edward spurlock

…The Great Explosion - the full text, so it seems.

TIME Magazine: 10 Truths About Weight Loss

TIME Magazine: Fast Food: Would You Like 1,000 Calories with That?

TIME Magazine: Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

NY Times: Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch (Pollan writes about Julia Child)

Slate Magazine: Fix Your Terrible, Insecure Passwords in Five Minutes

Slate Magazine: Minicows

Spinning Continuing Education (home study) for instructors

TheraBand Exercise Balls at Amazon

Head First Web Design Book at Amazon

Born To Run - A Hidden Tribe… at Amazon

Julia Sweeney on letting go of God - TED talk

And check out WikiPedia’s External Links for Julia Sweeney

NLPConnections.com has an active NLP forum that looks interesting

How about this Strange Maps blog, eh?

An Op-Ed from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:
Digital textbooks can save money, improve learning:

Today, our kids get their information from the Internet, downloaded onto their iPods, and in Twitter feeds to their cell phones. A world of up-to-date information fits easily into their pockets and onto their computer screens. So why are California’s public school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?

Wired magazine had an article about open-source textbooks last year:

Open Source Textbooks Challenge a Paradigm 

Amsterdam ‘beer bike’ hits rocky stretch:

Although famous for a love of bicycles as the city’s preferred transport, Amsterdam officials are starting to draw the line at a popular “beer bike.”

The bike, which can seat at least 10 people around a central “bar” as they pedal through the city center, is a frequent sight in the Dutch capital…A non-drinker steers the bike.

The bike seats 10 to 22 riders and they can drink beer? That’s the bike for the annual Shiner ride right there!

Spinning Math Into Gold:

The articles (today and tomorrow) are excepted from a new book, The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street.

Looks interesting.

In 1990, economist Amartya Sen wrote an article in the New York Review of Books titled More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing, in which he argued that in many places in the world, including China and India, cultural biases against women have led to millions of women and female children killed or never born in the first place (due to sex-selection abortions).

In 2005 or 2006, Emily Oster, a graduate student in economics at Harvard, found an explanation for many of the “missing women” — pregnant women with Hepatitis B were more likely to give birth to boys than to girls.

Unfortunately, however, new data has shown that Oster’s explanation at least greatly overstated the role of Hep. B in explaining the disparity of male-to-female births seen outside of the Western world. In 2008, Oster published a working paper titled “Hepatitis B Does Not Explain Male-Biased Sex Ratios in China”, in which she evaluates the new data.

Additional corroboration of Amartya Sen’s hypothesis has come from studies in the British Medical Journal (as reported in Slate magazine) and in research reported by Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray.

Emily Oster first came to fame anonymously, as the subject of Narratives From the Crib, a study of language development in young children.

Is the Recession Making Americans Fatter?

Could the plummeting economy be contributing to expanding waistlines? Something is: new data released exclusively to NEWSWEEK from Gallup-Healthways shows that in the past year, the number of Americans considered obese has jumped by 1.7 percent—or almost 5.5 million people—and that the obese report a much lower quality of life than those who are at healthier weights.

Listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book Outliers, I was struck by the name of the award that Air Transport World (ATW) created in 2004 for “…airlines that have achieved a commercial rebirth through a life-changing transformation.

It’s called the “Phoenix Award.” That’s “Phoenix,” as in “the mythological bird that dies in flames and is reborn from the ashes.”
You can’t make this stuff up…