Final arguments due in trial over lead paint:

Paint Makers Try to Hold Off Lead-Hazard Court Ruling:

Final arguments are due today in a trial over whether companies that produced lead paint used to cover hundreds of thousands of homes in California decades ago should have to remove it. If the court rules against paint makers Sherwin-Williams, ConAgra, and DuPont they would have to spend about $2.5B to strip the potentially poisonous paint. The case was filed by 10 city and county governments in California claiming the lead is harmful to children. Parents, please remind your kids not to eat paint chips.

 

LinkedIn denies accusations it "hacks" users email accounts:

LinkedIn denies accusations it “hacks” users email accounts:

Last week a class action lawsuit was filed against LinkedIn for allegedly breaking into the email accounts of its members. LinkedIn responds by asserting its innocence and clearing up “misinformation”. LinkedIn clarifies that they do not access their users email accounts without permission, nor do they send messages or invitations to join LinkedIn on your behalf without your permission. As a LinkedIn member, you are given the option to share your email contacts, which sometimes leads to mass emails inviting them to join the social network. This inadvertently happened to me on gmail once. I have a hard time believing this lawsuit has much merit to it, but perhaps that is because I enjoy LinkedIn and the service they provide so much. I believe LinkedIn is of great value to all professionals, and doing something as foolish as “hacking” users’ accounts in the wake of all the recent online privacy concerns would be the height of stupidity. I encourage you to continue to utilize your LinkedIn account and connect with me here.

 

This Week's Recap and Top Posts

The first week of The Modern Businessman was a great success and I have you to thank for that. There were over 40 posts the first week and I sincerely appreciate everyone visiting the website, reading the posts, sharing, tweeting, and commenting. It really means a lot to me and I hope you found something interesting and of value this week. If you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to reach out. If you’re just visiting the blog or the first time, or haven’t read my Welcome To The Blog post yet, I recommend starting there. Below is a recap of the top posts by views this week. A * next to a post means it was one of my personal favorites.

In order, this week’s top posts were:

  1. The Feds Won’t Taper: The Pundits Got It Wrong, Justin Wolfers Got it Right, and I got lucky. (This post was way out in front because the noted economist Justin Wolfers retweeted it, causing the blog to explode with traffic).
  2. The Weekend Hangover: 20 Links I wanted to post, but didn’t have time to during the week. (Let me know which links were your favorite in the comments section.)
  3. How to Spend Your Breaks at Work to Restore Cognitive Resources:*
  4. Paying Doctors For Performance Leads To Better Care
  5. How to survive a shooting at your office: Run. Hide. Fight.
  6. Mass Shootings By The Numbers
  7. Say Goodbye to the MBTI, The Bad Fad That Won’t Die*
  8. Why Fans Of Bad Teams Are More Likely to Be Obese*
  9. Some interesting data from Ratemyprofessor.com*
  10. The 9 habits of people building a successful future*

Other Featured Posts:

These news articles were picked up and shared by marketwatch.com and nasdaq.com:

A sneak peak ahead to next week: The week will feature a three part series on Innovation using Apple as a case study. A guest author who is brilliant, funny, and industrious wrote the featured post and I’ll be shocked if his piece isn’t the most read and enjoyed post on the blog to date. I laughed and learned a lot reading it. Be sure to check it out.  The first installment is being released tomorrow. 

 

The Weekend Hangover

The Weekend Hangover: All the articles I wanted to post this week but didn’t have time for:

How to remove a fishhook from your finger: This would have been helpful about 15 years ago. I was fishing with my dad and some close family friends in Maine. I think I got bored with fishing and was walking around exploring when I accidently got in the  way of my father’s back cast as he was fly fishing. When he finally casted he said, “I think I lost my fly.” To which I casually replied, “Dad, it’s in my arm.” Rather than pushing it through the skin in my shoulder and cutting off the barb as my uncle mark suggested and is illustrated in the picture here, I had to go to the hospital to get a tetanus shot and get the thing removed.

Speaking of fly-fishing, my dad, and uncle mark…

Here is a beautiful story on fly-fishing by ESPN’s Outside the Lines called Unity with the Universe. Can a fly rod really hold the secret of life? In the central Montana Mountains, a paralyzed man and his wife are proving the answer just might be yes. The photos and videos are breathtaking and worth a look just by themselves. Thank you to my Dad for passing this one along.

The Top 10 Famous Psychological Experiments That Could Never Happen Today: The videos of the experiments are awesome. You’ve probably heard of many of these experiments, but I bet you’ll come across one or two that are new to you. Also, for any psychology instructors, these are good teaching tools.

Neuroscience may help explain financial bubbles: Bubbles may be driven by the biological impulse to predict human behavior.

Beating the stock market has become nearly impossible:

Cracking the social media habits of Millennials: Everything you thought about them is probably wrong.

Joyriding with Ayn Rand: If you realize that she carries a good idea beyond its logical extreme, her books are great. The fact that there is an institute set up to teach the principles of her books is a little bit excessive though.

Insomnia’s Effects on the Brain Aren’t as Bad as They Seem: It just feels like your brain is much and nonfunctional, but insomniacs typically perform comparably well to people with normal sleep patterns on cognitive tests.

The 10 Best Restaurants in Northeast Ohio: I’ve been to some of these and can attest to their deserving to be on the list.

Help! My survey rate is too high!: This sounds like blasphemy, but CEB makes the case.

In Vermont, Stave Puzzles creates to confound: If you haven’t visited Vermont yet, you need to.

What do Flies and Neo have in common? Time passes more slowly for them both: It is quite the evolutionary advantage for them. It’s how they usually get away from you when you go to swat them. When I was in 6th grade, my teacher taught us how to catch flies like the karate kit. The secret is to wait until they land, and then clap your hands together 6-8 inches directly above it. The fly will take off when you move and will fly right between your hands. Try it sometime, you’ll impress your friends.

Pushed to the limit as a banking intern: Last month a 21 year old intern was literally worked to death at a Bank of America branch in London. Here is an interview with another banking intern about his experience. 


25 Guys to Avoid on Wall Street: An extremely funny post, worth glancing over the list.

The 10 Keys to Building Great Teams: Kind of an intuitive post, but just go with it. 

40% of U.S. food is thrown away: Of all the terrible stats I read about each day, this is one of the worst. With all the children going to bed hungry at night or those dying of starvation, this is terrible.

Is a cure for Type 1 Diabetes right around the corner?: I certainly hope so. It’s time to put a Dia-beat-down on Diabetes.

Ivy league schools keep grinding out top minds to the financial world, but the jobs there aren’t what they used to be.

While we’re on the subject… At elite universities, Student Entrepreneurship is all the rage.

Some experts believe Video is the future of recruitment, but I’m not so sure.

Unfortunately this only put a small dent in my reading list. I hope you were able to enjoy a couple of these articles. Good luck with your hangover.

 

House passes bill to avert shutdown, but it won't pass the Senate.

House passes bill to kill Obamacare, avert government shutdown: The legislation that passed in the House to fund federal agencies until mid-December and defund Obamacare is likely to fail in the senate. I’m sure no one is shocked that the Republican-led House passed a bill that would slash spending on food stamps by $40B and defund Obamacare, which the more Democratic senate is expected to reject. The public continues to wait for congress to make an agreement to avert a government shutdown while Democrats and Republicans play ping pong with legislation that will affect all 300 Million Americans.

 

Nasdaq Considers Breakup or Merger

Nasdaq mulls breakup or merger with the London Stock Exchange:

 Nasdaq’s stock price is currently cheap relative to its peers and they are having trouble identifying a successor for current CEO Bob Greifeld so a sale or merger has becoming a viable option for the transatlantic exchange operator. The Nasdaq has had a series of technical difficulties that have halted trading for a period of time in recent weeks. They are also partially responsible for the Facebook IPO debacle. While current CEO Bob Greifeld is only 56 and one year into a five year contract, this does seem like an intriguing opportunity to shake up the global marketplace. 

Pope Says the Church needs to be less obsessive over controversial topics

Pope Says the Church needs to be less obsessive over controversial topics:

It’s been six months since Pope Francis was anointed and the man is making waves. For starters, you can follow him on twitter here, which is pretty cool. Apart from being the first pope with a twitter account, he recently came out and said the church is obsessed with abortion, gay marriage, and contraception and that he will avoid delving further into those divisive issues. His comments shocked the world. Some were excited that one of the foremost world leaders is going to refrain from conversations promoting the restricting human rights. Others were dismayed by this iconoclastic viewpoint. The progressive pope articulated the church should be a home for all and criticized it for putting orthodox views before love and focusing on controversial issues when the larger goal of serving others was being neglected.

To put his remarks in the proper context he also said, “I see the church as a field hospital in battle, it is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol, and about the level of his blood sugars. You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.”  Here the Pope indicates those controversial topics are still troubling issues the church needs to address,  but that they aren’t the current priority since there are more pressing issues that need to be resolved.

This is progress to be clear, but the Pope has not yet changed his view on the topics of abortion, contraception, and gay marriage. He is merely reminding people that the church should be a place of love and requested that they tone down the hate and stop alienating others who want to be members, which is the larger issue for the Church right now. To be clear, a complete turnaround on what has been a steadfast church view would be shocking to the masses and would do more harm than good, so I like this approach as a first step. I bet Pope Francis would have been a great politician and I mean that as a compliment. The real test of his personal views and the direction he will lead the church will be what his next step in this matter will be.

I thought his line, “Who am I to judge?” was extremely powerful. I read that as, if I don’t have the power to judge people on these issues, none of you do. I hope that message resonates throughout the masses and the church. Be depriving himself of this ability, he deprives all those below him of the same ability at the same time. This was a very powerful and impressive move. Unfortunately,  many of his priests in the United States and across the world disagreed with him and took umbrage at his statements.  For a first step in a long process, this was brilliant.

 

Fatty Liver Disease, Typically Associated with Alcoholism, More Prevalent in Children:

Fatty Liver Disease, Typically Associated with Alcoholism, More Prevalent in Children:

1 in 10 children overall and 40% of obese children have fatty liver disease. As you may expect, this was a disease thought primarily to affect adult alcoholics. The disease has no detectable symptoms, but several factors like genetics, obesity, poor diet, and insulin resistance are thought to contribute to its occurrence in both children and adults. The standard treatment for fatty liver disease is to put it on a weight loss plan. Literally. One treats fatty liver disease in adults and children by reducing their weight and body mass index. A healthy lifestyle is the closest thing to a panacea for a variety of maladies, including fatty liver disease. The dangers and prevalence of obesity in America are vast and real, but that is a completely different post. Fatty liver disease, and its prevalence in children, is yet another reason the obesity epidemic needs to be addressed.