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  • Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair - Both companies continue to invest in innovation and science and engineering. The story of a bad economy and bad sales for a year or two is what you read in most newspapers. In my opinion the more important story is why Toyota and Honda will be dominant companies 20 years from now.
  • Albert Einstein, Marylin Monroe Hybrid Image - This fun post shows science at work and is just cool. "Hybrid images, however, contain two coherent global image interpretations, one of which is of the low spatial frequencies, the other of high spatial frequencies."
  • The Relative Economic Position of the USA is Likely to Decline - The economic clout of the USA has been huge since the end of World War II. The relative position has been decreasing recently with the rise of not only Europe and Japan but Korea, China, India, Brazil and many more
  • If Your Staff Doesn't Bring You Problems That is a Bad Sign - If an employee never learns how to find possible solutions themselves that is not a good sign. But it is much, much better to bring problems to managements attention than to fail to do so because they know the manager thinks that doing so is weak.
  • Manage Your Debt - "The 'secret' is not very secret. Just don't buy what you can't pay for. It is very simple, many people just don't want to follow that simple strategy. Also save money in an emergency fund, so when some emergency comes along you don't go into debt. You just use your emergency fund."
  • CEOs Finally Want Health-Care Reform - Decades ago Dr. Deming emphasized the deadly disease of excessive health care costs in the USA. Since then, year after year, the situation has become worse. During that time senior executives have put forth very little serious effort to fix this problem. Finally, in the last few years, more and more senior executives are actively moving to address the ever worsening crisis.
  • Is Productivity Growth Bad? - "My sense is their is more room to eliminate non-value added activity from management positions which will not harm long term productivity growth."
  • Revealed Preference - "Normally what matters is not what people say they want but what they actually will choose. For that reason revealed preference is a better measure than stated preference."
  • Dr. Russell Ackoff Webcast on Systems Thinking - "Synthesis (thinking about systems) involves 3 steps: 1) what is this system of which this is a part of; 2) understanding the behavior of the containing whole; 3) identify the role of function of the system in question within the containing system."
  • Historical Engineering: Hanging Flume - "The Montrose Placer Mining Company built a 13 mile canal and flume to deliver water from the San Miguel River for gold mining operations. The last 5 miles of the flume clung to the wall of the canyon itself, running along the cliff face"
  • Global Installed Wind Power Now Over 1.5% of Global Electricity Demand - "USA capacity grew 50% in 2008, moving it into the global lead for the first time in a decade. China grew 107%, the 3rd year in a row it more than doubled capacity."
  • Why Setting Goals can Backfire - They create serious systemic problems and should be avoided (other than in setting the scope). They are deeply ingrained in the way many people think, but we would be better if we could eliminate the use of goals, as they are used now (mainly as arbitrary numerical goals).
  • Failure to Regulate Financial Markets Leads to Predictable Consequences - The widespread failure to regulate financial markets recently is almost certain to lead to this exact type of situation every time. Companies will over-leverage, take huge risks, take huge pay while times are good and just go bankrupt when times are bad (or have the taxpayers bail them out if they give enough money to politicians).
  • 100th Entrepreneur Loan - The opportunity to give real capitalists an chance at a better life is wonderful. Kiva allows you to lend money to entrepreneur (in increments of $25).
  • Leadership is the act of making others effective in achieving an aim - Leadership is not about being great yourself... Leaders need to know what needs to be done, and then make others effective, based on that knowledge.
  • Buying Favors from Congress - "in 2004 that allowed multinational corporations to 'repatriate' profits earned overseas, effectively reducing their tax rate on the money from 35 percent to 5.25 percent. More than 800 companies took advantage of the legislation, saving an estimated $100 billion in the process"
  • Building a Great Workforce - In my experience far to little emphasis is placed on continual improvement of what many companies will say is their most important asset: their people. If you don't invest in education of your staff that is going to harm your long term success.
  • How We Know What We Know - People tend to think someone entertaining is more educational than someone not entertaining. They may be more entertaining, but taking the ideas of those who are entertaining and rejecting the ideas of people who are not is not a great strategy to build up a great system of knowledge.
  • Another Year of CEO's Taking Hugely Excessive Pay - We need to wake up and stop letting these people steal the bounty created by the employees, customers, community, suppliers, investors... They want a world where they can behave like nobility - taking whatever they want from the value created by others. And lately they have succeeded in creating such a world.