Proverbs

“Only when the last tree has withered, the last fish has been caught, and the last river has been poisoned, will you realize you cannot eat money.” 

– Cree Tribe ( Native Americans)

Johns Hopkins scientists discover a controller of brain circuitry

By combining a research technique that dates back 136 years with modern molecular genetics, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist has been able to see how a mammal’s brain shrewdly revisits and reuses the same molecular cues to control the complex design of its circuits.

Read more at:  Eureka alert

Arctic Could Face Warmer and Ice-Free Conditions

Source: United States Geological Survey

There is increased evidence that the Arctic could face seasonally ice-free conditions and much warmer temperatures in the future.

Asthma Gene May Show Connection to Allergies, Way to Treatments

A gene linked to asthma susceptibility in children has been identified that may reveal the respiratory disease’s connection to allergies and lead to new treatment for 6 million U.S. child asthmatics, a study said.

My favorite Business and Finance Blogs

Though I’m into Science and Technology, I’m more passionate about business and finance. I never had a chance to learn about stocks, bonds, investments, futures, pasts. It’s still complicated and  difficult to learn.  I have few blogs from where I slowly teach my self all about business.

Single Molecule sequencing

One day Helicos would make $1000 genome possible

What an employer looks for in an employee

Basic qualities

As a small business owner, I think these are the basic qualities an employer looks for in an employee:

• They generally know how to do their job. (The level of supervision they need can vary depending on their experience.)
• They show up for work every day.
• There are no important problems with their personalities.
• They have a good work ethic, and will do what their boss asks of them.

Problem employees

On the other end of the spectrum there are the “problem employees”. These are the attributes that I see in problem employees, i.e., the things that will get you fired without much notice, or will make you the first person to be laid off in a bad economy:

• Some part of their personality is a problem. They don’t fit in, they are anti-social, constantly argumentative, they lead the gossip pool, they have a “can’t-do, sky is falling” attitude, etc.
• They don’t give you an eight-hour workday. They either take a lot of breaks, spend a lot of time socializing, or sneaking around doing personal things that don’t pertain to work while they’re being paid to work, or have other issues in their personal lives.
• They don’t know how to do their job.

Employees who get big raises and promotions

My final list shows the attributes of employees that get better raises and promotions than everyone else:

• They have a positive, can-do, team-oriented personality and work ethic.
• They get their work done with little or no supervision.
• They offer ways to improve the way things are done.
• They may be the best at what they do.
• They are capable of leading or managing other people.

Where this comes from

I’m motivated to write this for several reasons. First, I’ve run into several people lately who either

(a) don’t know what they’re doing

(b) don’t put in full days

(c) have poor attitudes, what Zig Ziglar calls “a hardening of the attitude”.

While I’m in this neighborhood, this discussion reminds me of my ex-business partner. As a consultant, I worked with a small team of developers at a client site, and my partner would often say “If D, or R, or N have to come back to the office we’re going to have to lay them off”. He was extremely pessimistic for someone in a “leadership” position, and these people had done nothing to deserve to be laid off asap. They were all good people and good workers.

Alvin Alexander have worked in the programming field for 20 years now, starting with languages like Fortran and C, then moving to Java, Perl, PHP, and Ruby and he  also founded a consulting company named Mission Data

A day in the WWW

MAHALO – A new human powered search engine

Mahalo, a human-powered search engine dedicated to help people easily find information and resources they can trust. Mahalo launched in public alpha in May of 2007, added the freelance-fueled Mahalo Greenhouse in June and graduated to public beta in October of that year.

In December 2008, Mahalo introduced Mahalo Dollars through the addition of Mahalo Answers. The Greenhouse closed down after Mahalo introduced Mahalo Tasks and Page Management in June, 2009.

This human-powered search engine is also a knowledge sharing service. Mahalo aims to help users from all corners of the Internet, quickly find the most accurate possible information on any topic. Mahalo users are encouraged to join Mahalo and share their expertise in exchange for Mahalo Dollars, which can be cashed-out. This page can be the start off point for every new Mahalo user as it offers manuals to all of the features found within Mahalo.com.

Mahalo works by tipping it’s users for providing accurate and helpful internet research. Anybody can get started at earning for research by Answering questions for Mahalo. Just try it out and find it’s other interesting features.

Best sites that instruct you How To Do anything

These four sites would help us to do every single thing we want. Most of the articles are in video format which is an added advantage. Let us see the features of  each site.

Howcast

Howcast is all about videos – videos on everything from “How to Clean a CD Player” to “How to Dine Out With Family.” The videos offer simple (often tongue-in-cheek) instructions that make learning these skills simple. Each video starts with a list of what you’ll need, and then walks you through all the necessary steps and information, breaking everything down in a way anyone can understand.

Some of the videos are more funny than useful videos that kindly reminds you to bring your killer right hook and/or a change of underwear, just in case of a bear attack. The funny ones are worth watching anyway, and they’re outnumbered by the ones with practical information that’ll help you learn how to do any of Howcast’s tackled subjects.

WikiHow

A Wikipedia-style handbook for how to do anything. It’s created, edited and maintained by the community, and anyone can edit any page. Sounds like it wouldn’t work for a How-To, but it does – in the same way Wikipedia manages to work. There are some strict guidelines for users as far as how to put an article together, which makes for a simpler, more consistent read across the site. All the articles have short, simple steps, and everything is kept to a minimum to make actually doing things easier.

The cool thing about WikiHow is that since anyone can contribute, there’s a ton of articles about how to do somewhat random things – whatever people know how to do they tend to share, regardless of how niche-friendly it might be.

eHow

eHow is a huge resource of instructions, both written and video, on how to do just about anything. The site boasts over 500,000 articles and videos, all created by professionals – the quality here is often higher than on a site like WikiHow.

You can browse the articles by category, see the most popular eHows, or search for what you need. There are ratings and comments on every one, which gives you a sense both of how good the article is, and what it might have missed. As always, people are pretty smart, and everyone’s got their tips on how to do things a little bit better – the community part of eHow is one of its best features.

Instructables

Instructables is all about DIY (Do It Yourself) projects. It’s a huge repository of how to pull together household objects or cheap parts, and make something cool out of them.

Most of the articles have a video associated, and they’re all broken down into simple steps, always with lots of pictures to make life even easier. Instructables is the perfect site if you’re looking for something useful to do.