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Saturday, May 5

5th May - Weekender: Off-Topics


Watch out, Bruce Lee
Here are some off-topic articles from mostly the past week. Unless something crazy happens during the weekend, this is my final post for the week, next update on Monday morning. You can get update notifications by following MoreLiver on Twitter or Facebook. Contact me with any questions or suggestions!  


Previously on MoreLiver:

SOCIOLOGY
People Are Losing Trust In All Institutions The Big Picture
Lack of Trust – Caused by Institutional Corruption – Is Killing the Economy

FiveBooks Interviews: Ma Jian on Chinese Dissident LiteratureThe Browser
Writers in China are afraid to criticise their state and society, says the London-based author. He picks five works of Chinese literature, from the 3rd century BC to 2008, which show how it’s done

Hatred transformed: How Germans changed their minds about Jews, 1890-2006voxeu.org
The persecution of Jews during WWII is one of the darkest and most puzzling chapters of recent history. This column asks how economics can help our understanding, particularly of how people’s attitudes to Jews have changed over time. It argues that ‘cultural economics’ shows that there is more to understanding how people behave than looking at their incentives.

EU austerity is feeding racism, report sayseuobserver
In its annual survey out on Thursday (3 May), the council's European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), said welfare cuts and shrinking job opportunities are factors behind the recent rise in intolerance and violence directed at immigrants and other vulnerable minorities.

FiveBooks Interviews: Jules Evans on Ancient Philosophy for Modern LifeThe Browser
The philosophy author explores lessons of the ancients relevant to our globalised, information age – by way of cognitive behavioural therapy, and government measures of happiness

Did the Division of Labor Create Consciousness? Falkenblog
Ever since the invention of farming, productive adults tend to specialize in some economic activity. People are plastic, they can become many different kind of experts, but there's a lot of domain specific knowledge involved in anything so you need to choose a parochial area of expertise at some point.


MUSIC
Peace, AdamThe New Yorker
The ideal memorial is written from distance, a generous calculation of merit that proceeds honorably without abandoning accuracy. I have to apologize right now for being unable to give you that—Adam Yauch was a part of my childhood, an ambassador to America from our New York, which is now gone, as is he.

Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch dies of cancer, aged 47Reuters
Adam Yauch, a founding member of pioneering hip-hop group the Beastie Boys who captivated fans with their brash style in early hits like "Fight for Your Right (To Party)," died on Friday after a battle with cancer. He was 47.

Adam YauchThe Lefsetz Letter
It’s a sad day. For a long time we believed Adam would pull through. Death is final. It creeps you out. Be sure to live while you’re still alive.

Remembering the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch, an Icon of Remix CultureWired
In losing Adam Yauch — the musician and lyricist known to most as MCA — music has lost an icon, yes. But beyond that, for those who love what’s become known as “remix culture,” a musical movement is now minus one of its founding fathers.

How Chicago house got its groove backChicago Reader
Chicago house music is the sound of global pop today. In the 90s, though, it was on life support—until a new wave of producers, including Cajmere and DJ Sneak, got the city doing the Percolator.


TECHNOLOGY
Things That Will Change the WorldEconomist’s View
1h video from the Milken Institute’s conference. Robotics, thought-controlled electronics etc.

10 GHz Optical Transistor Built Out Of Silicontechnology review
In a significant step forward for all-optical computing, physicists build a silicon transistor that works with pure light

Machine Politics: The man who started the hacker warsThe New Yorker
In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile subscriber. He wanted an iPhone, but he also wanted to make calls using his existing network, so he decided to hack the phone.

The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s Changing the Rules of BusinessWired
Using A/B, new ideas can be essentially focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a slightly different version of a given web page and their behavior compared against the mass of users on the standard site.

Digital archiving: Where source code goes to dieThe Economist
On April 30th Google Wave ceased to exist… The flop could either be locked away in its code vault, the company trying hard to forget about all the money and effort that went into it. Or it could be given away in the hope that someone could do something useful with it.


SCIENCE
Update: Scale of the UniverseChart Porn
Cary and Michael Huang have updated their zoomable scale of everything (first seen in 2010). The graphics are nicer and smoother, they’ve replaced the annotations with a scale in the corner, and everything can be clicked on for popup detail.

Physicists Crack Fusion Mysterytechnology review
A new theory might help researchers double the power of fusion reactors.


MONEY
The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy GuyNYT
Unlike his former colleagues, Conard wants to have an open conversation about wealth. He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society.

A Stock Exchange for Your Personal Datatechnology review
Companies already make billions because they know our online habits. What if we could take a cut?

Mindless With MoneyThe Psy-Fi Blog
We all know the feeling of mindlessness. You get it when you drive the same roads as usual and get out at the end not remembering anything about the journey, or when you eat a meal without tasting it, or leave a meeting without the faintest idea what just happened. Yet to everyone around us we’ve behaved just the same way we always do.


PSYCHOLOGY
Humans Still Evolving as Our Brains ShrinkLive Science
Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs that our evolution may be accelerating.

Brain Scans Give Glimpse of How Your Dog Thinks – Wired
Of course, standing inside an FMRI machine isn’t exactly a normal canine experience, and Berns’ team needed eight months to train his dogs

Why First Impressions Don’t Matter Much For ExperiencesFarnam Street
while we remember people by first impressions, we don’t really remember experiences the same way. With experiences, we seem to remember the peak moments and how they end.

This Is Why You Fall in Love With BrandsThe Atlantic
Advertising veteran and marketing expert Susan Fournier reflects on her seminal 1998 study on brand relationship theory and asserts that it's not just a metaphor.

The Storytelling Animalbrain pickings
The science of how we came to live and breathe stories: where a third of our entire life goes, or what professional wrestling has to do with War and Peace.
  
Tuck into our latest round-up of the best psych and neuro links:

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut


OTHER
10 tips for giving a world class presentationbarking up the wrong tree

Embed Tableau Visualizations in PowerPointClearly and Simply
How to embed Tableau Visualizations in PowerPoint Presentations – an alternative without using an add-in

A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa 1939brain pickings
an intriguing old book originally published by James Webb Young in 1939 — A Technique for Producing Ideas

The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing GeniusPsychology Today
Marge Profit was a maverick thinker in evolutionary biology, possibly a genius, but never settled down in academia. Won a MacArthur grant, published three landmark papers while still in her thirties—and then vanished, in 2004

Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals CommunicateAmazon
Diego Gambetta shows that as villains balance the lure of criminal reward against the fear of dire punishment, they are inspired to unexpected feats of subtlety and ingenuity in communication. He uncovers the logic of the often bizarre ways in which inveterate and occasional criminals solve their dilemmas, such as why the tattoos and scars etched on a criminal's body function as lines on a professional résumé, why inmates resort to violence to establish their position in the prison pecking order, and why mobsters are partial to nicknames and imitate the behavior they see in mafia movies.

Politics and the English Language by George OrwellResort