeks dieting, the difference in metabolic rate between the twins was ‘too small to suggest that there’s really anything going on’.”
Self-assembling scaffold for spinal-cord repair: ‘Liquid’ bridge could help severed nerve cells grow.: “When they added stem cells - cells that can turn into other, specific types of cells, such as nerves - to the scaffolding solution, they turned into neurons and began to grow within the solidified bridge.”
Wednesday, 21 January 2004
Workers Assail Night Lock-Ins by Wal-Mart: “Their commanders sometimes called the store to order them to report to duty immediately, but she said they often had to wait until a manager arrived around 6 a.m. She said one airman received a reprimand from management for leaving by the fire door to report for duty.”
Monday, 19 January 2004
What’s it worth?: “At the same time, services have been growing at the expense of manufacturing, and, increasingly, the qualities that employers in the service sector want are those the middle classes acquire at home: articulacy, confidence and smartness.”
Tuesday, 13 January 2004
Signs I’m busy at work: Today I started applying an option pricing model to my weekly schedule to determine which meetings I should attend.
Monday, 12 January 2004
A shrinking giant: “on current trends in demography and productivity, Japan will need to import 5m foreign workers over the next decade (not counting their dependants) just to maintain the current anaemic rate of improvement in living standards”
Scientist at Work: On Crime as Science (a Neighbor at a Time): “What we are discovering around collective efficacy was not terribly obvious before we started to measure it with some precision.”
Possible Hypernova Could Affect Earth: “Eta Carinae is such an extreme case that another possibility exists: It could end as a hypernova, a super-supernova that at its peak will outshine the entire galaxy”