temphn

  What Silicon Valley does better than anyone is create 
  exits.  They know how to get people who they have made 
  money for to turn over a lot of that money to buy the 
  companies they have invested in. They know how to put on a 
  show to get a company to an IPO. They know how to go out 
  and get hundreds of millions of dollars to bridge companies 
  with 10s of millions in revenues to their IPO and more 
  importantly to make sure the IPO happens.

  startups which provide deluxe on-site benefits could extend 
  their daycare, meal and on-site walk-in health care to 
  people who have WIC or EBT cards and can show that they 
  live in the neighborhood. The bonus here? You can meet 
  actual people in your neighborhood.

  Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive 
  differences that reflect varying hormonal influences on 
  brain development

  By Doreen Kimura (May 13, 2002)

  Men and women differ not only in their physical attributes 
  and reproductive function but also in many other 
  characteristics, including the way they solve intellectual 
  problems. For the past few decades, it has been 
  ideologically fashionable to insist that these behavioral 
  differences are minimal and are the consequence of 
  variations in experience during development before and 
  after adolescence. Evidence accumulated more recently, 
  however, suggests that the effects of sex hormones on brain 
  organization occur so early in life that from the start the 
  environment is acting on differently wired brains in boys 
  and girls. Such effects make evaluating the role of 
  experience, independent of physiological predisposition, a 
  difficult if not dubious task. The biological bases of sex 
  differences in brain and behavior have become much better 
  known through increasing numbers of behavioral, 
  neurological and endocrinological studies.

  Sex differences in problem solving have been systematically 
  studied in adults in laboratory situations. On average, men 
  perform better than women at certain spatial tasks. In 
  particular, men seem to have an advantage in tests that 
  require the subject to imagine rotating an object or 
  manipulating it in some other way. They also outperform 
  women in mathematical reasoning tests and in navigating 
  their way through a route. Further, men exhibit more 
  accuracy in tests of target-directed motor skills--that is, 
  in guiding or intercepting projectiles.

  Women, on average, excel on tests that measure recall of 
  words and on tests that challenge the person to find words 
  that begin with a specific letter or fulfill some other 
  constraint. They also tend to be better than men at rapidly 
  identifying matching items and performing certain precision 
  manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a 
  board.

  Review 1: Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist at the 
  University of California, San Francisco, explores 
  groundbreaking issues in brain science...Brizendine 
  graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine and 
  draws on research done at the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood 
  and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF in 1994.

  Review 2 :This comprehensive new look at the hormonal 
  roller coaster  that rules women's lives down to the 
  cellular level, "a user's guide to new research about the 
  female brain and the neurobehavioral systems that make us 
  women," offers a trove of information, as well as some 
  stunning insights. Though referenced like a work of 
  research, Brizedine's writing style is fully accessible. 
  Brizendine provides a fascinating look at the life cycle of 
  the female brain from birth ("baby girls will connect 
  emotionally in ways that baby boys don't") to birthing 
  ("Motherhood changes you because it literally alters a 
  woman's brain-structurally, functionally, and in many ways, 
  irreversibly") to menopause (when "the female brain is   
  nowhere near ready to retire") and beyond.

  Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by   
  instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It 
  includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to 
  perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest 
  arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being 
  bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable 
  of leading in a heretical direction. 

  The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous 
  thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, 
  instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

  He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He 
  presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the 
  earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than 
  water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not 
  understanding the arguments that contradicted them.

  Boycotting the Nature Publishing Group

  The Nature Publishing Group publishes not only the 
  prestigious journal Nature, but also many others. When this 
  company bought Scientific American, it raised the 
  institutional subscription price seven-fold. Now they are 
  insisting on quadrupling the fees for 67 journals to which 
  the University of California subscribes.

  Right now, we pay them an average of $4,465 per year for 
  each journal we subscribe to. After the increase, this 
  would soar to $17,479 per year. In response, the University 
  of California is considering a system-wide boycott of the 
  Nature Publishing Group — for example, cancelling 
  subscriptions to all their journals.

  Max Levchin:  The notion that diversity in an early team is 
  important or good is completely wrong. You should try to 
  make the early team as non-diverse as possible. There are a   
  few reasons for this. The most salient is that, as a 
  startup, you’re underfunded and undermanned. It’s a big 
  disadvantage; not only are you probably getting into 
  trouble, but you don’t even know what trouble that may be. 
  Speed is your only weapon. All you have is speed. 

  Over the last decades, numerous researchers have 
  painstakingly collected, analyzed, dated, and calibrated 
  many data series that allow us to reconstruct climate 
  before the age of direct measurements. Such data come e.g. 
  from sediment drilling in the deep sea, from corals, ice 
  cores and other sources. Shaun Marcott and colleagues for 
  the first time assembled 73 such data sets from around the 
  world into a global temperature reconstruction for the 
  Holocene, published in Science. Or strictly speaking, many 
  such reconstructions: they have tried about twenty 
  different averaging methods and also carried out 1,000 
  Monte Carlo simulations with random errors added to the 
  dating of the individual data series to demonstrate the 
  robustness of their results.