Monday, March 9, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Management Reading for the Day
"A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice," Administrative Science Quarterly 17, no. 1 (March 1972): 1-25., by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen
Saturday, March 7, 2009
The Examined Life
Then it occurred to her that her talking heads should walk and talk. She had just read “Wanderlust,” a discursive study of the history of walking by Rebecca Solnit, and was reminded of the figure of the peripatetic philosopher, from Aristotle (who paced the Lyceum while teaching) to Kierkegaard (a proponent of thinking while walking, which he frequently did in the Copenhagen streets) to Walter Benjamin (the embodiment of the Paris flâneur). She realized that putting her subjects in motion would elicit a different kind of interview than if they were seated behind their desks in offices. This conceit became a guiding principle for a film that would attempt to take philosophy out of the ivory tower and affirm its place in the flux of everyday life.
“My intention was to show the material conditions out of which ideas emerge,” Ms. Taylor said. “People often think of philosophy as cold, analytic, abstract, disconnected from the real world, and I really want to say that’s not the case.”...
With “Examined Life” Ms. Taylor set out to make a pedagogical documentary that is less a lecture than a call to cerebral action — a film that, as she put it, “creates a space for thought.” Still, the end result differs from her initial conception in one significant respect. “I thought it was going to be this sort of slow-paced philosophical ramble, but it actually really moves along,” she said. “It’s because they’re philosophers. These are intense people with intense ideas.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
Free read chapters- Banking and Finance
Saturday, February 28, 2009
The Two Cultures asscociated with Wine and Beer
Grape vs. Grain- A Historical, Technological, and Social Comparison of Wine and Beer
Why is wine considered more sophisticated even though the production of beer is much more technologically complex? Why is wine touted for its health benefits when beer has more nutritive value? Why does wine conjure up images of staid dinner parties while beer denotes screaming young partiers? Charles Bamforth explores several paradoxes involving these beverages, paying special attention to the culture surrounding each. He argues that beer can be just as grown-up and worldly as wine and be part of a healthy, mature lifestyle. Both beer and wine have histories spanning thousands of years. This is the first book to compare them from the perspectives of history, technology, nature of the market for each, quality attributes, types and styles, and the effect that they have on human health and nutrition.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Development Lecture of the Day
Jeffrey D. Sachs - "Achieving Global Cooperation on Economic Recovery and Long-term Sustainable Development"
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
The Super-Organism
The Super-Organism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies;
Ants and other social insects are good at what they do, and they get better by means of cooperative labor. Their behavior fulfills principles of ergonomic efficiency embodied in the Barlow-Proschan theorems. When individual competence is low, the first theorem says, the reliability of a system of individuals acting together is lower than the summed competence of the individuals acting singly; but when individual competence is high, above a certain threshold level, the reliability of the system based on cooperation is greater. According to the second theorem, one redundant system, whose parts that can be switched back and forth (as in colony members), is more reliable than two identical systems with no such backup parts.
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