It may look like a geologic find, but the three-pound red and white fossil heading for auction in New York is actually a pile of dinosaur dung.

Bonhams New York puts the prehistoric deposit up for sale Wednesday along with such items as a 30,000-year-old woolly mammoth tusk, a giant beaver skull and a skeleton of a Russian Cave Bear.

The dung looks like a rock on the outside and a colorful mineral inside. It’s 130 million years old and is expected to sell for between $350 and $450.

The auction house is selling some items that are more than 438 million years old.

The priciest item up for sale is the Fukang Meteorite, which weighs almost a ton, expected to sell for more than $2.25 million.

{ AP/1010 WINS | Continue reading }

Working alone may be the key to better productivity, new research suggests.

You may not be aware of it - they might not be aware of it, but the people in your work environment might be slowing you down.
New research by University of Calgary, Faculty of Kinesiology researcher Dr. Tim Welsh says that regardless of their intentions, having an individual working on a different task - within your field of vision - could be enough to slow down your performance.

“Imagine a situation like a complex assembly line,” said Welsh. If you are doing a particular task and the person across from you is doing a different task, you’ll be slowed down regardless of their performance.”

The reason for this is a built-in response-interpretation mechanism that is hard-wired into our central nervous systems. If we see someone performing a task we automatically imagine ourselves performing that task. This behaviour is part of our mirror neuron system.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

I have a rude coworker who does everything in a loud and abrasive manner. She constantly burps, gasps and sighs. She slams desk drawers and filing cabinet drawers very loudly. She even shuffles papers LOUDLY.

She also eats food with her mouth open and often will talk with food in her mouth. People in our department have changed their lunch hours to not be in the break room with her because it is so disgusting.

{ Ask Carmen Courtesy | Continue reading }

Declines in the prices of existing single family homes across the United States worsened in February 2008, with 17 of the 20 regions now reporting record low annual declines — 10 of the 20 regions were in
double-digits:

“There is no sign of a bottom in the numbers. Prices of single family homes continue to drop across the nation. All 20 metro areas were in the red for the February-over-January reading.

{ Barry Ritholtz | Continue reading }

Apple this week bought a fabless chip company called PA Semiconductor and pundits far and wide are trying to explain the deal with broadly varying ideas, some of which are close but none seem to really understand what the deal is about. In the short term this acquisition means precisely nothing to Apple users. In the long term it could be quite significant, however, and gives a number of tantalizing hints about Apple’s hardware strategy.

Why would Apple, having already jumped from PowerPC to Intel, spend $278 million to buy a company that is best known for designing PowerPC chips? Are they preparing to dump Intel? No. Does it have anything to do with Intel? Yes.

This deal has Steve Jobs’ fingerprints all over it. His first formal position at Apple was as head of purchasing and Jobs was known for pushing suppliers to ever lower component prices. He still brings to his work a purchasing manager’s perspective and a desire to beat up suppliers whenever possible. So in that sense this acquisition is all about Intel. And the purchase price, which probably appeared to have been pulled right out of the air by Jobs, who then wouldn’t budge from the figure, is really based on Apple’s target savings over the next two years after forcing Intel to cut prices based on fear of a possible Apple switch back to PowerPC.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

What do you think pharmaceutical companies spend most of their money on? R&D: the search for new drugs? Think again.



True, pharma companies spend a great deal on R&D; studies show it comprises about 14% of their revenues. Yet, they spend about 1/3 of their revenues on Marketing. That’s right, on average, pharmaceutical companies spend two to three times as much on the Marketing of a drug as on its development. (…)



By far the largest chunk of these marketing expenses are taken up by the practice of “detailing”; that is, a vast army of company representatives visit physicians to shower them with information, free samples, and persuasive arguments (and a “healthy dose” of free gifts and travel), claiming that the company’s drug is wonderful and really does what it says on the tin. The raison d’etre of this practice is that physicians – human as they (often) are – only remember and hence only prescribe a limited number of drugs; much fewer than are in existence. Therefore it is important for a pharma company to make sure that physicians know their drugs; they’ll hammer them into their brains (with brute force if necessary!).



Moreover, over the last decade or so, the army of representatives has been expanding with particular vigour. For example, in the US alone, between 1996 and 2000, the herd of quacks with their suitcases full of pills and ointments rose from an already impressive 41,800 to a fearsome 83,000 pharma-suits.

{ Freek Vermeulen | Continue reading }

Thousands of people in Africa will be paid to avoid unsafe sex, under a groundbreaking World Bank-backed experiment aimed at halting the spread of Aids.

The $1.8m trial – to be launched this year – will counsel 3,000 men and women aged 15-30 in southern rural Tanzania over three years, paying them on condition that periodic laboratory test results prove they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections.
The proposed payments of $45 equate to a quarter of annual income for some participants.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

The “conservative” Swiss banking giant UBS — and I put that in quotes for obvious reasons — wrote down a previously unimaginable $37 Billion dollars. Their shareholders were (ahem/cough) quite perturbed. So the nice folks at UBS, with an assist from KPMG, put together a 50 page report detailing the hows and whys UBS took such a humungo hit.

For what you would expect to be a dry report, it is absolutely compelling reading. It explains much more than the subprime fiasco. The report implies that management didn’t really understand what the hell they were getting into with their purchases of Warburg/Dillon Read Capital Management. This unit eventually became UBS’ internal hedge fund (it has since been shut down).

I wonder if management ever truly understands the nuts and bolts of these large acquisitions. (…)

{ Barry Ritholtz | Continue reading }

Buried at the end of the report discussed earlier is the specific criticism of the financial compensation system in place at UBS for traders and the engineers of structured products.

The bigger question is how little their quaint little system differs from any other large bank or brokerage firm on Wall Street.

{ Barry Ritholtz | Continue reading }

screenshot { The Shining, 1980 | more }

A landlord couple have been charged in San Francisco with waging a campaign of terror against their renters in a South of Market building, including cutting out the floor supports at one apartment after the tenant went to court to keep from being evicted, authorities said Wednesday.

Software engineer Kip Macy, 33, and real estate agent Nicole Macy, 32, who have addresses in Sausalito and Incline Village, Nev., were arrested Tuesday and charged with felony stalking, felony residential burglary, conspiracy and other counts in the bizarre case of apparent landlord rage.

The charges stem from tactics the Macys allegedly used after they bought a six-unit, three-story apartment building on Clementina Street for $995,000 in 2005 and started eviction proceedings against the five tenants living there.

When one of the tenants, Scott Morrow, successfully fought eviction, the couple allegedly told workers in September 2006 to cut the beams that supported his apartment’s floor. They also shut off Morrow’s electricity, cut his phone line and had workers saw a hole in his living room floor from below.

{ San Francisco Chronicle | Continue reading }

screenshot { Michael Jackson’s Thriller | watch the video }

A local man is actively trying to take possession of hurricane-ravaged houses – and deputies are actively trying to stop him, police said.

According to the St. Bernard Sheriff’s Office, Jesse Bryant, 47, was booked with burglary and criminal trespassing after posting signs in yards of damaged houses reading “I, Jesse Bryant, take possession of this abandoned property.”

Police said he went so far as to change the locks in one house at a subdivision – effectively keeping the real owner out of his own house.

{ WDSU | Continue reading }

Learning how to turn a flashlight into a laser is not a top priority for most people. Yet Kip Kedersha’s step-by-step instructional video that teaches how to do just that has been seen online by more people (1.88 million) than live in Manhattan (about 1.6 million).

Mr. Kedersha’s online library of 94 videos includes tips on how to chill a Coke in two minutes, simulate a gunshot wound and start up a PC quickly.
Many of the clips have been played hundreds of thousands of times, turning Mr. Kedersha into the top earner on Metacafe, a video-sharing Web site that pays the makers of popular videos. In little more than a year, the site has written him checks totaling $102,000.

That puts Mr. Kedersha, a 50-year-old video producer from St. Petersburg, Fla., near the front of the latest online stampede: the rush to capitalize on the popularity of how-to videos on the Web. (…)

Most clips tend to run a few minutes or less — but not all. In a series of videos running a total of more than five hours, an Australian veteran of the Vietnam War demonstrates in minute detail how to build a replica of a working Sherman tank at two-fifths its original scale.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { How to build your own Sputnik }

Looking for a cushy job with great pay and low responsibility? Be a bank CEO!

Here’s how it works:

* Take the job after an economic downturn, when your predecessor is forced out after presiding over the loss of billions in bad-debt and trading write-offs (don’t worry, your predecessor won’t starve in retirement).

* Immediately take huge additional write-offs and reserves and blame them on your predecessor. Clean up balance sheet so your performance bar is so low you could fall over it.

* Announce “new era” in which Your Bank will focus on conservative, fee- and spread-based businesses in which you grow steadily and prudently.

* Smile for the cameras. Have PR people place a Fortune cover story entitled “The Wizard Who Turned Around [Your Bank”]!

* Announce that, given the huge opportunities in the markets, Your Bank will take a bit more risk (prudent, of course) to improve return on equity.

* Encourage your traders to make huge bets.

* Sit in your chair for three years and collect at least $50 million a year during rest of bull market while those bets pay off.

* When market finally turns (sorry, it always does), briefly deny that the downturn will affect Your Bank.

* When it’s clear that your traders were just bull-market geniuses and have gambled away all the “profits” Your Bank booked in the previous three years, blame them and express disappointment. Then hang around to see whether market cares.

* If market demands resignation, resign, collect $500 million severance, and join private equity firm.

* If market yawns, re-up for another cycle and do it all over again!

{ Huffington Post }

photo { Jessica Dimmock, Charlie Counting Money, 2004 }

related { The director general of the CBI has singled out the bonus culture that has turned thousands of bankers into millionaires as one of the central factors in creating the huge financial problems now engulfing the banking sector worldwide. }

Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal has been swift and smooth—till now. Marcus Brauchli, the Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal, is reported to be quitting his position.

Brauchli was one of the few Journal managers who tacitly supported the takeover of the Journal by Murdoch’s News Corporation, hoping the removal of the Bancroft family and a deep-pocketed backer would free a newspaper which had become hidebound.

But the Australian media mogul, and his lieutenants, have shown growing impatience with the Journal’s resistance to their plans. Murdoch plans to turn the Journal into a full-fledged competitor to the New York Times.

{ Gawker | NY Times }

related { One of Rupert Murdoch’s companies is going on trial for charges that it hired hackers to sabotage a rival company and gain the top spot in the global pay-TV war }