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the lamest


Study Finds Earth Located In Lamest Part Of Universe

PARIS—Citing factors ranging from the dumb, ugly asteroid belt separating the terrestrial planets from the gas giants, to the super-boring and practically empty interstellar medium extending in nearly every direction, new research published Wednesday by the International Astronomical Union has concluded that Earth is located in “by far the lamest” region of the observable universe. “Despite years of intensive analysis, we have failed to uncover even a single pulsar, black hole, lenticular galaxy, binary star system, quasar, or any other cool stuff within 50 light years of this stupid dump of a solar system,” read the study, which noted that to date, no telescope—either ground-based or in earth orbit—has been able to locate a portion of space more dull and tiresome than our own. “Maybe if we were a little closer to the center of the Milky Way galaxy instead of piddling away on one of its lame-ass outer arms, that’d be one thing, but we are right smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. All we’ve got is a bunch of crappy old cosmic background radiation and dumb-as-shit magnetic fields out here. Ugh.” The study’s authors added that they “so wish” they were on board one of the Voyager probes currently racing out of this mind-numbingly shitty planetary backwater.

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Amazon

 

10.25.13

Amazon Stock May Be Up, but the Company Still Doesn’t Make Any Money

That glowing new bestseller, that Friday stock bump, that rosy Christmas outlook—they can’t hide that after 20 years, the company still hasn’t managed to turn a profit. Daniel Gross on whether it ever will.
Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos, its founder and chief executive officer, are having a moment. They are the subject of a new, admiring bestselling book, The Everything Store, by Brad Stone. Bezos just plunked down $250 million to buyThe Washington Post. The buoyant stock, up 64 percent in the past year, got a nice jolt on Friday as investors were enthused about its third-quarter results: revenues were up 24 percent from a year ago, and Amazon issued a positive forecast for the Christmas season. The company is killing it in books and retailing goods, has a rapidly growing cloud storage and computing business, and is getting into original content and devices. It sports an impressive market capitalization of about $166 billion.

And yet.

The company, first founded in 1994, still doesn’t make any money. In the third quarter, it reported a $41 million net loss.

 

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Think Lean

Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, “lean“, is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, “value” is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.

Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as “lean” only in the 1990s.[1][2] TPS is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world’s largest automaker,[3] has focused attention on how it has achieved this success.

Continue reading “Think Lean”

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Data explorer

Logan Symposium: Google Public Data Explorer from Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism on FORA.tv

4th Annual Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting

Read more at http://fora.tv/2010/04/18/Logan_Symposium_Google_Public_Data_Explorer#uXLe1TU6lWF4IJp2.99

Uploaded on Jun 2, 2010

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2010/04/18/Logan_Sympo…

Using Google’s new Public Data Explorer tool, Ola Rosling demonstrates the effectiveness of visualizing datasets. Looking toward the next political election, Rosling hopes voters will use the tool to answer questions like: How was the money spent? Where are the biggest problems?

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Ola Rosling of Google Public Data gives a presentation titled, “Google Public Data Explorer” at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. This program was recorded on April 18, 2010.

Ola Rosling co-founded the Gapminder Foundation and led the development of Trendalyzer, a software that converts time series statistics into animated, interactive and comprehensible graphics. The aim of his work is to promote a fact-based world view through increased use and understanding of freely accessible public data.

In March 2007, Google acquired the Trendalyzer software, where Rosling and his team are now scaling up their tools and making them freely available for any individual or organization to use for analyzing and visualizing data.