Here's An Easy Way To Massively Improve Your Writing

Via Business Insider:

You might not be a Jane Austen or a Herman Melville even at the best of times, but if you want to be a much better writer, you need to limit distractions. "Try to reduce external interruptions as best you can," Foroughi told New Republic. "Turn off your cell phone. Turn off your Twitter and email notifications. You can live without them for an hour or two."

Here's An Easy Way To Massively Improve Your Writing - Business Insider

The result of some doctoral research. This is also why writers are encouraged to have a separate room where they can close the door.

Amazon Opens 3D Printed Products Store

Via Business Insider:

Amazon just launched a new store for 3D printed products, which has over 200 listings that can be customized by material, color, style, text, or size.

The marketplace includes jewelry, toys, iPhone cases, home-goods, personalized bobble heads, and, yes, cufflinks, among other things. 

Amazon isn't actually printing anything itself, but merely connecting consumers with companies that specialize in 3D printing, like Mixee Labs, Sculpteo, and 3DLT.

Amazon Opens 3D Printed Products Store - Business Insider

At what point will 3D printing disrupt even Amazon?

Supreme beings of leisure

Via Instapundit and USA Today:

…the upside is that with robots doing the work, humans will get to be supreme beings of leisure (OK, not actual Supreme Beings of Leisure) living life as they please without, as Philip Larkin wrote, letting "the toad work squat on my life." And even if the economic pyramid gets pointier, odds are that a machine-run society will be so wealthy that even the "unemployed" will seem well-off by today's standards, just as today's unemployed are unimaginably rich compared to the working class of General Ludd's era. As Robert Fogel notes, prior to the Industrial Revolution only about 80% of the "working class" was able to obtain enough calories to actually work.

On the other hand, Larkin concluded that he wasn't actually cut out to live without work. And maybe a lot of us aren't. Work makes us feel useful; people who are out of work generally feel sadder and less valuable than when they're working, even if they are just fine financially. A society where no one works is one where people will look elsewhere for meaning and identity — quite possibly to extremist religious or political ideologies.

Supreme beings of leisure: Column

It’s easy to think of work as a curse, but a reading of Genesis shows that work was part of the creation, God working and putting man and woman in the garden to care for it. The short lesson – work is an expression of who we are, hence Glenn Reynold’s thought that people might look elsewhere for meaning without meaningful work.

Don't Forget the Middle Performers

Via CLOmedia:

…a bell curve exists where the new hires and high potentials are the special cases of the workforce and receive most of the training, while middle-performers making up the majority are left out of the pipeline preparations.

With the right attention, however, these employees can move along the curve to become assets for their companies.

Click the link to see more: Don't Forget the Middle Performers | 2014-07-16 | CLOmedia

The middle performers are key to turning plans into action.

A Closed Mouth Gathers No Foot

Via Christian Post:

Have you ever been in a situation like that, when you wanted to say the perfect thing, yet you ended up saying the lamest thing possible?
An old proverb advises, "Better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and dispel all doubt." Or, as another proverb says, "A closed mouth gathers no foot."

There is a time to speak. And there is a time to be quiet. We need the wisdom of the Holy Spirit in our lives to know which is which.

Click the link to see more: A Closed Mouth Gathers No Foot

Just like there’s a time to take selfies and a time to refrain.

Want to Love Your Job? Church Can Help

Via ChristianityToday.com:

Regular attenders who frequent a church that teaches God is present at your workplace, work is a mission from God, or that faith can guide work decisions and practices is a good sign for your career, according to a recent study from Baylor University.

Those who often attend churches with that philosophy are more likely to be committed to their work, be satisfied with their work and look for ways to expand or grow the business.

Click the link to see more: Want to Love Your Job? Church Can Help, Study Says | Gleanings | ChristianityToday.com

Channeling the Protestant work ethic?

The Moral Hazards and Legal Conundrums of Our Robot-Filled Future

Via Wired:

…progress in robotics and related fields like AI is raising new ethical quandaries and challenging legal codes that were created for a world in which a sharp line separates man from machine.

Click the link to see more: The Moral Hazards and Legal Conundrums of Our Robot-Filled Future | Science | WIRED

As regulation proliferates, robots may be our only recourse to doing things humans may get regulated out of doing.

4 ways purpose-driven CEOs can align purpose with revenue

Via SmartBlogs:

…visionary CEOs are recognizing that the short-term revenue streams gained from activities that work against a company’s higher purpose are toxic in the long term. Furthermore, this kind of purpose-driven decision-making is being rewarded by investors…

When a CEO clearly defines the higher purpose of the organization―who the organization is and what it stands for―that purpose can be used to see toxic revenue more clearly. To clarify, toxic revenue isn’t necessarily earnings that come from products or services that are inconsistent with a corporate strategy; rather, it is derived from activities that directly conflict with the organization’s purpose.

Click the link to see more: 4 ways purpose-driven CEOs can align purpose with revenue | SmartBlogs SmartBlogs

Should be a standard consideration for business leaders who want to integrate their faith with their work.

The Best Tech Company Logos

Via Business Insider:

…list of the best, most beautiful logos, spanning from startups to more-established companies.

Click the link to see more: The Best Tech Company Logos - Business Insider

Inspiration for marketers.

In a Subprime Bubble for Used Cars, Borrowers Pay Sky-High Rates

Via NYTimes.com:

Auto loans to people with tarnished credit have risen more than 130 percent in the five years since the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, with roughly one in four new auto loans last year going to borrowers considered subprime — people with credit scores at or below 640.

The explosive growth is being driven by some of the same dynamics that were at work in subprime mortgages. A wave of money is pouring into subprime autos, as the high rates and steady profits of the loans attract investors. Just as Wall Street stoked the boom in mortgages, some of the nation’s biggest banks and private equity firms are feeding the growth in subprime auto loans by investing in lenders and making money available for loans.

And, like subprime mortgages before the financial crisis, many subprime auto loans are bundled into complex bonds and sold as securities by banks to insurance companies, mutual funds and public pension funds — a process that creates ever-greater demand for loans.

Click the link to see more: In a Subprime Bubble for Used Cars, Borrowers Pay Sky-High Rates - NYTimes.com

Here we go again.

Likelihood of achieving the American Dream

Via Business Insider:

…the Southeast has a pretty big lack of economic mobility: children from families in the lower parts of the income distribution are, on average, staying in those lower parts.

Meanwhile, in most of the Great Plains (excepting southern South Dakota, which the authors of the paper note include large Native American reservations that have suffered from long-term poverty), children from families earning less than the national average have much better chances of moving to higher income brackets.

Click the link to see more: Equality Of Opportunity Project Map - Business Insider

It would be worth overlaying the map with maps showing other demographic data to display correlations with the degree of economic mobility.

Search-and-rescue drone mission readies for takeoff after defeating FAA

Via Instapundit and Ars Technica:

…a federal judge ruled that the FAA's ban on the commercial use of drones was not binding because flight officials did not give the public a chance to comment on the agency's rules. Congress has delegated rule making powers to its agencies, but the Administrative Procedures Act requires the agencies to provide a public notice and comment period first.

The agency has promised that it would revisit the commercial application of small drones later this year, with potential new rules in place perhaps by the end of 2015. But for now, the agency is taking a hard-line against the commercial use of drones, and it's unclear whether that policy would change.

Click the link to see more: Search-and-rescue drone mission readies for takeoff after defeating FAA | Ars Technica

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles for non-military use will proliferate, so here’s hoping the FAA will figure things out quickly and come up with a way to manage this efficiently. It’s probably not reasonable to expect a laissez faire approach, so let’s hope the FAA proposes some reasonable solutions.

Nadella Just Rejected Ballmer's Vision

Via Business Insider:

He sees the company building the technology like the movie "Her" where computers intelligently do tasks for us, saving us time.

Nadella Just Rejected Ballmer's Vision - Business Insider

The tech opportunity here will be to develop engaging personalities for our machines.

Solution To Tangled Earbuds

Via Business Insider:

…a surefire way to end all earbud tangling: clip them together…clip the two earbuds together and attach them near the audio jack to create a loop

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/solution-to-tangled-earbuds-2014-7#ixzz36vb4lkQo

Solving the problems that keep us up at night.

Want to contribute to awareness about 3D printing?

3DPrint.com is looking for news and writing.

Check out 3D Printing News

Looks like a good way to keep up with developments in 3D printing.

Diminishing and fragmented attention spans

Via Hedgehog Review and Arts and Letters Daily:

For attention has become a critical term at the center of a multitude of social issues and human concerns. We of the elder generation are disposed to worry about the fragmented minds of the younger. We wonder if texting-while-viewing-while-talking-while-eating and never being in the same place at the same time may be having a deleterious effect on the young. Are they incapable of concerted focus? Are they unable to sit and think? Have they been driven (by distraction) to distraction?

And ourselves, those who were educated before the advent of the purportedly deracinating Internet—how does it go with us? Are we slowly losing the coherence of mind we once had? (We did have that, right?) Are we immersing ourselves too far deep into the land where Whirl is King, and slowly becoming distracted citizens of that sadly confused and confusing domain? Have we lost our ability to pay attention? Are we, too, going nuts?

Click the link to see more: IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 16, No. 2 (Summer 2014) - Pay Attention! -

Points:

• “Paying attention is not unrelated to discharging a debt, to offering tribute, to giving the entity that demands the attention something akin to cash.”
• “…the deep opposite of attention isn’t distraction, but absorption.”
• “Happiness is losing yourself in something that you love and that will also, in all probability, come to benefit others.”
• “…distinguish between being absorbed and being mesmerized.”

That last point is important. Paying attention or being absorbed isn’t the same as being entranced by a TV show.

God is dead, long live God

Via Spiked and Arts and Letters Daily:

The quest for a ‘viceroy for God’ has been long and arduous. Eagleton, who likes a list, provides a long one: ‘Reason, Nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity.’ The very survival of religion confirms the difficulty of replacing the complex role it plays in the life of human societies.

Click the link to see more: God is dead, long live God | spiked review of books

The persistent God. The examples listed above don’t seem to the kinds of things in which one might lose oneself.

The best investment advice of all time

Via MSN Money:

We've rounded up the finest market minds -- dead or alive -- and distilled their timeless wisdom into specific suggestions for stocks, bonds and funds you can buy today. Be warned: You just might get rich.

Click the link to see more: The best investment advice of all time - MSN Money

The single takeaway: Pay attention, and don’t lose focus.

Robots in the Office May Not Be Far Off. But Will They Be Safe?

Via NBC News.com:

Mechanized workers in the office are slowly making their way from the pages of science fiction -- not to mention the isolated industrial cages where they have labored in real life for decades -- and working side-by-side with humans. Self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles (aka “drones”), multi-limbed automatons that complete complex tasks and remotely-operated Beam “telepresence” vehicles are increasingly visible in our day-to-day lives.

Click the link to see more: Robots in the Office May Not Be Far Off. But Will They Be Safe? - NBC News.com

The next frontier will be supplying the machines with personalities to ease the collaboration.

Legendary summer convertibles

Via MSN Autos:

Maybe the sun is setting when you stop and put the top down. It's still plenty warm, so a T-shirt is more than enough, and as you roll down the street there is so much more to see, hear and even smell. It's summer and, like the song says, the living is easy. Truth is, while we all have our private open-air memories, the experience is widely varied and the allure of a convertible is as strong as this country is wide. And so convertibles remain American — the unexcelled visibility, the sense of motion, and a warm sun after a long, cold winter are simply too good for the soul.

Click the link to see more: Legendary summer convertibles - MSN Autos#4

The stuff summer daydreams are made of.

America's most expensive states in 2014

Via MSN Money:

…see America's most expensive states to live in, as ranked by CNBC, along with a sampling of the prices you'll pay for some basics in the most expensive area of the state.

Click the link to see more: America's most expensive states in 2014- MSN Money

As you would expect, mostly in the the northeastern United States.

There is virtually no excuse to lack hands-on experience for preparing for certification

Via CertMag:

Many certification candidates rely too heavily on books and other study materials when preparing for Oracle certifications (and I say this as someone who writes certification study materials). To really become proficient with Oracle, IT professionals need hands-on experience working with the software. Most people do not have access to a physical server where they can install Oracle. Virtualization is a solution for this problem that is in several ways better than having a physical server available.

Click the link to see more: There is virtually no excuse to lack hands-on experience - CertMag

Click the link above to read the writer’s 5 ideas.

VC: It's The Beginning Of Tech Investing

Via Business Insider:

Some may be pessimistic about the current state of investing and valuations, but one VC, Mark Suster is sure that we're only at the beginning of tech investing.

Suster, a partner at Upfront Ventures, recently shared a presentation on Slideshare that discusses the current state of the industry and the implications for investors.

Click the link to see more: VC: It's The Beginning Of Tech Investing - Business Insider

Good news for entrepreneurs and VCs.

Financial Crisis Scariest Moments

Via Business Insider:

The plot lines of the financial crisis are well-documented, but it should still give any market watcher pause to stop and think again about the events as they unfolded.

From Lehman's collapse to AIG's bailout, September and October of 2008 were, simply put, absolutely nuts.

Click the link to see more: Financial Crisis Scariest Moments - Business Insider

A recap of the last 5 years.

What Larry Page of Google says is the solution to unemployment caused by technology

Via Business Insider:

…companies should consider hiring two part-time workers to do one full-time job. This way more people are employed, which is better for society.

Click the link to see more: Larry Page's On Unemployment - Business Insider

Will they be the ones commuting a couple of hours one way because they won’t be able to afford living near work?

Does your calling make you miserable?

Here’s a quotation from the book, The Education of a Coach by David Halberstam:

It was not a profession that offered a lot in the way of tranquillity. “My wife has a question she asked me every year for ten years,” Bill Parcells said back in 1993 when he was still married, “and she always worded it the same way: ‘Explain to me why you must continue to do this. Because the times when you are happy are so few.’ She has no concept.”

Halberstam, David (2012-07-17). The Education of a Coach (Kindle Locations 3736-3739). Hyperion. Kindle Edition.

It’s clear for some football coaches like Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick, coaching is their calling. Does that mean you have to be happy all the time?

Stressed? Meditating really does work and you'll see a difference in three days

Via Drudge and Daily Mail:

The participants who received the brief mindfulness meditation training reported reduced stress perceptions to the speech and math tasks, indicating that the mindfulness meditation fostered psychological stress resilience.

Click the link to see more: Stressed? Meditating really does work and you'll see a difference in three days, say researchers | Mail Online

That’s assuming you’re willing to sit still long enough.