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Links November 2009

Credit Writedowns has a populist interpretation of the latest Boom-Bust cycle [1]. It’s an interesting analysis of the way the US economy is working.

Bono writes for the NY Times about Rebranding America [2]. He praises Barack Obama suggesting a different reason to believe that the peace prize is deserved and describes what he believes […]

Links October 2009

Garik Israelian gave an interesting TED talk about spectrography of stars and SETI [1]. He assumes that tectonic activity is a pre-requisite for the evolution of life (when discussing the search for elements that are needed for life) and that life which is based on solar energy will have a similar spectrographic signature to the […]

Links September 2009

The NYT has an interesting article about research into treating insomnia over the internet [1]. I wonder how many other psychological issues can be effectively treated over the net.

From next year all Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate sold in Australia will be made from fair-trade cocoa [2]. Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate is the most popular […]

Links August 2009

IQ as a Social Multiplier – Michael of Accellerating Future summarises some research into the effect of increasing IQ [1]. It seems to me that increasing the health of children and giving them adequate education is the best thing that can be done for developing countries. When smart children become smart adults they can fix […]

Links July 2009

Katherine Fulton gave a TED talk about the future of philanthropy [1]. She started out well with an overview of some of the technical methods, but I felt that the ending was lacking. At the end she made an emotional appeal for people to be philanthropic, it seems to me that you can’t easily convince […]

Links June 2009

KickStarter.com is an interesting new service that allows creative people to solicit funding to start new enterprises [1]. Note that it is not for investing in projects, sponsors give the money and the result is that the work gets done. Unfortunately it only allows people with US bank accounts to receive money at this time.

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Links May 2009

An interesting opinion post in the NY Times describes the research on early education and how it can affect IQ [1]. Among other things children from poor families who are adopted into upper middle-class families tend to end up with higher IQ scores. The article notes that half the population in 1917 would be regarded […]

Links April 2009

P. W. Singer gave an interesting TED talk about the use of robots in war [1]. He briefly covered some of the ethical and social issues related to robot soldiers as well as showing many pictures of existing robots.

Since November 2007 there has been a request for Google Gears to support “Iceweasel” (the Debian […]

Links March 2009

Cory Doctorow has written a column for The Guardian titled “You shouldn’t have to sell your soul just to download some music” [1]. One really interesting point he made was “The same companies that spent decades telling lawmakers that they were explicitly not the guardians of the morality of the young that they couldn’t be […]

Links February 2009

Michael Anissimov writes about the theft of computers from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab [1]. He suggests that this incident (and others like it) pose a great risk to out civilisation. He advocates donating towards The Lifeboat Foundation [2] to try and mitigate risks to humanity. They suggest pledging $1000 per year for 25 […]