Free Chicken Strips

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2010: A Year In Review

It is not easy reviewing a year’s worth of news in a few sentences.

But, when it comes to intrigue, suffering, over-reaction, absurdity, power-politics, hope in the depths of the earth and even a bit of well-orchestrated footy-fun, 2010 has had plenty to offer for us journalists.

As secret documents splashed across the headlines, diplomatic schemes from the masters of the universe fascinated us common people.

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The Terror Of L And R

It’s tough for Japanese to pronounce L and R, isn’t it? If your response is, “Well, not really,” you must either be a super fluent speaker of English or a person who has lived abroad in your childhood. Otherwise, it’s probably fair to say you are just a beginner who hasn’t yet felt the wrath of L and R.

It’s very difficult for Japanese to recognize the difference between L and R because these sounds fall into the Ra, Ri, Ru, Re, Ro liquids¹ category in Japanese. Therefore, in Japanese both L and R are pronounced as one phoneme, but in English L and R are two distinct phonemes.

So, native English speakers often wonder why Japanese can’t distinguish L from R. Also, comedians often use this L-R problem as a model of a typical Japanese accent as material for their jokes. I find any joke based on race to be disgusting, but what makes me feel worse is that it is a fact I can do nothing about.

More at Topics Magazine

Sisyphus On Facebook

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Ex-Googler Helps Users Disconnect From The Social Web

In October, Google engineer Brian Kennish debuted Facebook Disconnect, a Chrome extension that wipes out virtually all evidence of Facebook from your Web experience. Since then, Kennish has quit his job with Google to focus entirely on Disconnect, another extension for Chrome and RockMelt that aims to help users to block the larger scope of tracking devices on the increasingly social Web.

Kennish released Facebook Disconnect in October and the extension quickly gained popularity, hitting the top 10 list of Google Chrome extensions. He told us that he quit his job at Google three weeks later so that he could “develop tools that make it trivial for the average user to understand and control the data they share whenever they browse or search the Web.” He said that he thinks Google is “collecting more personal data than any other company” and “to fight for user privacy while working there would’ve been impossible.”

Disconnect, similar to his earlier project, blocks a number of third-party widgets from sites like Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo, as well as de-personalizes search at the cookie level, allowing you to remain logged-in to services like iGoogle or Gmail without having your search queries attached to your Google profile.

More at ReadWriteWeb

Why Businesses Can't Stand Free Markets

For almost two decades, the monks of St. Joseph Abbey in Covington, Louisiana, supported themselves by making and selling unadorned handmade pine and cypress caskets.

But if embalmers and funeral directors in the state of Louisiana have their way, the monks will be barred from earning a living by making coffins without a license issued by a state government board, eight of whose nine members work in the funeral industry.

Business people love to say how much they cherish free markets, all the while decrying government that limits entrepreneurialism and personal freedom.

But the truth is there is nothing most business people like less than free markets.

More at Bloomberg

The Digital Dump

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An Entrancing Entrance

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Trauma: How We've Created A Nation Addicted To Shopping, Work, Drugs And Sex

From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Canadian physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing.

Dr. Maté is the bestselling author of four books: When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection; Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It; and, with Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers; his latest is called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

In our first conversation, Dr. Maté talked about his work as the staff physician at the Portland Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, a residence and harm reduction facility in Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood with one the densest concentrations of drug addicts in North America. The Portland hosts the only legal injection site in North America, a center that’s come under fire from Canada’s Conservative government. I asked Dr. Maté to talk about his patients.

More at AlterNet

Cash Flow Illustrated

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