Ulysse Sabbagh

In the Greek Island of Ikaria, old people get older instead of, well, dying. Read until the end:

Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the Ikaria Study, which includes a survey of the diet of 673 Ikarians. She found that her subjects consumed about six times as many beans a day as Americans, ate fish twice a week and meat five times a month, drank on average two to three cups of coffee a day and took in about a quarter as much refined sugar – the elderly did not like soda. She also discovered they were consuming high levels of olive oil along with two to four glasses of wine a day.

Chrysohoou also suspected that Ikarians’ sleep and sex habits might have something to do with their long life. She cited a 2008 paper by the University of Athens Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health that studied more than 23,000 Greek adults. The researchers followed subjects for an average of six years, measuring their diets, physical activity and how much they napped. They found that occasional napping was associated with a 12 percent reduction in the risk of coronary heart disease, but that regular napping – at least three days weekly – was associated with a 37 percent reduction. She also pointed out a preliminary study of Ikarian men between 65 and 100 that included the fact that 80 percent of them claimed to have sex regularly, and a quarter of that self-reported group said they were doing so with “good duration” and “achievement.”

In the Greek Island of Ikaria, old people get older instead of, well, dying. Read until the end:

Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the Ikaria Study, which includes a survey of the diet of 673 Ikarians. She found that her subjects consumed about six times as many beans a day as Americans, ate fish twice a week and meat five times a month, drank on average two to three cups of coffee a day and took in about a quarter as much refined sugar – the elderly did not like soda. She also discovered they were consuming high levels of olive oil along with two to four glasses of wine a day.

Chrysohoou also suspected that Ikarians’ sleep and sex habits might have something to do with their long life. She cited a 2008 paper by the University of Athens Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health that studied more than 23,000 Greek adults. The researchers followed subjects for an average of six years, measuring their diets, physical activity and how much they napped. They found that occasional napping was associated with a 12 percent reduction in the risk of coronary heart disease, but that regular napping – at least three days weekly – was associated with a 37 percent reduction. She also pointed out a preliminary study of Ikarian men between 65 and 100 that included the fact that 80 percent of them claimed to have sex regularly, and a quarter of that self-reported group said they were doing so with “good duration” and “achievement.”

Twitter reveals London’s ethnic groupings

Twitter reveals London’s ethnic groupings

Great maps using Twitter’s API to index geo-tagged tweets. Made by Muhammad Adnan at UCL. 

With cameras becoming ever smaller and storage becoming ever cheaper, there will come a day when all of our life’s memories are digitally preserved. Memoto, a Stockholm-based startup inspired by the Quantified Self movement, is taking a stab at this opportunity with a postage-sized camera that wearers will carry around with them constantly. It snaps a photo every 30 seconds, keeping a visual trail of your everyday life. A companion online service will store everything, catalog it by time, date and place and even help you pick out the most visually interesting moments.

Creepy, messed up, and so forth but this might be here to stay. 

Here is the video:

With cameras becoming ever smaller and storage becoming ever cheaper, there will come a day when all of our life’s memories are digitally preserved. Memoto, a Stockholm-based startup inspired by the Quantified Self movement, is taking a stab at this opportunity with a postage-sized camera that wearers will carry around with them constantly. It snaps a photo every 30 seconds, keeping a visual trail of your everyday life. A companion online service will store everything, catalog it by time, date and place and even help you pick out the most visually interesting moments.

Creepy, messed up, and so forth but this might be here to stay. 

Here is the video:

The closest thing in the history of computing to a Prometheus myth is the late 1979 visit to Xerox PARC by a group of Apple engineers and executives led by Steve Jobs. According to early reports, it was on this visit that Jobs discovered the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at PARC. These wonders had been locked away at PARC by a staff that didn’t understand the revolutionary potential of what they had created. Jobs, in contrast, was immediately converted to the religion of the graphical user interface, and ordered them copied by Apple, starting down the track that would eventually yield the Lisa and “insanely great” Macintosh. The Apple engineers– that band of brothers, that bunch of pirates– stole the fire of the gods, and gave it to the people.

But…

It’s a good story. Unfortunately, it’s also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong. There are problems with chronology and timing. The testimony of a number of key figures at Apple suggests that the visit was not the revelation early accounts made it out to be. But the story also carries deeper assumptions about Apple, Xerox PARC, computer science in the late 1970s, and even the nature of invention and innovation that deserve to be examined and challenged.

A good read. 

The closest thing in the history of computing to a Prometheus myth is the late 1979 visit to Xerox PARC by a group of Apple engineers and executives led by Steve Jobs. According to early reports, it was on this visit that Jobs discovered the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at PARC. These wonders had been locked away at PARC by a staff that didn’t understand the revolutionary potential of what they had created. Jobs, in contrast, was immediately converted to the religion of the graphical user interface, and ordered them copied by Apple, starting down the track that would eventually yield the Lisa and “insanely great” Macintosh. The Apple engineers– that band of brothers, that bunch of pirates– stole the fire of the gods, and gave it to the people.

But…

It’s a good story. Unfortunately, it’s also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong. There are problems with chronology and timing. The testimony of a number of key figures at Apple suggests that the visit was not the revelation early accounts made it out to be. But the story also carries deeper assumptions about Apple, Xerox PARC, computer science in the late 1970s, and even the nature of invention and innovation that deserve to be examined and challenged.

A good read. 

Shifting US ideologies. Notice how Republican ideology is going outward from the centre since approximately 1975. 

Ideology here is measured according to the DW-NOMINATE scale, a score that ranges from -1 (extremely liberal) to +1 (extremely conservative) based on legislative votes, and is designed to be comparable across time. (The source data is available for download at voteview.com.) The width of each band represents the spectrum of all but the 10% most extreme legislators within each party; the dark dot shows the median. 

Semester Online: university consortium offering small online courses for credit

Semester Online: university consortium offering small online courses for credit

www.nytimes.com/2012/11/1…

Starting next fall, 10 prominent universities, including Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Northwestern, will form a consortium called Semester Online, offering about 30 online courses to both their students — for whom the classes will be covered by their regular tuition — and to students elsewhere who would have to apply and be accepted and pay tuition of more than $4,000 a course.

The revolution is here my friends. In a world of iPads and constant access to Internet, don’t you find it funny that education wasn’t more thoroughly changed before now? 

This is the second trailer for GTA V. Look at the faces and environment, it just looks real. 

(via Is Grand Theft Auto V the Most Realistic Video Game Yet?)

www.youtube.com/watch

This is the second trailer for GTA V. Look at the faces and environment, it just looks real. 

(via Is Grand Theft Auto V the Most Realistic Video Game Yet?)

Self-made billionaire entrepreneurs are seen as either super cool geniuses or ruthless opportunists. Do they share common traits? 

But you don’t have to be like that to be successful,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an Argentine academic who is professor of business psychology at University College London and Goldsmiths College, who has made the study of entrepreneurialism his business. Self-made billionaire entrepreneurs, he acknowledges, are “by definition unrepresentative. There is very little to be learnt about entrepreneurship from them.”

So he went on to designing a test that would help identify and measure the entrepreneur in you. Disneyland Paris and even the Royal Ballet in London are using this test. (It’s not easy to find a job when you’re a dancer because your career ends when you’re very young.)

“Meta is the next generation of psychometric testing,” he says. After years of research, the developers have come up with a new way of spotting and measuring skills linked to entrepreneurialism that are increasingly important in the modern working environment, he adds.

The Meta test has four broad headings – opportunism, proactivity, creativity and vision. Within that, it looks at what drives an individual – for example, their ambition, sense of curiosity, how innovative they are and how they see themselves working in a structured environment. Proponents claim it has any number of applications.

A fascinating enterprise. 

Self-made billionaire entrepreneurs are seen as either super cool geniuses or ruthless opportunists. Do they share common traits? 

But you don’t have to be like that to be successful,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an Argentine academic who is professor of business psychology at University College London and Goldsmiths College, who has made the study of entrepreneurialism his business. Self-made billionaire entrepreneurs, he acknowledges, are “by definition unrepresentative. There is very little to be learnt about entrepreneurship from them.”

So he went on to designing a test that would help identify and measure the entrepreneur in you. Disneyland Paris and even the Royal Ballet in London are using this test. (It’s not easy to find a job when you’re a dancer because your career ends when you’re very young.)

“Meta is the next generation of psychometric testing,” he says. After years of research, the developers have come up with a new way of spotting and measuring skills linked to entrepreneurialism that are increasingly important in the modern working environment, he adds.

The Meta test has four broad headings – opportunism, proactivity, creativity and vision. Within that, it looks at what drives an individual – for example, their ambition, sense of curiosity, how innovative they are and how they see themselves working in a structured environment. Proponents claim it has any number of applications.

A fascinating enterprise. 

The paradox of non-lethal weapons

The paradox of non-lethal weapons

www.slate.com/articles/…

Not all weapons are designed to kill; some are just meant to cause injury. Yet under the rules of war—a somewhat haphazard collection of ethical and legal directives—we are sometimes allowed to use lethal weapons even when certain nonlethal weapons are disallowed. In short, the lethal weapons are more permissible on the battlefield

Enlightening article by Fritz Allhoff on an issue that should be resolved rather sooner than later. 

Obama Conspiracies, neatly organised by Mother Jones. Click to enlarge.