larryhammer | "Ashes to beauty, rust in lust / passion attempts, misguided trust" (Reply)

As part of our strategic vision of diversifying this journal's commercial offerings, we must also not lose touch with our core competencies and maintain our corporate mission. While effecting a paradigm shift it is all too easy to lose focus and end up falling between both stools, thus weakening our overall portfolio. Even as we must think outside the box in order to retain our competitive edge, we also cannot throw its contents out with the bathwater. Therefore, as one component of reiterating our basic strengths, at this time I am pleased to announce the release of a new version of our premium linkblogging product -- on time, under budget, and with more of what our customer base is asking for of us.

The scientific basis for learning type models (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, et cet.) is not as well-grounded in research as you might wish. (via ???)
OTOH, other research suggests that in life as in art, our weaknesses are also our strengths, in a different context. The discussion of plasticity can also be compared to the result from thermodynamics that only noisy physical quantities can be variables. (via)
Department of It's All Going Downhill:
The new managerial class tended to neglect process innovation because it was hard to justify in a quarterly earnings report, where metrics like “return on investment” reigned supreme. “In an era of management by the numbers, many American managers … are reluctant to invest heavily in the development of new manufacturing processes,” Hayes and Abernathy wrote. “Many of them have effectively forsworn long-term technological superiority as a competitive weapon.” By contrast, European and Japanese manufacturers, who lived and died on the strength of their exports, innovated relentlessly. (via)
Department of It's Always Been Going Downhill:
An Assyrian clay tablet dating to around 2800 B.C. bears the inscription: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.” (via)
A lesson from a native speaker in how to pronounce the clicks in Xhosa. (via)
An oldy but goody, pointing to the archived version as the original seems to have gone 404: The Pillow Blog, or Sei Shonagon Has an LJ. (via)
Octopuses have been observed carrying coconut shells as portable protection. More tool use by animals. (via)
Annoyed by some of those little things in daily life? The Complaints Choir of Tokyo has you covered. Warning: there's a long, if pretty, introit that does not reflect the jazzy accompaniment to come.
And for the training of the future mad scientist in your life, appropriate alphabet blocks. (via)