Nine Lives - Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief by Bill Mason

After several months of this Fran told me a friend of hers had a very private two -bedroom condo for rent in the Georgetown Villas in Lyndhurst. I knew it was dicey, but by then I missed having an actual home so much, I thought it would be worth the risk. I took the place using my "John Welling" alias and set up housekeeping. First thing I did was indulge my legitimate paranoia and build an escape hatch in case the police came through the front door. I cut a hole in the ceiling of a closet that would let me climb up to an attic, then marked out where I could break back down into an adjoining condo and get away. This contingency arrangement made me feel a little better about the chance I was taking.

I came into the Broward County Jail in Florida for a three-month stretch (I'll explain why soon) at the age of thirty-six with my back straight and showing no fear. I cast dirty looks at the more intimidating of my fellow inmates, which got me a lot of catcalls and derisive remarks at first, but I kept it up and didn't look away. The jail wasn't well designed, and was kind of just an afterthought extension to the courthouse, so there was no exercise yard — in effect, we were on twenty-four hour lockdown — but I did chin-ups by the hundreds on the cell-block bars to demonstrate my upper-body strength. It wasn't to show off but to make sure guys knew I wasn't some couch-potato white-collar embezzler who couldn't and wouldn't defend himself. Early on I established that I wouldn't take too kindly to someone trying to f* me in the ass, that I'd rather get killed fighting back and would make sure to seriously damage..

The Difference Between Brits and Americans

Something tells me this talk would take an American woman half the time to deliver... what could be the reason?

http://www.ted.com/talks/rose_george_inside_the_secret_shipping_industry.htmlhttp://www.ted.com/talks/rose_george_inside_the_secret_shipping_industry.html

Takeaways :

Habitat of the North Atlantic Whale has been reduced 90%. Why? These sea geniuses can communicate over an entire ocean (yes, you're talking a thousand or more miles!) and can be drowned out by a container ship.
The 15 largest ships in the world cause as much pollution as all the cars in the world put together! So much for peaceful well-behaved Scandinavians! They're the scum! Look at the list - no wonder Europeans are screaming about global warming - and pointing the finger at us. Coz they are the real culprits!

Wisdom from Ashley Merryman : Top Bitch - The Science of Competition

A fallacy about team performance : In order for the team to perform well, everyone must be friends. False! Research says it's the other way around. Relationship quality derives from team performance..

When teams are failing, the poor performance upsets their members and they vent their f on each other. When performance is good, no one cares about the friction. Members will even say their success was due to the cooperative style of the team, even when independent observers report that the team was quarreling most of the time. Some famous teams were known for their internal hostility : Abe Lincoln's "Team of Rivals", the Manhattan Project (really? evidence woman!), and the Mercury astronauts were "famously at one anothers' throats."

Constant harmony is actually cause for alarm (that's why Samsung gets screwed by AAPL every year - think Korean culture vs Steve Jobs' rodding). Conflict-free operation means no one is bringing anything to the table that might engender controversy. The team isn't focused on purpose - but rather on protecting relationships. In this case, the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

Hackman of Harvard : Research on 70+ US and EU orchestras - the better the orchestra sounded, the more likely there was rivalry and discord behind the scenes!

Teams are always seen as the panacea, and never as the problem.
Successful teams are always as small as possible to get the job done.
In a small team, people feel responsible for the project and have a sense of what everyone else is doing.
This becomes hard as the team size grows.
In great teams, teammates anticipate the others moods and needs. They don't need to be told what needs to be done.
Teams that struggle have meetings, lots of meetings. And in those meetings, they talk a lot.
Successful teams communicate in short, clear sentences and communication is reciprocal. Requests are made and then, there's a confirmation that a request has been received, understood and will be acted upon.
On struggling teams, communication is dominated by fewer people, making longer soliloquiys.
On great teams, teammates trust that each team member will do his best.
On struggling teams, team members worry about freeloaders, mates not working hard enough, or stealing credit for others' work - which leads them to work less harder themselves - think back to what Jobs said about keeping only A-players on your team..

What science has to offer - the important work in the building of the team happens before any teamwork happens at all..

Forget Techion. Topcoder's Tutorials Take You All the Way

http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=tutorials&d2=alg_index

Author	Title
lbackstrom	The Importance of Algorithms
antimatter	How To Dissect a TopCoder Problem Statement
Dumitru	How to Find a Solution
leadhyena_inran	Planning an Approach to a TopCoder Problem:  - Section 1  - Section 2
dimkadimon	Mathematics for TopCoders
lbackstrom	Geometry Concepts:  - Section 1: Basic Concepts  - Section 2: Line Intersection and its Applications  - Section 3: Using Geometry in TopCoder Problems
gladius	Introduction to Graphs and Their Data Structures:  - Section 1: Recognizing and Representing a Graph  - Section 2: Searching a Graph  - Section 3: Finding the Best Path through a Graph
supernova	Greedy is Good
Dumitru	Dynamic Programming: From novice to advanced

http://apps.topcoder.com/wiki/display/tc/Competition+Confidentiality+Agreement+%28CCA%29

Jacob Beningo : How to Hire a Good Programmer

Good programmers :

• Write structured, maintainable code
• Document their code in a clear manner
• Recognize and reuse design patterns
• Are passionate about writing code (find it fun)
• Never stop learning and honing skills
• Enjoy challenges
• Thoroughly test their work
• Are humble and adapt to change easily
• Strive for perfection but identify limits

Crappity : Punching Holes in Theory

The moving Gravity is founded on utter crap. Don't watch it - save your money. In fact, very few Hollywood movies are worth watching anymore.. Go for the old ones.

Here's the BS they're feeding us in Crappity :

Objects in the same orbit are traveling at different speeds - who can fall for such crap. "90 minutes - that's how much time we have" the idiot hoary Cloony croons. Really? First, if there's an explosion, and you're getting material coming at you, if it's at a faster pace than you're orbiting at, it's going to move into a different orbit!! Duh!! Then, what about the material that went the opposite way? If your theory is good, and a 50 year old woman can have legs like that without touching up the video, then the debris that went the other way should be coming at your in less than 90 minutes if you just took a hit from stuff that came at you 5 minutes after the collision.

Boasting : Lumosity Word Bubbles

They said 1.6% of their users have made it to 15 tiles in Memory Matrix. How many have gotten 1800 in a word-bubbles prefix session?

A Non-Crappy Gaussian Distribution Calculator

I'll save you grief and time. You want something accurate to 9 decimal places. That's my assumption.

If your range is symmetric, just do this : assume mean is 0, sigma is 1 (yes, normalize before you read further). Now, you want to know how many samples can be outside of -x,+x. How?

Go to to http://www.wolframalpha.com/ and enter erf( x / sqrt(2) )

Of course, having come here, you're smart enough to put your actual number instead of x.

If you want something that can't quite hack 10 digits, just go to

http://calculator.tutorvista.com/normal-distribution-calculator.html

Even the Solido genius Amit can't do better than this.

Misao Okawa : Survivor of Japan's Feudal Age

After escaping a mounted-Samurai's sword-strike that almost sent her to the same place as O'ren Ishii, Misao-san lived to see it all - a vicious conquest of Japan's neighbours and an ignoble surrender to the Gaijin.

In the end, Japan is the victor - sort of. Someday I'll understand these people and what makes them tick.

Rumour has it she is concerned her kids won't last much longer since they're both over 90.

My link to a super centenarian : a close friend, now in her 60's told me (a couple years ago) that a lady-doctor her mother had taken her to, when she was a child, recently passed away at 111.

Metastability in Logic Circuits

http://www.signalpro.biz/meta1.pdf