Art of Inference
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| Volume 25 #2 - June 2007 |
| Anomaly - Volume 25 | |
| 01 June 2007 | |
Anomalies Used in the Inference Process
Reports - Volume 34 (2007) #4 Ubiquitous Addiction
| A University of Florida study concludes that after years of decline, cocaine is back. Between 2000 and 2005, cocaine deaths in Florida doubled, the study found - with the biggest spikes coming in high-income communities and college towns. The number of cocaine-related emergency room visits was also up sharply. (The Week, 11/3/2006) |
Reports - Volume 34 (2007) #3 Shipping : Engine of Global Trade
| Engine of Global Trade: The Panama Canal - 50 miles long, a conduit for more than 226 million tons of goods every year - is too small. The latest cargo ships can't fit into its locks. (Wired, March 2007) |
Reports - Volume 34 (2007) #2 Africa's Infrastructure
| Andile Mbatha owns a hair salon in Soweto. Half his customers no longer pay cash for their haircuts. They use their mobile phones to move money from their accounts to his. About half a million South Africans now use their mobile phones as a bank. (The Economist, 10/28/2006) |
Reports - Volume 33 (2006) #21 Rethinking Education
| Most students don't drop out of high school because they can't do the work. Nearly 90 percent had passing grades when they left school, according to the survey of dropouts by Civic Enterprises. (The Christian Science Monitor, 3/3/2006) |
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Experience of Leaders Human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. In his book, True North, author Bill George states, "In large part the leadership vacuum has resulted from a misunderstanding of what constitutes an effective leader. Leadership scholars have conducted more than 1,000 studies in the past 50 years in the attempt to determine the definitive leadership styles." None of these seem to work. "The reality is that no one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else," says George.The key is one's own experience. The CEO of Kroger, David Dillon, says that most people he has seen develop as good leaders were self-taught. True North is based on interviews with 125 of today's top leaders. One view that emerges is that the soul of leadership cannot be taught. It is shaped by personal experience. Jim Williams |
Retirees who moved to Florida and other warm states are making a U-turn and returning north, mostly to be near family. Pittsburgh "is trading younger elderly for older Floridians," says Peter Morrison, demographer at the RAND Corp. "Pittsburgh is basically accumulating among its elderly more and more of those who are dis¬abled and need services." (USA Today, 2/22/07)
Meals on Wheels, which has delivered food to the eld¬erly and disabled since 1954, is experiencing shortages of volunteer drivers, and about four of 10 programs have waiting lists of needy clients. (USA Today, 12/11/06)
A plan approved by the USDA calls for large-scale cultivation in Kansas of rice that produces human im¬mune-system proteins in its seeds. The proteins are to be extracted for use as an antidiarrhea medicine and might be added to health foods such as yogurt and granola bars. (Wash Post, 3/2/07)
"Back in the late '80s, I was told you'd never sell ma¬nure," said Kevin Elder of the Ohio Department of Agriculture. "Today, there are a large number of farms that broker it, that sell it to grain farmers." In 2003, only one person in Ohio was licensed to buy and apply large amounts of manure. Today, there are 30 - with 48 more in the process of getting their permits. (AP, 3/17/07)
Toyota is working on a radically different approach to car design, development and manufacturing in an at¬tempt to come up with an ultra-low-cost car. "Every¬thing from design to production methods will be radi¬cally changed, and we are thinking of a really ultra-low-cost way of designing, using ultra-low-cost materials, even developing new materials if necessary," said presi¬dent Katsuaki Watanabe. (FT, 1/22/07)
The Toyota Tundra failed to achieve a five-star rating in head-on crash tests conducted by the National Highway Safety Administration - tests that have given perfect scores to all full-size pickups made by Detroit. (Wash Post, 3/20/07)
IBM plans to build virtual stores for Sears and Circuit City in the popular online world "Second Life." The web site is a subscription-based, three-dimensional fantasy world devoted to capitalism - a 21st-century version of Monopoly that generates real money for successful players. More than 2.4 million people worldwide have Second Life characters, called avatars. (AP, 1/9/07)
More Second Life experimentation: Sun Microsystems has been holding press conferences in Second Life; Starwood Hotels set up a virtual version of a concept hotel called Aloft, asking Second Life residents to tour the hotel and give feedback; and Harvard Law School built a virtual campus. IBM is using Second Life to hold meetings, which some think is better than videoconferencing. (USA Today, 2/5/07)
The Mayo Clinic has set up a system in which medical residents electronically log their mistakes or any other problems they see so the hospital can analyze the errors and look for fixes. It's more a database than a blog, but any resident can post to it without fear of recrimination. (Inc., Oct 2006)
To improve customer service, hotels are hiring full-time trainers. Holiday Inn has hired 20 full-time trainers in a first-ever, $6 million training push. Starwood has hired 30 trainers, including some from Disney. Park Hyatt in Chicago recently hired a local theater company, Lookingglass Theatre, to train staff using acting tech¬niques. The luxury Omni Hotel in Austin sent hotel staffers to the local Whole Foods supermarket to see how it impresses customers. (USA Today, 11/29/06)
A recent Federal Reserve staff study found that between 1989 and 2005, China increased its share of exports to the U.S. in 48 industries. (FT, 3/8/07)
In a country where most music departments and conser-vatories are dedicated to teaching classical Chinese and Western music, the Beijing Contemporary Music Insti¬tute with 3,000 students is breaking new ground. Moreno Donadel, who teaches jazz piano, says the students have difficulty improvising, which he attributes to Chinese methods that focus on rote learning and discourage individualism. (CHE, 11/24/06)
In the past few years, a string of Chinese carmakers have rushed into the local market with their own brands. About 20 different companies now have a market share of nearly 27 percent, the most of any nationality selling cars in China. (FT, 11/20/06)
Pressure from Chinese consumers to get value for money means they will not pay high prices for products considered less than reliable. "No customers like to pay money, but in China it is almost a civic duty to drive prices lower," says Michael Dunne, VP at the China ' office of J.D. Power. (FT, 11/20/06)
In Fairbanks, Alaska, the three-week period ending on March 10 had an average daily high of 5.7 degrees below zero. It was the coldest such period since records began in Fairbanks 103 years ago. (NYT, 3/13/07)
People in Cambodia were wearing sweaters in February and distributing warm clothes and blankets to the home¬less around Phnom Penh. Low temperatures ranged from 7° to 15° degrees C (mid-40s to mid-50s F.) in the northeast and mountainous areas - the lowest in 27 years of weather records. (CSM, 2/6/07)
In January, doctors in Bangladesh reported that more than 100 people died from an unexpected spell of cold weather. (New Scientist, 1/13/07)
Close to one half of the 24 million households with HDTVs don't actually watch high-definition programs because they have not obtained the needed hardware from their cable, phone or satellite operators. And about one half of those viewers - six million - don't even realize they're not watching HDTV. (WSJ, 2/28/07)
The number of consumer products Americans say are necessities has multiplied in the past decade. "First, you want stuff because other people seem to have it. It be¬comes a necessity only after you've come to depend on it," says clinical psychologist Pauline Wallin. "We have become a lot less self-sufficient about things and rely more on machines and technology." (USA Today, 12/15/06)
Ninety-two percent of airline frequent flier miles are never redeemed. (The Week, 12/1/06)
Graying baby boomers have become America's fastest-growing criminal element. Last year the number of Americans over the age of 40 arrested for violent and property felonies rose to 420,000, up from 170,000 in 1980. Arrests for drug offenses among those over 40 rose to 360,000 last year, up from 22,000 in 1980. (NYT, 1/3/07)
Violent crime rose by double-digit percentages in cities across the country over the past two years, reversing the declines of the mid- to late-1990s. "There are pockets of crime in this country that are astounding," said Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum. "It's gone under the radar screen, but it's not if you are living on the north side of Minneapolis or the south side of Los Angeles or in Dorchester, Mass." (NYT, 3/9/07)
The No. 1 item stolen from bookstores, according to Psychology Today, is the Bible. (NYT, 12/23/06)
A rising number of directors of European companies are either in a U.S. jail or facing prison sentences because U.S. authorities hold them responsible for alleged in¬fringements of U.S. laws. About 19 foreign executives from close to 10 countries are jailed in the U.S. for allegedly violating U.S. antitrust laws. FT, 10/20/06)
Married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households - a share that has been cut in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by census. (Wash Post, 3/4/07)
Analysts estimate that some 18 million adults between the ages of 20 and 34 live with their parents. That's roughly a third of that age group. (USA Today, 2/7/07)
Prescription-drug abuse has outstripped traditional illegal drugs such as heroin, cocaine and Ecstasy in parts of Europe, Africa and South Asia. In the U.S., such abuse has gone beyond most illegal drugs with the exception of cannabis. (AP, 3/4/07)
The biggest contributors to California's drug abuse, death and injury toll are educated, middle-aged women living in the Central Valley and rural areas, while the fastest-declining, lowest-risk populations are urban black and Latino teenagers. (NYT, 1/3/07)
At Eastern Michigan U., professors can double their pay by teaching online. Last year, Daryl Barton, an associ¬ate professor of law, pulled in an extra $70,000, almost as much as her $72,000 base salary. (CHE, 1/5/07)
Through a national survey of 112,000 undergrads, the "Spirituality in Higher Education" project documented strong student interest in spirituality and religion. Re¬sponding to this demand, UCLA is creating a National Institute on Integrating Spirituality into the Campus Curriculum and Cocurriculum. (WSJ, 12/15/06)
Nearly half of Americans ages 25 and older - 92 mil¬lion people - take part in some form of continuing edu¬cation. One hot niche market - people over 50 - is now a $6 billion business, up from $4 billion only two years ago. In the U.S., the nontraditional student is now the traditional student. (CSM, 12/1/06)
Four U.S. states - Maine, Maryland, Washington and California - have laws requiring the recycling of certain electronic products. (CSM, 3/8/07)
In the last 15 years, forests have actually expanded in 22 of the 50 countries with the most forest, and many others are poised to make the transition from deforestation to reforestation in the coming decades, including Vietnam, Turkey, India and China. (IHT, 11/14/06)
In the past generation, the French marriage rate has plunged more than 30 percent, even as population and birthrates have been rising. The increase in the out-of-wedlock birthrate is even more dramatic: In 2005, 59 percent of all firstborn French children were born to unwed parents, most by choice, not chance. (Wash Post, 11/21/06)
"It's phenomenal what's happening in late December." - Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard economist, on the rising number of babies born just before year-end, possibly because their parents are planning the births to take advantage of tax breaks. (NYT, 12/24/06)
Once an expensive last resort for struggling elderly homeowners, reverse mortgages are now being sold as retirement planning tools for affluent people. Mortgage brokers say homeowners are using them to tap into their equity to invest in stocks, upgrade their living quarters or simply pay expenses. Federally insured reverse mort¬gages grew 77 percent in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 compared with fiscal 2005. (Bait Sun, 11/26/06)
The top 0.1 percent of Americans in income receive nearly 7 percent of the total, the highest share since the 1920s. (NYT, 11/19/06)
Over the past decade, people registering without a ma¬jor party affiliation have accounted for 91 percent of all growth in the electorate, reports Joel Kotkin at the New America Foundation. Independents now constitute one in every five voters. (WSJ, 11/14/06)
"Walking may be as close to a magic bullet as you'll find in modern medicine," says Dr. JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "If there was a pill that could lower the risk of chronic disease like walking does, people would be clamoring for it." (Bait Sun, 3/16/07)
Unintentional fatal drug overdoses in the U.S. nearly doubled from 1999 to 2004, overtaking falls to become the nation's second-leading cause of accidental death, behind automobile crashes. (AP, 2/10/07)
"While more older people are attracted to nursing, the number of people entering nursing in their early to mid-20s remains at its lowest point in 40 years." -Dartmouth economics professor Douglas Staiger. (Wash Post, 1/16/07)
Family members of hospitalized patients of trying to be their advocates can phone for an in-house emergency team if they feel the patient's care is falling short. The in-house 911 has been available at many hospitals, but only to staff members. Now at least seven U.S. medical centers, some of which have multiple hospitals, have brought the patients and family members into the loop. (USA Today, 1/29/07)
Doctors at Johns Hopkins and other medical institutions are beginning to report a curious increase in children with kidney stones, an ailment once found almost exclu¬sively in adults. "Five years ago, we used to see maybe a handful of children a year. Now, it's five or six a month," said Dr. Yegappan Lakshmanan, a pediatric urologist. (Bait Sun, 12/29/06)
Diabetes is striking a growing number of children around the world as parents and doctors fail to diagnose a disease that until recently was associated mostly with middle-aged and elderly people. "The childhood obesity epidemic is really driving diabetes in children," said Francine Kaufman, a professor of pediatrics at USC. (Reuters, 12/5/06)
A clinical study of 700 patients funded by Abbott Labo-ratories is using ultrasound probes and other devices mounted at the end of long catheters to identify the type and location of plaque in coronary arteries. The ultra¬sound scans generate so much data that it takes four days to log the initial information received on each patient. (NYT, 11/27/06)
In a reversal of the usual pattern of outsourcing, in which developed-world jobs are replaced by cheaper Indian ones, Infosys, India's second largest computer services company, will start a pilot program in 2007 in which it will recruit 25 graduates from 12 UK universi¬ties for training in Mysore before eventual redeploy¬ment in their home markets. The program expands on a scheme the company began last July, when it started training 126 U.S. graduates at Mysore, with a goal of training a total of 300 U.S. graduates. (FT, 11/28/06)
Japan's big companies have started offering special deals to workers with children in an effort to reverse a dramatic fall in the national birth rate. Matsushita has struck a deal with its unions to put the bulk of pay in¬creases this year into special allowances to encourage workers to have children. (FT, 3/22/07)
Masahiko Fujiwara's book Dignity of a Nation sold more than 2 million copies last year. In it, he describes how Western concepts like freedom and equality are inappropriate for Japan and don't really work in the U.S. (CSM, 12/28/06)
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently engineered two historic changes - transforming the postwar Defense Agency into a full-scale Defense Ministry and ushering in a law requiring patriotic education in schools. (CSM, 12/28/06)
Some 20,000 ATMs in Japan have scanners that read the veins in your hand. (BW, 2/19/07)
"If s not just that there's a growing gap between high and low earners with advanced education. It's that all well-educated workers, even those at the top, are at much greater risk of economic reversals than they used to be. Remarkably, the ranks of the long-term unem¬ployed are disproportionately professional and well-educated." - Jacob S. Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale (NYT, 12/24/06)
A Minneapolis-based consulting firm, CultureRX, is promoting a new way of working called ROWE, or Results-Only Work Environment. The company intro¬duced the program about four years ago at headquarters of Best Buy. Voluntary turnover is down and productiv¬ity is up. The program's premise: People can do what¬ever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. For 65 percent of the employees, there are no starting times, no quitting times and no rules about when or how much they work. (McClatchy-Tri-bune, 11/26/06)
The Pentagon will establish a new military command to oversee its operations in Africa. Three commands now divide responsibilies in Africa. (NYT, 2/7/07)
The Fire Scout robotic helicopter has enough computing power to take off, fly and land on its own. Last year a pair of test Scouts made history, landing on the deck of a moving ship without the help from human pilots. (Popular Mechanics, Mar 2007)
Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth Web site to pinpoint their attacks, British army intelligence sources say. (Telegraph, 1/13/07)
When Ingolf Turban, a concert violinist, was asked to compare a modern violin made of a mix of spruce and graphite with a 1721 Stradivarius, he preferred the new one. "I have never been playing any violin with such a singing E string," he said. "It is no longer like playing violin but like singing." (NYT, 11/28/06)
In a little-understood chapter in the history of cultural exchange, nations from around the world have been choosing musical outfits and sending them to the big¬gest music markets abroad in hopes of raising their international profile and generating export sales. (NYT, 11/12/06)
Married couples now make up a minority of American households. But on television, a growing number of characters are getting hitched. This season, each of the Big Four broadcast networks is offering new romantic comedies about weddings and marriage. (WSJ, 2/9/07)
Eighty percent of 18- to 25-year-olds had talked to their parents in the past day, according to a Pew Research Center study, "A Portrait of Generation Next." (NYT, 3/ 11/07)
More Americans than ever before are volunteering. In 2005, 29 percent of adults were serving - a 30-year high. Three age groups - older teens, baby boomers and seniors - are driving the upsurge. (CSM, 1/30/07)
"There has been no upward trend in happiness despite the fact that we are richer, healthier and have longer holidays," says Lord Richard Layard, an economist and advisor to the British government on happiness. A re¬cent poll found the proportion of people who said they are "very happy" had fallen to 36 percent today from 52 percent in 1957. (CSM, 1/17/07)
"For some ... people, spas are the new church," said Mary H. Yabacchi, an associate professor at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell. "They offer a non-threatening environment that allows people the time and space away from their ordinary lives to connect to something which they describe as spiritual." (NYT, 12/24/06)
Some families are designing group home offices in which parents and kids can work together. In a survey last year by the American Institute of Architects, the shared office was named the most popular "special-function room," before home theaters. (WSJ, 3/24/07)
Towns in the need of inexpensive housing are turning to garage apartments, mother-in-law units and cottages in the backyard. Hundreds of communities across the country have rewritten their zoning rules in recent years. (NYT, 12/2/06)
"Fed up with breakthroughs that fill journals rather than medicine chests, private foundations and charities that have traditionally funded academic scientists have started doing the once-unthinkable: writing checks for millions of dollars to for-profit companies." - (WSJ columnist Sharon Begley (WSJ, 1/26/07)
A new tool for medical research, the Alien Brain Atlas, provides a three-dimensional catalog of all the genes active in the brain and has revealed clues to diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Lou Gehrig's, as well as conditions such as autism. Dr. Susan Swedo, a researcher at NIH, said, "I, in five minutes, was able to do what used to take a graduate student four years for one tiny, little nerve connection, and now they have it for the entire brain." (Online Newshour, 11/29/06)
Frustrated by poor federal cooperation, U.S. states and cities are building their own network of intelligence centers led by police to help detect and disrupt terrorist plots. The new "fusion centers" are now operating in 37 states. (Wash Post, 12/31/06)
While bookstore closings get press attention in New York City, bookstores are also opening. In the past several months, five new independent bookstores have opened across the city. Taschen, the German publisher of art books, has opened its first New York outlet, and powerHouse Books, a publisher of photography books, has opened a large store. A store with jazz books and recordings along with two neighborhood shops have also opened. (New York Sun, 1/15/07)
Associated Anomalies
Reports
Anomaly
Inference Update
Quarterly Reviews
Anomalies
Themes
Thinking About Thinking
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