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Bill Gates on the problems he's currently trying to solve
"I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest. [...] But capitalism alone can't address the needs of the very poor."
A Twitter account that absorbs the "flavor" of your writing and bounces it back to you
A cunning display of human self-absorption and technological prowess
A high-friction road treatment is preventing crashes in Cedar Rapids
Why the world should worry about a Syrian backlash
Violence there isn't going to remain contained for long. Also, we need to worry about the children left homeless and alone by the war.
Police helicopter crashes into Scottish bar
What makes academics like drug lords
It's all about the hustle
How jobs evolve
Firefighters do a lot more than just putting out flames. If your job hasn't evolved similarly in the last quarter-century, worry.
Why call anything a "tech company"?
An intriguing argument that technology isn't really a distinction anymore
Corn prices have really gone into the toilet
From last November's $7.03 a bushel, we're down to $4.30. Not a good indicator for cash rents, and consequently for land prices
Why people get addicted to first-person shooters
Certain role-playing games have the capacity to induce a sense of "flow" -- a rewarding sense of control and positive feedback -- that makes people feel really good
Skill shortages keep Iowa businesses from growing
Trump's four bankruptcies
Government website for businesses to enroll in health care will be delayed by a year
Vaccination works
We should be enormously thankful for their success
The Obama Administration's campaign against photojournalists
Illinois may at last have a fix for its huge state-pension crisis
Higher retirement ages, smaller COLAs, and more room for individual success or failure all look to play a part
Can species extinction be undone?
Silicon Valley is more old boys' club than real meritocracy
Letting ideas mix freely in the brain is how we evolve
Using games to recruit better workers
IBM's computing power drives synthesis on medical research
A human doctor could read medical journals all day and not make sense of all the footnotes. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using computers to do what we cannot do on our own. This is a whole new level of tool-making, which establishes us as some pretty impressive primates.
American dialects, illustrated
(Video)
FAA tells pilots of some Boeing aircraft to not fly so close to thunderstorms
And in some other interesting aviation news, China says it has some new airspace, and some American B-52s are challenging that claim.
Yahoo struggles to get its own people to use Yahoo Mail
Eating your own cooking?
What broadcasters get wrong about podcasting
What's worse than a drunk driver?
Quite possibly, a driver who is hungover
Scotland is quite seriously looking at going independent
September 18th next year is the big vote
So...the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation no longer owns the rights to hockey in Canada
That's like ESPN losing the rights to SportsCenter
There's more to what's happening in the Middle East than just the Iran deal
Forces of nature
Markets are like all other forces of nature: We can direct and harness them in limited ways, but we can't ignore them into nonexistence.
Information most certainly doesn't want to be free
Arguments that "information wants to be free" or "information wants to be shared" are cute and easy to parrot, but the reality is that information most definitely does not want to be free. It has value. Now, we certainly have incentives to share some of it at some times for particular reasons -- to gain status, to ensure the success of family or friends, or to build relationships or achieve political ends -- but at its base, we have no instinct to give away any of our resources just for fun without compensation. And information is a resource.
A backlash against tech's nouveau riche?
Your property is not your own
Not when New York City changes mayors. The new boss wants to squeeze property owners into doing what he wants done with their land by jacking up tax rates if they don't. Politicians need humility, competence, and curiosity. Lacking humility, they become too eager to tell other people what to do.
Swiss voters reject legal limits on manager pay
There are plenty of business executives who are paid far more than the value they create...but that's something for shareholders to fix, not politicians
A six-lane connection between Omaha and Lincoln, at last
We're putting ourselves in serious existential danger by overdosing on antibiotics
Everyone has great reason to take far too many for themselves, and little incentive to show restraint (which is what's good for the population at large). This is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons.
Internet slang is killing the rules of English
Because Internet, as they say.
Young people and radio
A survey claims to tell what young people think of radio broadcasting today. And it may very well be a valid survey -- but the sample size is just 303 people. Doesn't seem like enough to draw conclusions about an entire generation.
Does the disaster response to the Filipino typhoon tell us what a China-led world would look like?
What's actually killing us
Considering that death seems to maintain a 100% hit ratio among humans, one would think we'd be more interested in strategically taking out the causes of death one-by-one.
All the wingdings in one chart
Notes from the "Brian Gongol Show" on WHO Radio - November 24, 2013
French carmaker Peugeot turns to Chinese investors for cash
Companies can create their own innovations, or they can buy them. This kind of investment allows China to "buy" the know-how to make a car industry. And it's certainly not the only such investment.
Controlling the inner psychopath
The more we discover about neuroscience, the more we encounter really difficult questions -- like what to do when a person's brain is wired for psychopathy, but when they manage to keep it well-socialized. How much biological determinism are we ready to accept and accommodate within our justice system?
Building a rival to Amazon.com
Amazon's advantage in the marketplace may be its willingness to not really make a profit. Great for consumers, terrible for investors.
The return of the phishing scam
They really seemed to have cooled down over the last several months, but they're back with a vengeance
How Wayne, Nebraska, is recovering from an EF4 tornado
With characteristic Midwestern behavior, one might say: They're just putting their heads down and getting to work
Jury tells Samsung to pay Apple $290 million for patent infringement
Not a very enlightened reform
China may be easing on things like the one-child policy, but it looks like trends in the government's control of the media are taking no such steps forward. It makes sense that the state would want to encourage a mild amount of muckraking because that serves up patsies who can be charged with corruption and paraded around as examples in front of everyone else. But real criticism of the government? That's not going to happen when the government requires journalists to be credentialed in the "Marxist view on journalism".
Microsoft's takeover of the Nokia phone business is going smoothly
It looks like the EU is going to approve
Fun fact: Iowa produces twice as many eggs as any other state
China claims to have its first stealth drone
Some tools seem really cool to have -- when nobody else has them.
Getting kids interested in science, technology, engineering, and math
These are innately interesting subjects...they're often just taught in a way that kills that interest
Turning classic movie titles into clickbait
The website Funny or Die has spoofed Upworthy and other clickbait-obsessive sites by turning classic movie titles into what they'd be as, well, clickbait. It was easy to welcome Facebook and Twitter as relief from the ordinary until people started sharing these clickbait items relentlessly. Now it's like it's 2002 again, and all of our inboxes are again full of spam.
Someone landed at the wrong airport
With a modified 747 sized to carry huge cargo
US Treasury promises that it won't be "Government Motors" after January 1st
The official policy is that the government wants to be entirely out of GM ownership by the end of this year
Hilton Hotels is going public
When times get tough, it's tough to repress populist nationalism
There's nothing wrong with a healthy degree of nationalism -- to the scale that people say to themselves, "We can do better...that's the American way!" But blind populist nationalism (of the flavor that says, "We don't want outsiders here!" or "We need to protect our own industries, no matter the cost!") often leads to highly counter-productive policies that make getting over the tough times even tougher. And Europe is in the middle of some tough times.
A delightful parent-child interaction
Mom starts the artwork with a portrait; daughter finishes with a doodle
News flash: Researchers identify a new category of boredom
Another news flash: Somebody's actually made a career out of studying boredom.
Resolving some loose ends
(Video)
Which uses more electricity: A refrigerator or a smartphone?
Depends on whether you're trying to measure the "total energy footprint" of the cellular network
Germany has no national minimum wage
If you really want a healthy, stable society, just build an appropriate social safety net. There's a very good case to be made that a guaranteed minimum income (as by a negative income tax) is a vastly more efficent way of doing this than by putting restrictions on the labor market. If you want to ensure competitiveness (and opportunity, particularly for the young and unskilled), making it harder for businesses to hire and fire is a recipe for disaster.
The demographics of the world's 50 richest
Google is opening physical showrooms in New York City
Private-sector experience matters
One doesn't have to have been in the private sector to be a great President...but the vacuum of management skill inside the Obama White House should make voters deeply skeptical of putting anyone into the Presidency again unless they've been a governor, a private-sector manager, or a military leader. Legislative experience is just not the same thing.
The unpardonable turkey
Take two minutes for a self-exam today
Take a minute or two and conduct some basic self-screenings for cancer. Early detection saves lives. There's lots of misinformation about cancer that finds its way around the Internet, largely because we've been trained to wait expectantly for some sort of magic-bullet solution to cancer. But cancer risks can be significantly reduced through a balanced diet, exercise, and early detection and treatment. Meanwhile, science is making great progress towards improving genetic detection, which holds great promise for some types of cancer. Instead of forwarding hoax-ridden e-mails about "cancer cures" and false threats, people should instead remind their friends and family to assess their health once a month.
Notes on the "Brian Gongol Show" on WHO Radio for November 17th
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