alex.moskalyuk

I am reading Starbucked by Taylor Clark, and the book is quite enjoyable, both as a look inside the coffee industry, and as a business case study of Starbucks. Clark dedicates an entire chapter to fair trade coffee practices, that I wasn’t too familiar with, but as anybody else, assumed it was a Good Thing. Fair trade coffee practices, controlled by a non-profit TransFair USA, pay farmers participating in the program $1.26 a pound for regular coffee, and $1.31 for certified organic. Under the fair trade label it’s resold to you at $12-15 a pound, making the retailer quite a winner in this transaction (originally fair trade was supposed to eliminate the middleman, and thereby lower the final cost of coffee).

When the price of coffee beans can occasionally go under 40c, this seems like a good deal, if you’re a coffee farmer, so what’s the catch?

1. Fair trade contracts are binding, and requiring the coffee bean farmers to commit to $1.26-$1.31 even if market surges (as it does when there’s a cold summer in Brazil). Ok, this is a bit hypothetical, but coffee markets have been known to swing wildly nevertheless. In 2006 Starbucks (the largest seller of fair trade coffee in the US) has actually paid its non-fair-trade growers an average of $1.42 per pound. Oops.
2. TransFair requires that each coffee farm participating in the program be coop-owned and employ no outside seasonal labor. This rules out private farms, family-owned farms, and corporation-owned farms. A family of coffee bean growers starts out a farm, hires seasonal labor to pick the beans, and wants to sell it as fair trade coffee? TransFair doesn’t let those capitalist pigs get anywhere near the application form.
3. Roasters admit that fair trade coffee is of inferior quality. While the rest of the coffee farms have to compete in lower-priced open market, they frequently do it by quality of their product. When a fair trade farm is guaranteed $1.26-$1.31 a pound, the economic rationales start to take over, and growers always try to cut their costs to enjoy higher profit margins.
4. TransFair requires every participant in the fair trade program - retailer or coffee grower - to sign a release form promising never to criticize the program in public.

There was a lengthy article earlier this month in The New York Times on the importance of doing pushups, and how it’s an all-around exercise, responsible for exercising quite a few muscles in a human body.

The push-up is the ultimate barometer of fitness. It tests the whole body, engaging muscle groups in the arms, chest, abdomen, hips and legs. It requires the body to be taut like a plank with toes and palms on the floor. The act of lifting and lowering one’s entire weight is taxing even for the very fit.

Then there’s a blog post on NYT site as well, featuring 93-year-old Jack LaLanne, who still incorporates push-ups into his daily workout. They link to push-up calculator, which says that an average 27-year-old should be able to do 37 push-ups on average, and above 50 in a single session to be considered excellent. Google Video has a few videos on what’s considered a proper push-up.

The bionic arm project, sponsored by DARPA and executed by Deka Research and Development Corp. run by Dean Kamen (inventor of Segway, among other things), is nearing completion and might undergo clinical trials if DARPA sees the project fit, IEEE Spectrum says: “The arm has motor control fine enough for test subjects to pluck chocolate-covered coffee beans one by one, pick up a power drill, unlock a door, and shake a hand. Six preconfigured grip settings make this possible, with names like chuck grip, key grip, and power grip. The different grips are shortcuts for the main operations humans perform daily.”

Ever since my doctor alerted me to the high levels of cholesterol, I started paying attention not only to the diet, but also to the technology and science surrounding cardiovascular system. MIT Technology Review now runs a story of Imaging Cholesterol Buildup in the Heart, where Mount Sinai researchers have finally figured out a way to monitor cholesterol buildup in blood vessels - something that was virtually impossible previously:

Directly labeling the plaque inside blood vessels with a marker that
can be detected by MRI, known as a contrast agent, could provide a
better picture. But getting these molecules across the vessel lining
has been a challenge. New research shows that contrast agents that
mimic a natural molecule–high-density lipoprotein (HDL), or “good”
cholesterol–could do the trick. Normally, HDL passes through arteries
and attaches to low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad” cholesterol,
carrying it out of arteries to the liver.

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Business 2.0 magazine writes about Jeff Hawkins’ new project. The creator of Palm is trying to approach the problem of intelligence and decision-making by replicating the processes involved in human brain. Numenta will be available to researchers at some point in March 2007, and you will have to pay only if you plan to use it for a commercial application:

He knows that he needs to build a community of developers around Numenta with financial incentives to help his technology succeed, just as he did at Palm. He toyed with making Numenta a nonprofit, like his Redwood Neuroscience Institute from which the company sprang, but ultimately decided against it. “If you have a technology and people think they can make money from it, you will get thousands of people working on it,” he explains.

Ray Kurzweil is in the news lately, first describing stock-picking to some hedge fund investors, where the most successful investment strategy is determined exactly in the way the best chess move is during any given move:

Because arbitrage opportunities disappear so quickly now, neural networks have emerged that can consider thousands of scenarios at once. It is unlikely, for instance, that Microsoft will begin selling ice cream or IBM declare bankruptcy, but a nonlinear system can consider such possibilities, and thousands of others, without overtaxing computers that must be ready to react in milliseconds.

The at SC06 the inventor described the nanobots that would cruise the human body, cleaning blood passages and doing a lot of useful work, which is required for a body to avoid heart diseases:

By the late 2020s, doctors will be sending intelligent bots, or nanobots, into our bloodstreams to keep us healthy, and into our brains to keep us young;

He even points at the exact year, when computational power will exceed the human intelligence:

Computer, or non-biological, intelligence created in the year 2045 will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.

Anick Jesdanun of Associated Press is avid runner, and hence he signed up for a job of reviewing GPS-enabled running devices, which are supposed to help you track the distance, time, and all the data related to your workout. He also publishes at-a-glance reviews of Timex BodyLink, Garmin ForeRunner, Bones in Motion and Nike iPod kit.

MarketWatch takes a look at the brain fitness, while quoting the results of some survey of what Americans considered important for keeping their brain sharp, but then they turn to the experts who provide the following tips:

1. Eat foods high in omega fatty acids, such as salmon and trout
2. Have a meal with family or friends at least once a day
3. Challenge the brain out of the comfort zone, by learning new language, or exploring new stuff, such as ant colony optimization
4. Stay physically fit, and provide more blood to your brain via cardio workouts
5. Do art projects
6. Do puzzles
7. Volunteer for opportunities for better social interaction
8. Spirituality and meditation are also quoted to increase the brain power

MIT Technology Review takes a look at the current developments in the visual search arena and how new approaches to visual search involve analyzing brain patterns:

Neurophysiologists at the CBCL are studying how, exactly, the brain does its visual work. They note how each pixel in an image stimulates a photoreceptor in the eye, for instance, based on the pixel’s color value and brightness: each stimulus leads neurons to fire in a particular pattern. The programmers make a mathematical model of those patterns, tracking which neurons fire (and how strongly) and which don’t. They tell the computer to reproduce the right pattern when it sees a particular pixel, and then they train the system with positive and negative examples of objects. This is a tree, and this is not.

Weekends became quite a rarity when we were launching Tech. They still appeared on the calendar with special color backgrounds applied to them, but they didn’t really matter. The crunch time is the period prone to stress and long working hours, but there are also ways to manage it.

1. Wake up as early as you can. I consistently have had better productivity sessions early in the morning than late at night. And I am not really a morning person. Getting up as early as possible achieves numerous positive effects, including driving to and from work in decent traffic, feeling woken up and energized at a peak time around 9-10 am, and getting a lot of stuff done before lunch. One of the hardest parts about getting up early is going to bed reasonably early, so that you still get a normal amount of sleep. The problem is kinda self-curing, as by forcing yourself to get up early, you more or less force yourself to go to bed earliler. When you just start off with the practice, you might feel like watching Leno, but after waking up early on a regular basis, the body self-corrects and almost requires hitting the sack earlier than usual.
2. Sleep whenever you need to sleep. Feeling tired is one of the signals by which the body communicates to the brain the need to take a break. Most of the stupid coding errors and check-ins due to simple typos can usually be discovered after the clock hits about 6 o’clock, and most of the activity at this point achieves very little productivity, or, what’s worse, becomes counter-productive. When you feel sleepy but still decide to continue coding, the likelihood of introducing an error or missing a small part of the spec grows significantly. If you stand up and go away from the keyboard, two hours of missed work will probably be compensated by half an hour of work next morning. Plus, you won’t have to fix the coding errors introduced during late night coding sessions.
3. Be reasonable with caffeine. The impact of caffeine on human body varies widely from person to person, but generally presence of caffeine increases blood circulation and blocks, or slows don, the metabolism or sugar. The short-term effect of feeling wired and energized is compensated by feeling dormant and weak after lunch or early in the evening. I try to switch from coffee to green tea, whenever I foresee a regular consumption of caffeine throughout the day. According to my doctor, avoiding caffeine entirely will have a better effect on the body in general. I don’t think I am at the point where I can completely go off caffeine, though.
4. Let your eyes rest. Generally that means walking away from the computer for 5 minutes or so every hour. Bathroom breaks, getting something to drink or just simple walk around to stretch the muscles usually gets the job done. Update: The “downstairs” that my boss is talking about in the comments is the “game room” at Yahoo!, which features such prominent items as foosball table. Foosball is a serious addiction for US white-collar men 25-34, and shouldn’t be joked about.