13 year old singer

I came across this video and was impressed.
Can somebody tell me what this British TV show is?

Even a talented person takes years, even a decade

I'm a big fan of the radio program “This American Life”. The main personality of the program, Ira Glass seems to be a die-hard public radio guy and very talented. If you hear a couple of episodes of the program (all past episodes are available online), you know what I'm talking about.

And I got to know an interview with him is available on YouTube.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Part 4:


A “O'Reilly Radar” posting and a “Signal vs. Noise” posting mention the part 2 of the interview regarding the importance of discarding not so great things to make a superb thing.

But to me, equally eye-opening was he took a decade or so to get to the level of a good radio reporter/producer. He played his radio reporting at his 8th year as an example of crappy one. He also said that many people cannot bear the gap between their superb taste and their not-up-to-snuff outcome and quit a career. He emphasizes that it's inevitable at the early stage of a career and the only way to overcome that is keep working.

Question your work

I came across a blog posting titled “Question your work” on “Signal vs. Noise”. It tells you to ask the following questions in your work regardless the size of a task/project you are working on:

• Why are we doing this?
• What problem are we solving?
• Is this actually useful?
• Are we adding value?
• Will this change (user) behavior? [(user) is added by me]
  
• Is there an easier way?
• Waht's theopportunity cost?
• Is it really worth it?

I posted it on my PC display at work.

This is along the line with what Tim Ferris said in the presentation titled “The 4-Hour Workweek” on last year's SXSW conference:

Ask your self periodically: Am I productive or just busy? Am I producing something or doing a crutch activity?

The list above is much more concrete and useful to me.

If you are still early in your career, you may not need to worry about what to do and what not to do. But as you grow matured at work, you will need to.

The Myth of the Rational Voter

I listened to a presentation at South by Southwest 2008 titled “The Myth of the Rational Voter”. The presenter was Bryan Caplan, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. It was a counter-argument to The Wisdom of Crowd. He pointed out several examples of The Wisdom of Crowd not holding true. He proceed to ask for re-thinking democracy.

Awesome future of biology

I came across impressive presentations and interviews on biology.

1. “Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention” by Craig Venter
   MP3 file is here.
2. “On the verge of creating synthetic life” by Craig Venter
   You can download the video to iTunes and the MPEG 4 file on the page.
3. “Fighting Virulent Bacteria” on Bio Tech Nation
   MP3 file is here.

Presentation one and two above are similar, but one is more comprehensive while with two you can see slides which help understand the content. So I'd recommend to listen/watch in that order. Both tell that genetic information from newly found micro organisms is mounting at a very rapid pace and no no sign of slowing down. And designing and synthesizing life is becoming reality.

There is a bacteria which makes octane (an ingredient of gasoline) from carbon dioxide and sunlight -- photosynthesis is not the only way for life to materialize sunlight energy. Vender's research team is working on engineering such bacteria so that it does that efficiently.

Interview three above says that a person has 10 times more non human cells than human cells -- we have a huge number of bacteria mainly in gastrointestinal tract. Bioscience now understands the importance of those bacterias. Human being depends on them while they don't.