Is the Paleolithic Diet—the fad regimen that suggests we should all eat more meat and no grains, ostensibly mimicking the diets of our ancestors—really healthy for the average human living today? Is it even actually representative of what human ancestors ate? Good tackles these questions and more, in a round-table interview with a group of anthropologists and evolutionary biologists.
Taken from:
Does the Paleolithic Diet make sense?
My new Publishers Weekly column has just gone up, documenting the progress with my DIY short story collection, With a Little Help. This month, I talk about the Baroque process of getting a book listed on both Lulu and Amazon:
Getting the book on Amazon was much harder than I anticipated. At first, I considered selling the book using Lulu’s wholesale channel, which can feed into Amazon. But once both Lulu and Amazon had taken their cut of the book, my net price would have been in nosebleed territory, somewhere in the $20 range. Add to that a $2 royalty for me and the book would be remembered as one of the most expensive short story collections in publishing history.
In order to list on Amazon at a decent price point, I needed fewer wholesale discounts. For me, that meant cutting out Lulu and listing directly on Amazon through CreateSpace, Amazon’s own POD program. But CreateSpace, frankly, is a pain in the ass. First, it refuses to print any book that already has an ISBN somewhere else, a very anticompetitive practice. To overcome this, I had to create an “Amazon edition” of the book with a slightly different cover and some additional text explaining the weird world of POD publishing.
But the fun was just beginning. CreateSpace also has a cumbersome “quality assurance” process that effectively throws away all the advantages of POD. For example, every time I change so much as one character in the setup file, CreateSpace pulls the book out of Amazon. A human being must recheck the book, and then I am notified that I have to order (and pay for) a new proof to be printed and shipped from the U.S. to London. I then have to approve the proof before CreateSpace will notify Amazon that the book is ready to be made available again. It can then take three to five days before the book is actually back for sale on Amazon. Practically speaking, this means that fixing a typo or adding an appendix with new financial information costs about $20 upfront, and takes the book off Amazon’s catalogue for two weeks.
With A Little Help: Hitting My Stride
With tsunami warnings blaring, 64-year-old Susumu Sugawara didn’t head for higher ground like most of the 3500 or so inhabitants of Oshima, the small island on which he lives. Sugawara knew that if he let the storm destroy his fleet, his island risked becoming isolated after the calamity subsided. So he got in his favorite boat, “Sunflower,” said goodbye to the rest of his fleet, and headed out to sea to face the tsunami head-on. More
Fast-food chain McDonald’s said Monday that it plans to hire as many as 50,000 additional employees in the United States later this month.
The woman who accused three Duke University lacrosse players of rape five years ago was arrested Sunday, suspected of stabbing her boyfriend, police said.
Continue reading Next-gen iPod nano chassis hints at camera?
Next-gen iPod nano chassis hints at camera? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
From research done the Inon Inon Pricing Research Centre, and Leigh Caldwell:
Everyone knows – or thinks they know – that prices such as £1.99, £5.99 or £9.99 are optimal price points for retail goods. Customers read the first digit first, and the last two are ignored – or at least, they have much less cognitive impact. In general, consumers were thought to put a subjective value estimate of about ten per cent less on an item priced at £3.99, than one at £4.00.
This has been a fairly robust result in the past, and is intuitive for a number of reasons, “but WAIT!” say Leigh:
[And] the results were a surprise. At first we thought that the effect we have discovered was just a previously unnoticed artefact, hidden by the fact that no proper experiment has been published before. But after further exploration, we think it is also an effect of changing consumer preferences. As customers become more aware of marketing tactics and more cynical about any communication from companies, their psychology and behaviour inevitably changes.
So, to the results. The summary points are:
- Prices ending in .99 no longer have any advantage in consumer value perception, and do not lead to higher sales.
- The optimal penny value varies by country. In the United States, it is .01. So, instead of $3.99, companies should charge $4.01. In European countries, the optimal price point is different for different product categories, but there is a peak at .04 for many products. So, British or European retailers currently charging, say, £0.99 should increase the price to £1.04.
- By switching in this way to a “dollar-plus” price instead of “dollar-minus”, retailers can increase sales volume by an average of 8% and increase profit margins by 1-3% (depending on the exact price point).
- Consumers, when presented with the new price point, report an increased level of trust and affinity with the brands of the retailer and manufacturer. We believe this arises from the “honesty signal” that comes from abandoning a discredited and manipulative sales practice.
This is indeed very interesting, and I eagerly await reading the full study (which Leigh is offering as a pre-print!). Head over to Leigh’s blog for more rather counter-intuitive findings from his new research!
Filed under: Economics, Society 
Continue Reading:
I Got .99 Problems, But Pricing Ain’t One.
The world’s most bioluminescent bay
At night, Mosquito Bay flashes green with an eerie ethereal light. Bright blue tracer lines suddenly appear in the water as small fish dart through the blackness. But this illumination has nothing to do with spirits or aliens: Mosquito Bay happens to be one of the most bioluminescent bodies of water in the world.
Bioluminescence is a form of natural light created by living organisms converting internal chemical energy into light. The light in Mosquito Bay is created by tiny organisms called dinoflagellates (specifically Pyrodimium bahamense or “swirling fire”), and Mosquito Bay contains an astonishing number – roughly 700,000 per single gallon of water. Although they’re microscopic, the effective size of the light they give off is a hundred times larger than their own bodies, and in great numbers they light up like an underwater aurora borealis.
Trapped by a curve in the Bay’s opening and fed by the surrounding mangroves, the dinoflagellates find Mosquito Bay a perfect home. Thought to bioluminesce as a defense mechanism – to attract predators that can ward off the small fish who eat them – dinoflagellates make light upon sensing any movement in the water, swirling out bright blue-green plumes that eventually diffuse back into the dark stillness of the Bay. This makes swimming in the Bay a truly astonishing – not to mention surreal – experience.
There are a number of outfits that will take people out to the bio-bay, but be sure to select one that uses kayaks, and don’t wear bug spray, as gas and DEET kill dinoflagellates. In addition, be sure to visit on a night with no or little moonlight, as seeing the bioluminescence in near-total darkness is truly amazing.
Read more about Mosquito bay on Atlas Obscura…
Category: Watery Wonders, Fascinating Fauna, Bioluminescent Spots
Location:
Edited by: Dylan, wythe, Gergle
See the article here:
Mosquito bay
 |
I always thought that if someone wanted to counter the agenda of the forces in our country peddling fear and make America more progressive and open to the world, they would simply give people determined to build walls passports and plane tickets. I’ve also thought that about the best investment the rest of the world could make in the interest of everyone’s well-being would be to establish a fund to give each American a trip to a foreign land of their choice (not Canada) upon graduation. This map shows a hard-to-refute correlation to percent of population with passports and political persuasion. It also shows a economic correlation between those who travel and those who don’t. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this, but it is thought-provoking. Does travel make someone more savvy about politics or more mixed up? Or is this just a quirky coincidence with no real meaning?
This was brought to my attention today: Christopher Soghoian, on slight paranoia from December 2009: 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight:
Executive Summary
Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.
The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.
It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.
Originally posted here:
In 2009, Sprint provided law enforcement customer GPS location information 8 million times in 13 months