Hey folks–I’ve been a bit out of the loop lately, and I’ll be traveling almost non-stop for the next few weeks. While Jarred will be taking one (a few?) for the team and blogging in my absence, I hope to chime in when I can from the road. Here are a few links, albeit a little abbreviated this week:
- The Bush-Cheney 2004 e-Campaign Director offers ideas for how the McCain campaign could have moved past traditional press-release blasts to create momentum around Obama’s “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?” comment. As I think is pretty clear by now, Jarred and I are Obama fans…and, for the record, I think we both ate waffles almost exclusively one summer. But regardless of your politics, this piece is really striking in the creativity available to campaigns online, IF they’re willing to push the envelope a tad and move away from their old habits (NO MORE PRESS RELEASES).
- I never thought I would subscribe to–much less link to–a Wal-Mart blog, but this post written by the company’s sustainability director is worth a look. He describes new packaging options (some as simple as milk in a bag instead of a carton) and weighs the merits of biodegradable plastics.
- Lifehacker offers ten tools to maximize your Amazon shopping experience. These range from discount finders and gift list managers to a site that tracks prices of a recent purchase in order to cash in on the “if you find a cheaper price in 30 days we’ll give you the difference” offer. Pretty impressive, though some of these things might take more time than the $3 you’ll save is worth.
“The sculpture consists of 100 cast iron figures which face out to sea, spread over a 3.2 km stretch of the beach. [...] As the tides ebb and flow, the figures are revealed and submerged by the sea.”
- This is a few weeks old but worth sharing: PaleoFuture points to a 1995 Newsweek article that basically…well…calls the “internet” a passing fad and a huge crock:
“[N]o online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”
Well, that’s all for now. Keep checking back all week for new posts.
Happy Monday. I decided to start the week (sharing with coworkers, naturally) with Whole Wheat Apple Muffins, following this recipe from Smitten Kitchen. Del.icio.us. (nerd joke!). Enjoy a few links as you consider how good an apple muffin would taste right now (answer: unbelievably good).
- Could Google benefit from asking users to input their race before searching? The NY Times reports on Rushmore Drive, a new search engine that delivers search results catered to specific racial groups. The company behind Rushmore Drive started with an African-American focus, but plans on expanding to other races; from the article:
[The site] offers search results that, at first glance, border on stereotypes. A search query for “Thanksgiving recipes,” for instance, yields sites featuring recipes for sweet potato pie and collard greens. But according to Johnny Taylor, the chief executive of Rushmore Drive, the results are based on years of search data from IAC’s Ask division.
Rushmore Drive analyzed search results for 3,000 of the most popular search terms in areas with large black populations and found that when people in those areas searched for recipes, they were much more likely to click on pages with soul food. Those searching for hair products, dance, cars, fraternities and sororities also ended up on vastly different Web sites than people who lived in areas with smaller black populations.
- Here’s a quick Fast Company featurette on the new D.C. Nationals ballpark. It’s the first professional ballpark to receive LEED certification. Can’t wait to catch a game (or 3) there in May
- This is old news, but in case you missed it (or didn’t understand the details), here’s a Washington Post article describing the new partnership between Google and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The U.N. will use Google Earth to draw attention to the plight of refugees around the globe and to illustrate their forced emigration.
- [slaps head for not thinking of this]: Here’s a simple idea for storing your ever-growing list of frequent flier/hotel reward program/valued shopper numbers…file them away in your cell phone under a specific heading. Brilliant…the Internet is a beautiful thing.
Happy Monday.
Last night’s winner on Top Chef served grilled shrimp with a pickled chili salad and miso smoked bacon. The dish looked delicious, and who can blame the judges for going with the clear winner: bacon. What self-respecting meat eater doesn’t love the salty, crispy stuff? On a recent episode of Iron Chef America, Cat Cora referred to maple and brown sugar bacon as “pig candy,” which I find both hilarious and a little disgusting. Regardless, one thing is clear: many of us freaking love bacon.
Here’s the bad news: Smithfield Farms, the world’s largest hog producer (based, regrettably, in my home state of North Carolina) is responsible for true environmental injustice in rural communities in NC and IA…and now they’re expanding to Europe. Grist reports (emphasis mine):
In the 1990s, Smithfield perfected the meat industry’s infamous “vertical integration” strategy that it’s now unveiling in Eastern Europe. In an old-school meat market, packers bought livestock from independent farmers. But starting in the early ’90s in the United States, dominant meat packers began to raise vast numbers of their own animals, stuffing them into concentrated animal feedlot operations (CAFOs).
In doing so, they put independent farmers in direct competition with [Smithfield's] own livestock operations — a game that the meat packer usually wins. Farms go out of business in droves, unable to sustain themselves on the low prices offered by the packers; survivors scale up, mimicking the packers’ intensive techniques. That is, they CAFOize, using debt to erect large confinement buildings into which they stuff thousands of hogs. Most of them essentially cede their independence, working under contracts wherein the packers supply the feed and the hogs.
The trends now playing out in Poland has already flattened small farmers in Iowa and North Carolina. When Smithfield first bulled its way into Poland in 1999, after buying an old state-run processing plant, it declared its intention to make Poland “the Iowa of Europe.”
Continue reading ‘Pork Across the Pond and Here at Home’
Last week, Lisa Belkin wrote in the New York Times “Fashion & Style” section (impressed?) about her experience with assessment testing. She underwent a battery of examinations that lots of employers give to job candidates to complement their standard interviewing process.
Some tests measure your personality, others your suitability for certain types of jobs, and others your work style (team player v. individual worker, for example). Though they certainly don’t replace the face-to-face interview, they do offer an interesting quantitative measurement of the candidate in question.
About a month ago, I underwent a similar experience of “human aptitude testing” with the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation. Rather than for a job interview, I did this more for personal enrichment and discovery. For seven hours on a cold Saturday in March, I assembled blocks, memorized numbers, arranged tiles, analyzed tones, moved pins, wrote essays, and more. Sounds absurd, and some of it seemed pretty stupid at the time for sure. But at the end of the day, I was given a double-sided sheet of paper (along with mountains of background information) that claimed to quantify some of my aptitudes.
And you know what? It was pretty accurate, and… enlightening.
Continue reading ‘Measure for Measure: Assessing Human Aptitudes and Abilities’
Sorry for the delay in posting these links, folks. I’ve been traveling, and I’m just now getting back to bloggin’. Unlike some people, I’m determined to make it through the 826 unread items in my Google Reader. How about a few links?
Although common tracking systems, known as cookies, have counted a consumer’s visits to a network of sites, the new monitoring, known as “deep-packet inspection,” enables a far wider view — every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered. Every bit of data is divided into packets — like electronic envelopes — that the system can access and analyze for content
- This Nick Kristof column on racial and gender bias provides links to a number of interesting online psychological tests.
The initiative is modeled after the grand challenges formulated more than 100 years ago by mathematician David Hilbert. His list of important unsolved problems has encouraged innovation in mathematics research ever since. Similarly, the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative aims to engage creative minds from across scientific disciplines — including those who have not traditionally taken part in global health research — to work on 14 major challenges.
- Smitten Kitchen is my new favorite food/cooking blog. This lemon blueberry yogurt cake looks amazing (due in no small part to their expert photography…and baking).
- If you’re looking to spice up an office memo, or maybe a senior thesis, try the beard font.
That should be enough for now. Sorry to fill the links with so much random stuff, but expect more *ahem* serious blogging to follow this week.
