John Kay:

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In 1906, the great statistician Francis Galton observed a competition to guess the weight of an ox at a country fair. Eight hundred people entered. Galton, being the kind of man he was, ran statistical tests on the numbers. He discovered that the average guess (1,197lb) was extremely close to the actual weight (1,198lb) of the ox. This story was told by James Surowiecki, in his entertaining book The Wisdom of Crowds.

Not many people know the events that followed. A few years later, the scales seemed to become less and less reliable. Repairs were expensive; but the fair organiser had a brilliant idea. Since attendees were so good at guessing the weight of an ox, it was unnecessary to repair the scales. The organiser would simply ask everyone to guess the weight, and take the average of their estimates.

juxtapoz:

With the London Olympics set to open on Friday, July 27, everyone is getting into the celebratory/satirical mood. Banksy was going to miss this opportunity to land a few punches and comical jabs at the increasingly corporate games, and he just produced two new street pieces to show his “support” of the Olympics.

Vincent LaForet:

I recently stumbled across this incredibly cool video that takes you through the ages of title design, starting with D.W. Griffith’s 1916 film, “Intolerance” and ending with the Gaspar Noe’s 2009 film, “Enter The Void” (trust me – this film is as crazy as the title sequence that it has). Throughout the progression of the piece you see how far along title design has come in terms of complexity – but you also see the creativity that has always been there, despite the limits of technology. On its own it is an incredibly interesting piece that really puts some perspective and importance on this often overlooked art form.



But there’s more. The video is really just an introduction piece to an incredible resource called “Art of the Title,” which is a website that does periodic features on various title designs, giving you a behind the scenes look at who made them, and how they were envisioned and executed. It’s incredibly fascinating. You HAVE to watch the making of the title for Boardwalk Empire (and just about every single one of them…)

John Torinus:

I ran this idea out about ten years ago and got no traction. Here we go again: how about about quality audits in health care?

Good quality information has been slow in coming in health care, mainly because not all the big players on the provider side of the equation are all that enthusiastic about having hard readings out there about mortality rates, infections, readmissions and outcomes.

Data and information is emerging, often from Medicare databases, but the pace has been anything but breath taking. Yet the growing army of consumers – estimated at more than 30 million people with personal health accounts and high deductibles – needs quality ratings on providers just as much as they need hard price information.

Professor Sabena:

Here are some examples of the comments I received:

On the positive side: Could not agree more!

On the negative side:
(Humour)The professor will get seated next to John Candy
(Professor) Unlikely …But if I do…. then does that mean I get Darryl Hannah as my girlfriend?

And then there was Angry. I won’t identify him.

Ken Bain:

Many people think of intelligence as static: you are born with lots of brains, very few, or somewhere in between, and that quantum of intelligence largely determines how well you do in school and in life.

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has never liked this view. “I hardly ever use the word intelligence,” says Mr. Tyson, who directs the Hayden Planetarium in New York. “I think of people as either wanting to learn, ambivalent about learning or rejecting learning.” He speaks from experience: As a young man, he was booted from one doctoral program but managed to get into another and complete his Ph.D.

Brendan Greeley:

Economists don’t get controlled experiments, so they have to take countries as they are. Right now, Estonia seems to show that monetary and fiscal restraint can, after pain, create growth. “If you look back, the crash is very good,” says Palmik.



Not surprisingly, Estonia, a country with 1.2 million people, has been offered as a model by advocates of austerity in Europe and elsewhere. On the far side of the Atlantic, however, Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been arguing for years against this kind of restraint, saying it leads to pointless misery. The argument is central to the future of the U.S.—and most other countries, too.



On June 6, in a blog post titled “Estonian Rhapsody,” Krugman took on what he called “the poster child for austerity defenders.” In his post, he graphed real GDP from the height of the boom to the first quarter of this year to show that, even after a recovery, Estonia’s economy is still almost 10 percent below its peak in 2007. “This,” he wrote, “is what passes for economic triumph?”

Roberto Baldwin:

Hey, city slicker: Erase all preconceived notions about the technological competence of rural America. As you drive past all those rolling, pastoral fields during your summer road trips, you might be lulled into thinking our farmers and ranchers are stuck in the 1950s — or maybe even homogeneously Amish. But think again: The people who work the land are using technologies that rival what’s coming out of the world’s most advanced R&D labs.

Hell, they’re actually using technologies that come out of advanced R&D labs.

From autonomous tractors to robot fruit pickers to cow milking machinery of amazing complexity (see image above, and our explanation below), rural America is on the cutting edge. So throw away your twee, urban biases of country folk. They’re using the technology of the future to feed us all — and this holds true for the local produce, meat and poultry that you’re going to buy this weekend at the farmers market.

Ed Wallace:

Think of it this way. During the Financial Panic of 1893, considered the worst depression to hit America since its birth, those involved in electric utilities systems suffered not a bit because electricity was a growth market. Henry Ford, working as the chief engineer for Detroit Edison at the time, never worried about losing his job or having enough spare money to build his first automobile. That was also the period in which electric trolleys and the interurban rails came to most cities; and those manufacturers, the rail systems’ owners and the workers who installed them also went through that Panic virtually unscathed. Thomas Edison built his first movie studio in New Jersey the year of the financial collapse; and he certainly didn’t go out of business for lack of demand for his short films.



Even when the dotcom bubble burst in the late 1990s, it didn’t affect the progress made in expanding the Internet – or in the improvement in high-speed connections, video streaming or the expansion of commerce online. All those things dramatically improved during that collapse.

Katherine Markovich:

Dear People Who Take Pictures of Food With Instagram,

Just because the picture looks artsy doesn’t mean you are. I get it. We all went through our creative, experimental stages. There is a period in all of our lives where we think we can probably make money off our pseudo-artistic talent of choice. And now, you think you are a photographer because Instagram does the work for you. Do you have to focus anything? Do you have to worry about lighting? Do you have to think at all? Not really. You are part of a fast growing legion of people that have been duped into believing they are visionaries, auteurs, even.

“<3 <3 Gorgeous day for lunch outside <3 <3,” you post to the image of a set of railroad tracks behind a McDonald’s.