An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers, and diligence, that outpaced their American counterparts.

That's because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn's work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. The scale is unimaginable, he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility's central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world's consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

They could hire 3,000 people overnight, said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple's worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple's engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone's screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That's when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms, white and black shirts for men, red for women, and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

..Self-inflating bike tires keep you up and riding ..Posts .| Today in Tech – 3 hrs ago....tweet13Share3EmailPrint..... Commuting by bicycle is a healthy and eco-friendly option, but if you find yourself with a flat tire halfway to the office, your boss probably won't be happy. And if you're halfway through a day-long pleasure ride through the country with nary an air pump in sight, you'd be in even worse shape. Sure, you could carry a bulky bike pump with you, but that takes up valuable weight and space. To solve this dilemma, San Francisco inventor Benjamin Krempel has come up with an ingenious solution: a tire that keeps itself inflated. The PumpTire system consists of a tire, an inner tube, and a one-way air valve that pulls air into the tire from the atmosphere as the tire meets the ground while it turns. The valve also senses the air pressure within the tire, and keeps inflating until it reaches a certain level, at which point it stops adding air. If the air pressure within the tire falls below that point, it adds more air to bring it back up again. Two versions of the PumpTire will be available initially, the City Cruiser designed for casual cyclists, and the City Pro, which has thinner racing tires and the ability to adjust the target air pressure. They'll sell for $129 and $149 per pair, respectively, but pledging $75 or more on the PumpTire Kickstarter reserves you a pair for just over half price.

As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time). Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy wheel rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered and how much willpower was left in the customer.

Similar results were found in the experiment with custom-made suits: once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions — the ones with the most options, like the 100 fabrics for the suit — they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less.

Books Ngram Viewer Graph these case-sensitive comma-separated phrases: between and from the corpus American English British English Chinese (simplified) English English Fiction English One Million French German Russian Spanish with smoothing of 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 30 40 50 . Run your own experiment! Raw data is available for download here.

Ever been confused at a restaurant in a foreign country and wish you could just scan your menu with your iPhone and get an instant translation? Well as of today you are one step closer thanks to Word Lens from QuestVisual.

The iPhone app, which hit iTunes last night,  is the culmination of 2 1/2 years of work from founders Otavio Good and John DeWeese. The paid app, which currently offers only English to Spanish and Spanish to English translation for $4.99, uses Optical Character Recognition technology to execute something which might as well be magic. This is what the future, literally, looks like.

Alaska Airlines 867 Seattle, WA (SEA)
4:25 pm Thu, Dec 2 Kahului/Maui (OGG)
8:34 pm Thu, Dec 2 Coach · Nonstop · More...§

Total: 2,639 mi · 6 hr 9 min


Alaska Airlines 878 Kahului/Maui (OGG)
9:05 am Thu, Dec 9 Seattle, WA (SEA)
4:40 pm Thu, Dec 9

Mohammed Image Archive

Depictions of Mohammed Throughout History

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

180 million dollars in funding for Zynga from DST, others

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Social games publisher Zynga said Wednesday that it has raised 180 million dollars in funding from Russian Internet company Digital Sky Technologies (DST) and other investors.

I discovered Swoopo through an online ad plugging its latest deal, a fancy desktop computer at more than 90 percent off. If you are already saying to yourself that there is a catch, you are right. Swoopo, which bills itself as an "entertainment shopping" site, combines the addictiveness of auctions and the chance of lotteries into what may be the most devious way to separate folks from their money yet devised.

This spring we have robin's nest on our deck/arbor. We sit and watch the adults feed the chicks while we have dinner in the evenging. The first batch of eggs/chicks just flew away this morning.

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Cool Facts

People who squirm at the sight of bugs or are grossed out by blood and guts are more likely to be politically conservative, new studies find.

In particular, the squeamish are more apt to have conservative attitudes about gays and lesbians.

Lots of other research has tied politics to biology and behavior. Some quick background:

JANITOR INSURANCE

By

Keith Milem

Finance 493 Analysis of Financial Topics Independent Readings

Janitor Insurance

Many of us may not know it, but we may be worth more to our employers dead than alive. The so-called dead peasant, or dead janitor insurance is insurance purchased by companies on low-level employees. This practice is generally done without the knowledge of the employee. When the employee dies, the family receives no benefit. Instead the face value of the policy goes to the company, tax-free[1]. This insurance is also known as corporate-owned Life Insurance or COLI

Rickrolling is an Internet meme typically involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a web link that he or she claims is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link and is led to the web page, he or she is said to have been "Rickrolled" (also spelled Rickroll'd).

I wish I had thought of this--peaches

FORT WORTH, Texas — Researchers in Texas are trying an unusual approach to combat fire ants — deploying parasitic flies that turn the pesky and economically costly insects into zombies whose heads fall off.

A report by the National Academy of Sciences found that if a storm as severe as one in 1859 occurred today, it could cause $1 trillion to $2 trillion in damage the first year and take four to 10 years to recover.

The 1859 storm shorted out telegraph wires, causing fires in North America and Europe, sent readings of Earth's magnetic field soaring, and produced northern lights so bright that people read newspapers by their light.

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on.

BOSTON (Reuters) – Pharmacies across the country are struggling to meet demand for antiviral medications as anxious patients rush to fill prescriptions, raising the specter of supply shortages for those who really need treatment.