Jinn of Quality and Risk

What a thriller. Tonight in Helsinki, Sweden defeated Finland 6-5 after being led 1-5, thus moving on to meet Slovakia in the semifinals. I listened to the Swedish radio over the Internet. Fantastisk! DN: Sverige är klart för semifinal i hockey-VM efter en bragdmatch mot hemmanationen Finland i Helsingfors. Kronorna vände ett 1-5-underläge till seger med 6-5. En av de stora segerorganisatörerna var Peter Forsberg, som svarade för två mål. Och Mikael Tellqvist spelade stabilt... 

More medical progress. Excellent news. CNN: A cold virus genetically engineered to help it sneak into cancer cells can kill inoperable brain tumors in mice, U.S. scientists reported on Tuesday. The effects were so stunning that the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are rushing to test the approach in people with brain tumors. If it works, it will be the first treatment for malignant glioma, the deadliest form of brain cancer. Brain tumors affect about 18,000 people in the United States every year, killing 13,000. Gliomas are responsible for about half of all the cases. 

Jared Diamond (Edge): What I'm going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group decision making. I'll divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat fuzzily delineated categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem. Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem. Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so. While all this talking about reasons for failure and collapses of society may seem pessimistic, the flip side is optimistic: namely, successful decision-making. Perhaps if we understand the reasons why groups make bad decisions, we can use that knowledge as a check list to help groups make good decisions. 

NYT: In a recent study ... two finance professors ... demonstrate that momentum exists because of investors' tendency to sell their winners more rapidly than their losers. The research [has] been circulating in academic circles for several months... [B]ecause people hate to acknowledge mistakes, they tend to hold on to losing stocks longer than they keep winners, a tendency known as the disposition effect. Cutting one's losses applies to more than investment.

Note: in mechanics, momentum is the quantity of motion —the product of a body's mass and its velocity. 

NYT: studies of the DNA of orchids are revealing a host of surprises, chief among them, that orchids are actually part of the asparagus group, closer kin to these vegetables than to the other, flashier, flowering plants they had been placed with before. ... orchids, long thought to be the recent product of plant evolution, are actually quite ancient, having emerged more than 90 million years ago.