The coolest videos I saw this week

Zero 7 - Destiny - Fantastic Video with a great song. They have other great tunes but this one is a killer.



I aaaam Iroon Mannn!!!!!



Chuck is a bad-ass-m#$%¨$%&¨@#$!!!




Mars Volta - L´Via L´Viaquez - The most weird, but in a good way, band in the whole world.

The only Secret!

During the Rugby World Cup 07 one moment caught my attention; Portugal’s rugby players singing their national anthem. They lost to Scotland (56 x 10) and New Zealand (108 x 13), but they played with their heart during every second of the game. They are amateurs playing against professional, yet if you look to the origin of the world amateur – lover in old French – I can see why it is worth to watch their game.

When have most of the people lost their passion for what they do? People who killed that little inner-child that wanted to be a fireman just because their parents told them they couldn’t make a few bucks out of it. But is this a good trade-off? Do something that is a torture for you just to make ends meet does not seem a good deal to me.

People are most of the time badly informed and end up making decisions supported on poor and misleading information. In order to support young and why not mature people to make a more conscious decision about what to do with their life a real cool site appeared on the web - Ikwa. They are currently in beta but soon enough people will be able to access some of its content that will allow people to make a more conscious decision regarding their career planning.

You should always be passionate about what you do and that is the only secret to be happy. Simple as life should be.

The phenomena land

One thing we – Brazilian - have inherited from Portugal is that we believe in saviors. The most famous Portuguese episode in that sense was the Sabastianism’s belief – e.g. a belief that Don Sebastian, a Portuguese king killed in combat, was expected to return and restore the glory of the old days. More often than not we Brazilians tend to follow the same behavior in several aspect of our everyday life. We tend to put all of our hopes in one person and forget all the hard work of hundreds or thousands of people that helped this person to achieve its goal. But is there any problem with that?

Yes, there is!

First, we end up setting unrealistic expectations of what one can do and, therefore, simplifying the reality and making wrong decisions. When Brazilians elected Lula they thought that the only thing they had to do was vote for him and everything would be alright. It never crossed their mind that they should had elected a base of sustentation in congress or they should had asked who was going to be part of his office. Several months later corruption scandals, incompetence and apathy have been the characteristics that define this administration. When you don’t vote in a plan, in ideas, in a team you vote in saviors and as Santa Claus they don’t exist.

Second, a lot of the time we tend to forget all the hard work that takes to accomplish something and to give all the glory to just one person or to place all our hope on then. Our sport is full of example where we become extremely dependent of our phenomena and forget all that it takes to accomplish a goal. Brazil’s basketball was for almost twenty year dependent on Oscar; once he was gone Brazil can’t even get to the Olympics games. On the other hand Argentina that at the same period did not base its basketball on a single player but instead on a whole structure of teams, league and players has been now harvesting the fruits of this strategy – an Olympic gold medal and a second place in the world rank.

I am not saying that we should not have idols, use their superior abilities and capability to lead, however it cannot overcome the sense that all goal to be achieved demand hard work and teamwork.

Contextualization, humans still "rock"!!!

The human brain is the most powerful “computer” we know. Despite the fact that computers have been replacing humans in several activities there are still some fields where our “computational” power cannot be beaten. Humans can in seconds understand context with thousands of variable and a huge number of layers where computer would fry its circuits to understand it in a rudimentary way. While some engineers still struggle to create more and more complex algorithms – that try to emulate artificial intelligence – others have putted their money in humans with free time.

Born out of crowdsourcing – a way of out outsource a service to a huge number of third parties – the human based computations seems to be the solution to the “simplicity” of nowadays algorithms. This area of computational science believes that a lot human performing small – although complex for computer – tasks would create the most powerful computer ever built. There are several methods of human based computation like: Darwin (programs written by several programmers competing to survive), wiki (several people contributing in a same direction), Human based genetic-algorithm (humans selecting, contributing, mutating and recombinating – Yahoo answers), Social search (humans ranking searches - Cha-Cha search, Google Image), Guessing Games (extract knowledge from people through funny games). These are an example of how human intelligence can be used to make a more complex, complete and relevant experience in several fields.

Let us take contextual market for example, while several companies (Google, Yahoo…) use complex algorithms to deliver marketing to content, boo-box developed a very elegant service that believes humans “rock” when it comes to contextualization. The first group works like a guy with machine gun trying to kill a rat in a dark room, the second like a sniper that shoot just once and delivers the right message to its target – bulls eye all the time!!! There are a few decades ahead before a computer understands what I am saying – even I don’t – until then I am gonna use boo-box. What about you?

Aid a curse in disguise

Africa received in the last 50 years more than US$1 trillion in aid (values brought to its present value), but from the 48 poorest countries in the world 38 are African states. This “cheap way” to buy guilty-relief that the developed world found it has prevented Africa to reach its real potential and condemned its citizens to a beggar’s life. That is why it should be found a new approach to tackle this old problem.

First it has to be analyzed what are the effects of this money inside African societies. Most of the donations do not come with clear goals and the proper planning, therefore do not reaching the wished effects. And moreover it has some side effects that just help to increase the problem itself, those side effects are:

• Creates an enormous bureaucracy (68% of the money donated to health in Uganda are used to overhead costs);
• Makes corrupt governments richer (from US$20 bi donated to Congo US$5 bi ended up in Mobutu’s account in Switzerland);
• Suffocates local entrepreneurs (in 2003, 650.000 tons of grain were donated to prevent the effects of a probable drought that never happened, and made the local producer to swallow a big drop in their prices)
• Favors a beggar mentality.

Those are the reasons why the Quenian Economist, head of the NGO that try to find new solutions for Africa, says – “For God sake stop helping Africa”!

The new path that Africa and those who are trying to help should tread is good and old-fashioned capitalism. It worked for East Asia – Africa of the 60s – and should work now for Africa.

Education, fair trade and productive investments are the key to rescue millions from poverty in the continent. Money shouldn’t be given it should be earned. When capital is invested in productive activities it creates a virtuous circle. First it wakes the entrepreneurs within the population, then it creates jobs, then generates wealth, then it is used to wake more entrepreneurs, and so on and on. The more this circle grows the more it makes corrupt governments and mammoth bureaucracy unacceptable and thus, creating an urge within entrepreneurs and consumers to get rid of then.

If instead of see Africa as a continent to be helped developed countries see Africa as partner for business, they would then be really helping pull the continent out of poverty. It is imperative to stop patronizing Africa and allows it to achieve the real independency - the economical one.

The almight Smashing Pumpkins

The best album of the year is out and it rocks!!!
Hear are the highliths of this record.

1- Doomsday clock
A crunch-bone-heavy-metal song that will make you want to bang your head on the wall.
A new characteristic from this new pumpkin formation is the background
vocal that have improved a hundred time and this song has a lot of good background vocals.


3 - Bleeding Orchid
With a multi-vocal intrduction, the dramatic and heartful mood of the song is introduced. This is one of those songs that has it all: powerful guitars, variated druming, killer vocals and good lyrics.


5 - Tarantula
Heavy and fast! With good vocals and a bluesy feel on it. It has hitted big on the radio.


7 - United State
A marathon of lound guitars and tribal druming with a colossal ending (if you won't hear the complete song at least hear the last 2 minutes)



Those are the songs that should be highlighted on this album. Pick up yours and have fun!

Economic Growth and sustainability, are they at the same side?

The last minute says it all!

Mankind faces now a dilemma: go green or go dead. Which one would you choose? Even though a five-year-old could answer that question, still is not clear if we have perceived the urgency of the matter. China and US have their private contest of who pollute the most; developing countries fight for their right to destroy earth; we still have a locust-swarm behaviour devouring careless all the planet resources.Is there any hope?

In the last two years, especially after the Katrina disaster, mankind seems to have awoken of its golden dream of infinite growth with no consequences and have opened its eye to the nightmare we brought ourselves in. DVDs like Al Gore’s inconvenient truth, the enlargement of Bush’s vocabulary adding to it the word global warming, the growth of the media space upon ecological issues, it has increased the awareness of the problem. But what can be done to amend it?

First of all we have to change the mindset that has lead us hear. We must get rid of those economics models that do not consider our most precious possession - our home the mother earth. Economists love to put a price on everything, why “d´a hell” they think all nature resources are for free? That is the reason why they created the false trade-off between economic growth and care about preservation. Everything we consume is underpriced and companies that do not care about the pollution their value chains generate are getting rich by destroying the world. Our responsibility on this process is to start to demand green companies, if they do not carewe do!!!

Second, we are a major part of the problem; our ways of doing things also gives a hand to the destruction of the planet. We must start to analyse what we can change in our behaviour to make a better world, the first step is to discovery what is our ecological footprint and then start to reduce it. There are several sites on the Web that shows how with a moderate effort we can help to change the world. Always have in mind you are one, but we are 6 billion, so if we all push to the same side, who knows what we can do !!!

Would know the difference between fly and fall if you could not see the ground? Right now our society is on a free fall thinking that it is flying. And if it do not wake up soon it will hit hard the cemetery of civilizations. A great quote I have seen about that it was on Al Gore´s DVD and it was said by Churchil.

“The time of half-measure has passed. We are entering a period of consequences,"

Think about that!!!

Cool websites about it:

Incovenient Truth web site
Natural Capitalism web site (You can read some chapters of the book - it will blow your mind)
EcoWorld web site (good articles)
Footprint Calculator