(Things you should know within the next 5 minutes)

Intelligent paint turns dark pink when there is ice on the road. The transparent coating is said to be tested in France first to test it’s efficiency in preventing ice-related accidents. Now there’s a practical solution.

Seeking Alpha’s weekly quiz. See if you can answer questions about the losers in the automotive sector, the rallies against UBS and Deustche Bank, and other financial headlines.

Boston.com has an interesting article on why poverty is self-perpetuating. Simply put, "The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems."

Business Week’s favorite financial blogs. (In case you need to procrastinate further)

And a favorite amongst mine will always be those that shows the subprime mortgage crisis in pretty charts and graphs. As you can tell, this world probably seems quite frightening to a newly-grad like myself:

Chad and I have recently gone house-and-condo shopping with the clear conclusion that we will never be able to afford anything nice around here. A 2 bedroom townhouse was selling for $655k, and that was considered cheap. We’re saving up money, hoping for a move. At this point, I’d gladly run with that idea, but a big part of me is excited to see this all unravel before my bright brown eyes.

This week in Advertising/Marketing

Yahoo decides to launch a "stock market for Ads". Not a bad idea, but I sure hope you guys can convince Microsoft to buy you for more than $31/share. Well, mainly because I hold some Yahoo shares.

GoogleAds , I dislike them too. But if you’re an advertiser, I would imagine that GoogleAds is no longer your advertisement of choice. Check out the article for a great analysis.

Hilariously enough though, my boyfriend’s startup got slammed by SEOmoz last week. I think this was slightly unfair given that many of the sites listed are aware of this problem but are just in private beta mode. In addition, many popular startups such as facebook and reddit relied very little on SEO. SEO is great, but it really isn’t the end all be all as the author suggests. That’s not to say that SEO is not useful though … I just thought that rant was presented in a slightly fanatical way.

And now, for something a little more light-hearted — A comic portraying the difference between marketing, advertising, public relations, and branding .

NPR has a great article about how cognitive dissonance, the tension someone feels when they hold two contradicting beliefs, can actually be a fuel for self justification. I would usually break the story down a bit more, but I have to run. So sorry.
Anyway, here’s a simple snippet from the article:

Half a century ago, a young social psychologist named Leon Festinger and two associates infiltrated a group of people who believed the world would end on December 21. They wanted to know what would happen to the group when (they hoped!) the prophecy failed. The group’s leader, whom the researchers called Marian Keech, promised that the faithful would be picked up by a flying saucer and elevated to safety at midnight on December 20. Many of her followers quit their jobs, gave away their homes, and dispersed their savings, waiting for the end. Who needs money in outer space? Others waited in fear or resignation in their homes. (Mrs. Keech’s own husband, a nonbeliever, went to bed early and slept soundly through the night as his wife and her followers prayed in the living room.) Festinger made his own prediction: The believers who had not made a strong commitment to the prophecy—who awaited the end of the world by themselves at home, hoping they weren’t going to die at midnight—would quietly lose their faith in Mrs. Keech. But those who had given away their possessions and were waiting with the others for the spaceship would increase their belief in her mystical abilities. In fact, they would now do everything they could to get others to join them.

At midnight, with no sign of a spaceship in the yard, the group felt a little nervous. By 2 a.m., they were getting seriously worried. At 4:45 a.m., Mrs. Keech had a new vision: The world had been spared, she said, because of the impressive faith of her little band. “And mighty is the word of God,” she told her followers, “and by his word have ye been saved—for from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.”

The group’s mood shifted from despair to exhilaration. Many of the group’s members, who had not felt the need to proselytize before December 21, began calling the press to report the miracle, and soon they were out on the streets, buttonholing passersby, trying to convert them. Mrs. Keech’s prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger’s.

Also, there is a pretty awesome Singularity Summit going on during my birthday. (Sept 8 & 9)  If you’re a fan of AI or Kurzweil, you should come join me!  Even if you are not a fan of  AI, I can guarantee that it will at least be philosophically profound.

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Current and surprisingly related read: Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett
Other current reads: Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

Okay, I’m not foolish enough to completely believe in that, but I do believe that constant aid has encouraged a lot of impoverished Africans to remain poor. From a recent article online, which I know everyone and their mothers have already seen, a Kenyan economics expert says that aid to Africa does more harm than good:

"Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need."

Further, the majority of food, money, and clothing donated to Africa goes into the hands of politicians, ebay, and corrupt black markets before they end up in homes of the needy. The people do eventually get fed, but they are never the top priority. How incredibly sad.

In which Africa will remain a child forever

Despite the government’s corruption, the tactics from the G8 are no better. Shoving Africans with some corn is like telling a man that he has an unlimited supply of women. Wife got mad at you? Here — have a nother one. They will never learn the game that is so hard to play to begin with. All that’s left is another generation of beggers and waiters. Anyway, because there are no jobs for many of these people, there are neither reserves to live off of when there is a disaster.

No reserves, and no incentive for reserves either.

Parenting from developing countries

But examples can be made of the poorest parts of India, China, Mexico, etc… The book A Billion Bootstraps (which I have just picked up a week ago and highly recommend to everyone) describes how microlending, small sums of money lent to people in poverty for the goal of advancing a business idea, can actually improve an entire country with less aid. These sums are small in comparison to the donations made by the G8 each year, yet would perpetuate more stability and happiness in people’s lives than any single sum of money the G8 could provide. Here’s an example from the book:

In the Caribbean, a young man used a microloan to buy a used
TV and VCR. He has turned his two-room tenement apartment
into a movie theater. He rents a new video every day,
charges neighbors the equivalent of 15 cents to watch the
movie, and sells snacks from his four-shelf grocery store. In
Asian villages with no electricity, “phone ladies” buy cell
giving credit where credit is due 41
phones with microloans and make their livelihoods by serving
as their villages’ pay telephones. A man in India with a laundry
business was not making enough money to survive. Washing
his customers’ clothes in a nearby stream was not the problem;
giving them a fresh-pressed appearance afterward was. A
microloan of $50 was all he needed to acquire an iron and an
electrical outlet, bringing his business to the next level.

Poor people often do not need outsiders to tell them about
business opportunities. They are keenly aware of opportunities
to start or grow a microenterprise. Usually they just need
a little working capital.

I cannot sum that up any better.

Finally, a little change in our agenda for charity and aid. [A reference because I'm awesome.]

A list of microcredit organizations who are ready to start a business using just 0.1% of your paycheck. [www.abillionbootstraps.com]

Browse and donate money for projects from Africa. [www.kiva.org]

Microfinance in Africa: Combining the Best Practices of Traditional and Modern Microfinance Approaches towards Poverty Eradication. [www.un.org]

Solutions for a sustainable future in Africa [Related post]

Hey children — here’s a good one! The first prize of a Creationist Science Fair goes to an 8th grader who disproves the theory of evolution by making stalactites from Epsom Salts:

Brian Benson, an eighth-grade student who won first place in the Life Science/Biology category for his project “Creation Wins!!!,” says he disproved part of the theory of evolution. Using a rolled-up paper towel suspended between two glasses of water with Epsom Salts, the paper towel formed stalactites. He states that the theory that they take millions of years to develop is incorrect.

“Scientists say it takes millions of years to form stalactites,” Benson said. “However, in only a couple of hours, I have formed stalactites just by using paper towel and Epsom Salts.

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Tech Crunch had a very good post about how the Silicon Valley could use a downturn at this moment. Is that a terrible thing to say? Maybe slightly. But when everyone, from my 16 year old sister to my 50 year old mother, is aware of the VC frenzy, I think it’s about high time to slow it down a bit. When acquires from google have a price tag of, say, $1.65 billion, it’s almost like you’re asking our bright minds to get lost in the fame and fortune of others. Innovation gets lost in this frenzy and people begin to fight over the web’s attention. As Michael wrote:

The press side of things is equally nuts. I wasn’t writing a blog in the first bubble so I can’t compare now to then. But entrepreneurs are no longer talking to us just to get our opinion and hope for a blog post and a little discussion. These guys need press to stand out from the scores of startups just like them. Saying no to them isn’t really an option. They show up at our front door with a bottle of wine or flowers. They instruct their PR firms to do anything necessary to get a story. More than once I’ve had a CEO break down and cry on the phone when we said we weren’t covering them. And more than once, I folded and wrote about them after those conversations.

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In recent events, an Ohio woman was outraged by the following “anti-religion” quote:

The Way I See It #347

Why in moments of crisis do we ask God for strength and help? As cognitive beings, why would we ask something that may well be a figment of our imaginations for guidance? Why not search inside ourselves for the power to overcome? After all, we are strong enough to cause most of the catastrophes we need to endure.

– Bill Scheel
Starbucks customer from London, Ontario. He describes himself as a “modern day nobody.”

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It’s one of those articles that I think should be included in a Manager’s handbook: New York Times Article .

Here’s a little snippet from it:

Let’s begin with what I call the “Cookie Monster Experiment,” devised to test the hypothesis that power makes people stupid and insensitive — or, as the scientists at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “disinhibited.”

Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table.

There are certain qualities that I think are innate to us, including the quality of anticipating cliches. Need I explain any more? Do I need to tell you that power somehow eludes us? However, I do think most of it comes from giving people too much credit to begin with. The problem is with us, putting up with this behavior instead of scoffing at it.
And right after I say this, Paris Hilton decides to make a spectacle of herself.

This will not be my most philantropic post, but I can’t help it when kilowatts from a solid state laser has the ability to demolish thick aluminum plates in less than a fraction of a second. I’m not much of a man, but I’m intrigued by the blowing up and destruction of things. (as long as nothing is harmed) Got a firecracker? Let’s light it! Got a light saber? Even better! Well, you get the idea…

The picture below was stolen from the BBC website of the laser beam penetrating an aluminum surface. The time between each frame captured is 167 milliseconds.

My thoughts? Perhaps this article is short of a lot of important information, but I can already imagine the inventive ways that enemies will come up with to dissipate or direct the beam elsewhere. From my experience with the laser maze, Foggy works wonders too. He was well known in our Davis Optics Club community.