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Friday, February 5, 2010

The End of the Beijing Consensus

Since China began undertaking economic reforms in 1978, its economy has grown at a rate of nearly ten percent a year, and its per-capita GDP is now twelve times greater than it was three decades ago. Many analysts attribute the country’s economic success to its unconventional approach to economic policy — a combination of mixed ownership, basic property rights, and heavy government intervention. Time magazine’s former foreign editor, Joshua Cooper Ramo, has even given it a name: the Beijing consensus.

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Lawyers, Guns, and Money

How big banks, powerful lobbyists, sneaky attorneys, and a host of businessmen funnel dirty cash into the US.

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Pecking order

Peter Lennox keeps chickens, and they have taught him a great deal about behaviour, ethics, evolution and the psychopathic nature of modern ‘efficiency’

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Thursday, February 4, 2010

Our world may be a giant hologram

According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

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Crash Blossoms

In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities.

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Azzam the American

The making of an Al Qaeda homegrown.

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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Easy = True

How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel

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How to Survive a 35,000-Foot Fall

You’re six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations—and lived to tell the tale. Here’s PM’s 120-mph, 35,000-ft, 3-minutes-to-impact survival guide.

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The Quiet Revolution

Obama has reinvented the state in more ways than you can imagine.

(Thanks, Heather)

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Monday, February 1, 2010

Neighbors' Keeper

A woman feeds her community in Port-au-Prince.

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