Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

• Book reviews: Civilization: The West and the rest (Source)
• Consumer response to gas price changes: Inelasticity rules (Source)
• TARP beneficiaries and their lending patterns during the financial crisis (Source)
• Energy, complexity, and sustainability: A historical perspective (Source)
• Non-uniform scaling of prosocial behavior in cities (Source)
• Ski Mountaineering Competition: Fit for It? (Source)
• “VC’s with entrepreneurial backgrounds are just better, period”. True or false ? (Source)
• Replacing the $1 Note with a $1 Coin Would Save U.S. $5b (Source)

A passionate and hugely inspiring talk by the head of Al Jazeera here at TED this week:

• Canada & Australia lead way in latest Economist house price/rent ratios (Source)
• Greenland update for 2010: record melting and a massive calving event (Source)
• Unhealthy Sleep-Related Behaviors — 12 States, 2009 (Source)
• Condemned to Joy: Our unhappy obsession with the cult of happiness (Source)
• The Northeast Snowfall Impact Scale (Source)
• MIT Scientist Captures Son’s First 90,000 Hours and First Words on Video, Graphs It (Source)
• Debunking the “Dennis the dentist” meme (Source)
• Re-engineered NY Times magazine launches (Source)

From a paper that led to a short talk here at this year’s TED, fifteen reasons why news is bad for you:

1. News misleads systematically
2. News is irrelevant
3. News limits understanding
4. News is toxic to your body
5. News massively increases cognitive errors
6. News inhibits thinking
7. News changes the structure of your brain
8. News is costly
9. News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
10. News is produced by journalists
11. Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always
12. News is manipulative
13. News makes us passive
14. News gives us the illusion of caring
15. News kills creativity

BBC on writer David Foster Wallace:

With TED 2011 entering its final day, here are the four best pieces of advice I gave me and took this year:

• Introduce yourself to everyone you think you might ever want to meet but haven’t
• Leave your laptop in your hotel room
• Eat at the food trucks
• Only sit in the first three rows of the main theater

These four things made a great TED experience even better.

• Geothermal Industry Dashboard (Source)
• Nassim Taleb on Charlie Rose (Source)
• Technology Review opens its archive (Source)
• Average information content is a much better predictor of word length than is frequency (Source)
• Congrats to CoverItLive for being acquired (I’m a small shareholder) (Source)

• Interactive Map: Metropolitan Areas and the Next Economy (Source)
• Landscapes and their relation to hominin habitats: Case studies from Australopithecus sites in eastern and southern Africa (Source)
• The end of oil exports is coming (Source)
• Who is Winning the U.S. Smartphone Battle? | Nielsen Wire (Source)
• Broke Town, U.S.A. (Source)

This POV video of a downhill bike race in Santiago, Chile is absolutely nuts:

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

From a reader, a moose charging backcountry x-c skiers in waist-deep snow in Quebec. Fun.