How Messi and Ronaldo Can Make You a Better Parent

Did the FIFA World Cup capture your imagination? Even if you’re not a soccer fan, the fact that the U.S. Men’s Team made it out of the “Group of Death” surprised and excited Americans everywhere. Moreover, for the first time in history, the U.S. Men’s Team advanced to the knockout round in two consecutive FIFA World Cups.

As a dad who has watched two daughters play club and school soccer for more than a decade, I’ve developed a passion for the game. (I now play indoor soccer on a team with my oldest daughter–not very well, I might add, but it’s a ton of fun.) I watch soccer now more than any other sport.

As a result, I’ve become familiar with two of the game’s stars both of who were on display at the Word Cup — Lionel Messi of Argentina and Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal. Messi and Ronaldo are considered by almost every fan and soccer pundit to be the two best players in the game and two of the best of all time. Together, they’ve won the past six Ballon d’Or awards as the best player in the game. Messi has won it four times to Ronaldo’s two with the non-winner in each year being the runner-up in five of the six years.

So it’s clear that among the soccer intelligentsia who bestow the Ballon d’Or that Messi and Ronaldo are the “it” men of the game. Even the casual soccer or sports fan — even someone who has rarely, if ever, watched a soccer match — when asked to name the best player in the game will undoubtedly mention one, if not both.

But who is better, really? Before I answer that question, answer the following one quickly — as soon as you hear it — and write down your answer.

Who do you think is the better player? We’ll come back to your answer later.

The answer to who is better depends on whom you ask. It can be influenced by a host of factors that include allegiance to country or club (Messi plays for Barcelona and Rolando for Real Madrid, two of the world’s elite teams), how often you’ve watched each play matches, knowledge of and experience playing the game and exposure to the opinions of fans and experts.

The fact is it’s not easy to separate these two superstars unless you’re willing to examine the evidence and not allow extraneous factors to influence your opinion. And therein lies the lesson for how you can become a better parent.

Nate Silver, creator of the website fivethirtyeight.com and author of the best-selling book The Signal and the Noise, is famous for using statistical analyses to separate the chaff from the wheat. To answer the question of which player is better, he compared Messi and other soccer stars by conducting rigorous analyses of the most important statistics focused on player performance. His analyses included the following: shooting and scoring production; from where on the field they take shots (and how often they score from various distances); how often they set up their own shots and what kind of kicks they use to make those shots (soft or hard); ability to take on defenders; the kind and accuracy of their passes; how often they create scoring chances and how often those chances lead to goals; and how their defensive playmaking compares to other high-volume shooters. He also separated the players’ from the effects of playing on their teams (i.e. the influence of how good their teams and teammates are on the players’ performance). And this is only a sampling of the data Silver crunched.

After examining the evidence, Silver came to the crystal-clear conclusion that “Lionel Messi is Impossible.” (Read about his analyses in this article on his website). The results of his analyses are so overwhelming in favor of Messi as the best player in the world that even Ronaldo can’t compare. (In effect, these analyses offer an examination of the two because Ronaldo came in second — a distant second — in many categories.) So if someone tries to argue with you that Rolando or anyone else is better than Messi, you can use this ream of facts to show how misguided they are.

Just as these analyses provide evidence that Messi is far and away the best soccer player in the world, so too is there evidence on how to be an effective parent. Unfortunately, some parents don’t care enough to examine the evidence or don’t know it exists, to their own detriment and that of their children. I am convinced, however, that parents must and can do better at examining evidence about what leads to effective parenting — if they would only make the effort. They must also teach their children to examine evidence generally so that their children grow into adults who make informed decisions and are skeptical about acting on information (e.g. opinions) in the absence of evidence or that is based on flawed or “cherry-picked” evidence.

I’ve read several books lately on how people tend to not rely on sound evidence to inform their beliefs and, ultimately, decisions. (In addition to Silver’s book, I highly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.) Humans have a tendency to use heuristics, or “mental shortcuts,” to make decisions. Why? Because it’s easier to rely on a shortcut than to do the hard work necessary to examine the evidence before making a decision. (Yes, thinking is hard work.) The problem is these shortcuts create biases in thinking that cause us to make decisions — including those about how to parent — that have little or no basis in fact.

When I asked you which player you thought was better, what was your initial answer? Unless you said you didn’t know (perhaps because you don’t follow soccer), you probably had a very confident opinion. What I didn’t ask was why you had that opinion. You might be surprised to learn that you quickly — automatically — drew on whatever you had ever heard about these two players. You probably relied on the most recent exposure to information about them. If you watched the FIFA World Cup, you might have been influenced by a discussion among the experts about Messi’s greatness, that he won the Golden Ball (the award for the outstanding player in the tournament) and that Ronaldo and his Portuguese team performed poorly. (The incredible cross Ronaldo made that led to the tying goal in the final minute of stoppage play against the U.S. not withstanding.) Regardless, the fact is you answered quickly (perhaps after a little thought) based on what was most readily available in your memory.

One of the mental shortcuts parents rely on is called the availability bias. (There are many others that affect parents’ decision-making, so this one is illustrative.) Simply put, parents rely on what immediately comes to mind (what’s available in their memory) when making decisions about how to parent (e.g. discipline their children). What readily come to mind are how they were parented, how the other parent in the family parents and how other family members (e.g. siblings) and friends parent. Other factors that might influence availability include stories of parenting (good and bad ones) that a parent might have seen on television or in a movie. Or perhaps they just read a parenting book chocked full of opinions about how to be a good parent but that’s void of evidence.

Parents succumb to this bias because it requires little effort. It’s just easier to make a decision quickly and easily without examining the evidence. Unfortunately, this and other biases can lead to poor parenting. That’s why I encourage you to seek out parenting advice that is evidence-based and evidence-informed. I also encourage you to question where the advice you hear comes from and to tell your children to do likewise regardless of topic. If you do both of these things, you will increase the chance that you’ll be as effective a parent as you can be and that your children will reach their goals in life as often as Messi finds the back of the net.

Bratton's War… on Acrobats. Yes, Acrobats.

When my oldest son was a newborn, I remember riding the subway with the baby carriage and an unflinching paternal instinct to protect him. Around this same time, I started noticing the “Showtime” b-boys and acrobats pop up on trains now and then. They’d clear the aisle and would generally steer clear of my son’s carriage. I remember because I appreciated that — and appreciated the show. Over the years as they went from dancing and rolling down the train car to more elaborate moves, like flips and somersaults, I never felt a threat to either my son or myself. If anything, as times got tough, I tipped them more.

That was almost a decade ago. My son turns 10 in October. In that time I’ve witnessed the subway become a makeshift stage for all sorts of performers: African drummers, Doo-Wop singers, hip-hop violinists, poets and Mariachi bands, to name a few. Some of those acts were impressive, so I gave them a few dollars. Some weren’t, so I didn’t. Then there were the religious proselytizing types whose sermons informed us we were all going to hell for our sins. Those were harder to stomach, but I sat through it. Most of us did. We’re thick-skinned New Yorkers, right?

This year, the once-and-again police commissioner, Bill Bratton, has cracked down all sorts of his usual targets — panhandlers, vendors — as part of his decades-old “Broken Windows” schtick. You remember Broken Windows, the theory that focuses on low-level crimes as a way of preventing bigger crime. Lord knows that the Mexican woman selling Churros left unchecked can only mean a crime wave down the line, right?

Well Bratton has been steadily focusing his hawkish gaze at subway performers — acrobats in particular — lately. The crackdowns were spiking back in the spring but now we have the numbers, and they’re pretty revealing of the priorities down at 1 Police Plaza: the NYPD has arrested 240 performers in the first six months of this year compared to 40 during the same span last year — a five-fold increase.

But what was the impetus to the underground police squeeze? It seems that no one, including a highly-cited Associated Press piece, can find any actual reported incidents of onlookers getting hurt — which seems to be the prevailing argument against the high-flying acrobats. The since-closed Spiderman Broadway musical might have had more actual reported injuries.

The Daily News summed up some of the support for the crackdowns — if there is in fact sizable public support for dancers being handcuffed and throw in jail over backflips and a boombox (Note: there is no indication that Bratton has seen Michael Jackson’s “Bad” video or that he’s sending extra cops to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station). In a July 8th article subtitled “In Praise of Bratton’s Crackdowns”, the News’ Harry Siegel writes:

… performing and panhandling on trains are banned precisely because riders are a captive audience. And acrobatic acts, with bodies spinning around poles on packed, moving trains are particularly problematic.

To be completely clear, based strictly on a law and order argument, Siegel is correct. Performing and panhandling (putting aside the image of the poor and the homeless being led out in handcuffs for the high crime of asking for a buck) is banned. I guess one could make a similarly black-and-white argument for support of a crackdown on littering or jaywalking — which happened — but this issue really goes beyond that. Where our city decides to pick its fights is a political question, not simply a legal one. And by Siegel’s admission, no one has been hurt — so the premise for the ban (one hinging on safety concerns) rings somewhat hollow.

So why focus on acrobats? Why focus on one ‘quality-of-life’ issue and not another? The commissioner has pointed to complaints from passengers. I’m sure there are complaints aplenty. A lot of them likely coming from the section of ridership that shares in commissioner Bratton’s disdain for ‘disorder’ and street culture. Bratton says he can’t stand seeing graffiti on his commute to Long Island. Why should he be exposed to street culture on his drive to his second home in the Hamptons? But as one acrobat told me, however many number of people are complaining, there are plenty of people tipping performers — and supporting the risky business in way of dollars.

Perhaps, then, the question is also cultural. George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, co-authors of the famous 1982 Atlantic Monthly article often credited with birthing the Broken Windows theory, wrote that the theory targets the “disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people.” Wilson’s book, Varieties of Police Behavior, expands:

The teenager hanging out on a street corner late at night, especially one dressed in an eccentric manner, a Negro wearing a ‘conk rag’… girls in short skirts and boys in long hair parked in a flashy car talking loudly to friends on the curb, or interracial couples — all of these are seen by many police officers as persons displaying unconventional and improper behavior.

Jesus.

But if we’re talking about cultural breakdowns — the reason I enjoy and support b-boying on my commute but the older white guy two seats over might not, for example — then we’re also talking race. Recently, the Nation’s Mychal Denzel Smith followed up an earlier blog criticizing the crackdowns as tantamount to a “criminalization of black youth.” Farfetched, right? The NYPD criminalizing young black men. Siegel had pointed to Smith’s blog as Progressivism gone wild. In his most recent entry, Smith responded to Siegel and reiterated his argument: “We are continuing to police black bodies under the guise of public safety, but all we do is criminalize otherwise benign behaviors and punish black youth.”

Of course he’s right, but the war of words between the writers was still largely absent the voices of the performers themselves (although Siegel claims to have spoken with a few).

I had a chance to speak with a subway performer named Besnkheru (quoted sparsely in the AP story). He has been arrested for performing before, most recently the night after I spoke with him. He says:

They say by arresting these performers [it] will be a way to stop bigger crimes. Really, by arresting these performers — which in some cases this is their only outlet to make money — [they] may look to crime… How can people think that jail is the answer for everything? There are 8 million people in this city; there are not 8 million jobs so if someone creates a way to earn a living, they criminalize it. There is no outlet for the youths, for their talent; but there is a jail.

Hmmm. Sounds like more of that zany Progressive stuff.

Heidi Kole, a busker whose singing and guitar-playing doesn’t pose the risks associated with acrobats, has been arrested and harassed by cops before, but she says it’s reached a boiling point under Bratton:

The performers have been moved on, arrested, ticketed and charged with the crime of self-expression. It’s a very sad, bleak and lonely place underground since the new police chief, Bratton’s entrance. Every day now when I go under I get either questioned or ticketed, or worse. It’s a scary place underground right now with hundreds of NYPD officers cuffing dozens of people, one after another on a Friday night like tonight. TImes Square has become one huge perp walk. It’s a freaky, freaky scene. There is no music, no dance, no laughter, no art. There is only the loud rumble of metal on metal of screeching brakes interspersed with NYPD announcements over the loudspeaker of what to be ‘afraid’ of.

When Bratton ‘cleaned up’ Times Square and made Squeegee men public enemy number one in the ’90s, he also presided over the police department when crime began to plummet. Ever since then, Bratton, champion of Broken Windows, has been celebrated as a crime-fighting guru. But crime went down all across America — including places that didn’t subscribe to Broken Windows. With Bratton apparently coronating acrobats the Squeegee men of 2014, nuisance-based policing is trying to find a place for itself in New York.

Ultimately it doesn’t seem to make sense at any level. Arresting young, talented, entrepreneurial (predominantly) Black and Latino kids doesn’t carry with it the implication that without it we’re risking a violence epidemic — like Bloomberg’s rationale for Stop and Frisk (which had its cheerleaders in the public and the media; and still does) went. Heavy-handed policing, which extends beyond acrobats and onto platforms (where it is generally legal to perform), has already cost city taxpayers cash settlements as performers have begun to file lawsuits. Tourists love performers — so its unlikely that an NYC scrubbed of musicians and artists will fit into the city’s tourist-friendly economic models.

Recently I met with Heidi, Besnkheru and a few acrobats wary of giving names, citing fear of the police. We talked about alternatives to Bratton”s approach. Besnkheru told me that the MTA’s Music Under New York program, which holds auditions, grants permits and designates locations, can’t accommodate the number of performers vying for performance space. The audition program closed in March but he explained that subway cars are simply more lucrative, anyway — which explains why people will still risk arrest.

Ultimately that may be the bottom line. The performers aren’t going anywhere. The acrobats, largely young people of color and possibly from low-income communities in the city, will likely keep dancing and flipping in the face of ‘super-cop’ Bratton’s clampdowns. The celebrity-commissioner rarely backs down publicly either. Some of the organizers are organizing to publicly pushback against the arrests. They have my support. And I suspect they’ll enjoy the support of a lot of New York, too.

6 Kids Who Put Up A Damn Good Fight Against The Monsters Under Their Beds

After their parents have tucked them into bed and turned off the lights, it’s not uncommon for kids to be overwhelmed by a common fear: terrifying monsters that live under their beds and in their closets.

In her photo series “Terreurs,” French photographer Laure Fauvel gave this scenario a new twist. Instead of cowering in fear, the pajama-clad kids in these pictures are ready to battle against the monsters in their rooms. The monsters, meanwhile, look terrified and ready to surrender.

“I wanted to show children who aren’t scared of monsters and who are able to fight them and be stronger than [their] fears,” the photographer told The Huffington Post in an email.

So, parents, next time you hear loud noises coming from your children’s rooms at night, it might just be a monster fight.

Check out the photos below:

(hat tip: Neatorama.com)

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Stephen Colbert Thanks Racism For His Inherent Distrust Of Barack Obama

Stephen Colbert doesn’t blame racism for John Boehner suing Barack Obama; he thanks it.

Nearly all United States presidents have issued executive orders, but now Republicans are attempting to sue President Obama over his use of the power when it comes to Obamacare.

In his first show back from break, Colbert expressed support for Boehner’s lawsuit, claiming executive orders have always been wrong. It just took his inherent distrust of Obama and black people to finally allow him to see it.

“The Colbert Report” airs Monday through Thursday at 11:30 p.m. ET on Comedy Central.

As Climate Impacts Accelerate, Speed of Mitigation Becomes Key

Co-authored by Mario Molina and V. Ramanathan

Bad news can be paralyzing, and that’s a problem when it comes to climate change. The steady drumbeat of bad news can numb us. We’ve recently learned that a large part of the West Antarctica ice sheet is disintegrating and cannot be stopped, with ten feet or more of sea-level rise now inevitable. More recently we learned the bad news from the US climate assessment, confirming that climate impacts have moved “firmly into the present,” with costs mounting quickly — more than $100 billion in the U.S. alone in 2012-and a near certainty that things will get worse quickly. At the global level, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sent the same message.

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In the face of this news, the U.S. risks moving from climate denial to climate despair–that citizens can do little to stop impacts, that government doesn’t have the political courage needed to adequately address the problem, and that industry genius will falter and not develop the technologies to solve climate change in time to avoid the worst impacts.

To avoid this it would be extremely helpful to implement fast mitigation that shows near-term improvements in the climate, on a timescale relevant to politicians’ short election cycles, and that can demonstrably reduce impacts and the risk of passing dangerous tipping points that set off self-amplifying warming that feeds on itself.

Can any strategy produce such fast results? To answer this we need to review the underlying climate science, to understand that there are two main levers we can pull to slow climate warming. The first lever is the one that reduces the carbon dioxide emitted when we burn from fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas. To insure long-term climate stability we need to pull this lever, now, as hard as possible, promoting energy efficiency, low carbon fuels, and clean energy sources. But we also need to understand that pulling back the carbon dioxide lever will produce climate cooling very slowly: by mid-century an aggressive effort to reduce carbon dioxide can avoid 0.1° Celsius of warming, out of an expected 2° Celsius or more of warming by 2050 under business as usual.

We also need to pull back the lever to reduce the short-lived climate pollutants. These pollutants include black carbon (soot) air pollution, tropospheric ozone (the principal component of smog), methane, and several HFCs, which are factory-made gases used in air conditioning and refrigeration. Pulling this lever to cut the short-lived climate pollutants can avoid 0.6 ° Celsius of warming by mid-century, six times more than the carbon dioxide lever can produce. At the end of the century, the avoided warming from cutting the short-lived climate pollutants is 1.5° Celsius compared to 1.1° Celsius for carbon dioxide. Both strategies are essential at this point.

These numbers are from sophisticated climate models, but still have uncertainty. Yet there is no uncertainty about the speed these strategies can produce their results. Black carbon stays for only a matter of weeks, and methane and most HFCs last only for a decade and a half. In contrast, a quarter of carbon dioxide lasts essentially forever-five hundred years to thousands of years.

President Obama’s climate strategy presents a solid effort to address both carbon dioxide and the short-lived climate pollutants, in the U.S., and globally. This includes efforts to increase clean renewable energy, standards to improve mileage for autos and to replace some of the HFCs used as refrigerants in auto air conditioners, restrictions on soot emissions from heavy-duty trucks, buses, and vans, restrictions on methane, and restrictions on carbon dioxide from new power plants and proposed restrictions on existing power plants.

As a result of these and similar efforts, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell by 3.4% in 2012, their lowest levels since 1994. Yet emissions of HFCs continued to grow, up 41% since 1990, making HFCs the fastest growing greenhouse gases in the U.S., and in many other countries.

The president also is leading the global effort to reduce short-lived climate pollutants. This includes the Paris-based Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants, which the U.S. launched two years ago and now has grown to nearly ninety partners, including countries from all levels of economic development. It also includes the president’s effort to build the consensus needed to phase-down HFCs under the Montreal Protocol, widely regarded as the most effective and efficient global environmental treaty ever created. The president has won support from the leading economies in the G7/8 and the G20, as well as with China’s president, to use the Montreal Protocol to phase down HFCs. The U.S. also helped put fast action to reduce short-lived climate pollutants on the UN Secretary-General’s agenda for the heads of State climate summit in New York in September.

Success cutting the short-lived climate pollutants can cut the rate of global warming in half for several decades — indeed, it may be the only strategy that can provide such fast relief. It also produces powerful collateral benefits, including avoiding many of the seven million deaths caused by air pollution every year, while cutting crop loses.

Success reducing all of the four short-lived climate pollutants will build momentum to conclude the climate treaty next year in Paris. This should start with an agreement at the Secretary-General’s September climate summit to negotiate terms for an HFC phase down under the Montreal Protocol in the next 18 months. Such an HFC phase down would almost certainly be the single biggest, fastest, and most effective piece of climate mitigation available to the world in the near-term, and would open the door to fast mitigation of the other short-lived climate pollutants.

Mario Molina, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his work on chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere, teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

Veerabhadran Ramanathan is a professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

Durwood J. Zaelke is the founder of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, and co-directs a related program at UC Santa Barbara.

This Month In Booze: What's Happening This July In The Wonderful World Of White Spirits

This article was written by Robert Haynes-Peterson and was originally published on AskMen.

Now that the World Cup is over, we’re guessing your focus has shifted to thinking about which deck, beach resort or patch of grass you’re going to occupy, and which summer cocktails you need to get your hands on. The emphasis this month is on the so-called “white” spirits: vodka, gin, silver tequilas, and rums (for those craving new whiskies and other aged temptations, check out our new brown spirits roundup). Get off your butt long enough to reach for one.

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Flickr / Tech Cocktail

Booze News And Trends

In Mobs We Trust: Companies activating crowdsourcing and social media do so at their own risk, as McDonald’s can tell you (see: “Hashtag Hijacking”). But ballsy brands are apparently willing to embrace the hazards. Purity Vodka founder Thomas Kuuttanen regularly takes his product on the road for blind tastings amidst bartenders and media who might unknowingly trash his baby to his face (they never do, and it almost always wins). This spring, Ilegal Mezcal asked its fans to share their “Ilegal Confessions” online because… Rob Ford? Actually to raise money for charity and maybe get the shot at free booze and inclusion in an ongoing film project.

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And now Laphroaig — the super smoky Islay single malt whisky — has launched #OpinionsWelcome, an open-ended forum for submitting your thoughts on the brand, good or bad. Found at Laphroaig.com/Opinions and supported on Facebook and Twitter, master distiller John Campbell says “these authentic reactions will entice those unfamiliar with whisky, and inspire them to share their own opinions.” Our favorites so far: “Like the delicious smell of a burnt enemy’s flag,” and “Caveman sweat. In a good way.” Also, a video of father and son sharing their first peaty dram.

A Pinch of Salt: Many people love rimming margaritas with salt. More and more, bartenders are finding that just a bit of salt — especially fancy sea and smoked salts — enhances a drink beyond measure. Camper English, of Alcademics, attended Bombay Sapphire’s “Most Imaginative Bartender” contest finals in London last month and found NaCL mixed into many of the drinks, including the winning entry from France’s Remy Savage (which featured a “paper syrup” designed to make the drinker think of, yes, paper). Savage tells English his bar, Little Red Door, adds salt or saline solution to all the cocktails on their menu “to amplify flavors.”

In his new book Liquid Intelligence (out soon), mad scientist and innovative bartender Dave Arnold adds a pinch of salt or a couple of drops of saline solution to most of the book’s unusual cocktails including the Schokozitrone (chocolate vodka, lemon juice, ginger), Boozy Shakerato (rum, espresso, cream) and even his Egg White Whiskey Sour. While Arnold goes deep into the physics and chemistry of things like carbonation, nitrous infusions and red hot pokers, we haven’t yet found a passage wherein he explains his love of salt.

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Flickr / Dana Moos

Tales of the Cocktail, a week-long industry bacchanal in New Orleans takes place this month (July 16 to 20). So if you saunter into your favorite craft cocktail watering hole and all the bartenders are AWOL, figure that’s where they’ve headed. The bonus for you? They’ll come back brimming with new ideas for your drinks.

There’s more booze news where this came from. Check out the full article to be the first to know about new liquor releases, and to get AskMen’s cocktail recipe of the month (it’s a Watermelon Mint Margarita).

If Jason Were a DJ: Sound Reactive LED Mask

If Jason took a break from hunting people down and battling it out with Freddy Krueger and decided to become a DJ, then this is what he would put on instead of the hockey mask. Not that this sound-reactive LED mask has anything to do with the fictional character, but it’s very nature brings to mind none other than Jason Voorhees.

But enough about Jason.

Sound Reactive LED DJ Mask 620x620magnify

Designed with professional DJs in mind, the mask is unlike any other. By default it comes with a white base, but you can have it custom-made with a base color of your choice. The entire face of the mask is covered with a sound-reactive LED panel that lights up and flashes, depending on the current surrounding sounds and noise.

It’s a neat idea and sounds interesting in concept, but the actual product is, well, strange and weird at best. If the mask is something you see yourself wearing, then you can get one of your very own on Amazon for $185(USD).

[via Petagadget]

Ex-Ford CEO Alan Mulally Joins Google’s Board Of Directors

Image (1) Alan_Mulally.jpg for post 181082 That didn’t take long. Former Ford President CEO has found a new parking spot at Google after just retiring from Ford Motor Company earlier this month.
Google has just announced the appointment of Alan Mulally to its Board of Directors and will serve on Google’s Audit Committee. His appointment was effective July 9, 2014. Read More

Are You More Prepared Than A Boy Scout? Take The Swimming Merit Badge Test

Are You More Prepared Than A Boy Scout? Take The Swimming Merit Badge Test

As adults, we’re better equipped with basic skills than a bunch of Boy Scouts, right? Prove it, could you pass the test to get a Swimming Merit Badge?

Read more…


Why Potholes Happen (And How to Get Them Fixed)

Why Potholes Happen (And How to Get Them Fixed)

They’re the bane of modern interstates and countryside roads alike: Potholes cost American drivers nearly $6.5 billion dollars in flat tires, blown shocks, and cracked rims in 2013, according to AAA. Save your car this beating by learning to recognize the early warning signs of developing potholes and how to get them fixed before they turn into sinkholes.

Read more…