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Begin the process by downloading Fancy Cache (~2MB) software. After installation and starting up the program, the software interface would list out the storage mediums connected to your pc. Select your SSD from the list and configure a cache size for it (Refer the image). The cache size may be set to suit your needs. We’ve allocated currently 3192 MB of RAM as the cache and the defer caching has been also set to enabled. After setting the cache size for your SSD and related options on fancy cache, click Start Caching and you’re ready with the caching setup for your SSD.

The TRIM Command The very first step after setting up an SSD is to enable the TRIM Command in Windows. Windows 8 has the TRIM command already enabled if you are using an SSD. It is important to have the TRIM command enabled on your system as it helps to maintain the SSD’s life by optimizing the garbage collection in windows.

3) Enabling TRIM Command to Optimize SSD From the Start Menu, type CMD in the search box. Right click the command prompt icon and choose Run as Administrator. Now type fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify and press Enter. If its shows you disabledeletenotify = 0, the TRIM command is enabled in windows and you don’t have to make any modifications. If not, it would display, disabledeletenotify = 1. If TRIM is not enabled, type fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0 The TRIM Command would now be set to enabled.

Drive defragmentation helps in organizing the fragmented data and helps in improving the performance of a hard disk. But drive defragmentation doesn’t speed up SSD, as these drives doesn’t contain any rotating parts and defragmenting a drive would involve the transfer of data i.e. more read/write cycles which actually shortens the life span of the SSD. So, its always good to disable drive defragmentation in windows.

So its better to disable them if you have 4GB or less memory. If you have plenty of RAM installed, enabling them might give an iota of boost and would speed up SSD performance.

Bring up the Registry Editor in Windows by Typing regedit on RUN Window (WIN + R) and pressing Enter. Now navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSessionManagerMemory ManagementPrefetchParameters“ You’ll see Enable Prefetcher and Enable Superfetch options being list out on the right window pane. Double click each and set the value from 3 to 0. Now restart your system for the changes to be enabled.

SSDs are speedier than hard drives and have an access time of 0.1 milli second. Drive indexing results in increasing the number of file write operations doesn’t really speed up SSD and its better to have it turned off. Open My Computer and just right Click Your SSD and choose properties. Just untick the Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties option. You’ll be prompted with warnings just after clicking Apply. Proceed by pressing Ignore All and it would show you a processing window and would take a few minutes for the changes to be applied.

You may also Apply a Standard or Basic theme from the previous window. The Standard Windows 7 theme is more preferred as its gives a neutral look than the classy windows old theme.

Right click on ” Computer” and select “Properties” from the right click menu. Click on ” Advanced System Settings ” from the left pane to open up the ” System Properties ” window. Select the “Advanced” tab from it. Then Under ” Performance ” click ” Settings “. Choose ” Custom: ” Options From it. Now un tick all the options (Choose “Adjust for best performance“) and select only the last four options (actually three are preferable  you may un- tick the second option out of the last four). Take a look at the screen shot below.

Open up ” Programs and Features ” from Control Panel. Click the ” Turn Windows features on or off ” from the left pane. Now uncheck all the Feature that you don’t use in Windows 7 and restart the system for the changes to take effect.

If you’ve got a new ssd for your system, then you’d definitely consider checking out this guide which explains 9 tweaks to properly speed up, optimize your ssd and prolong the life of your ssd, while getting the best performance from it.

Right click on the sidebar and choose ” Properties “. On the properties windows untick the check box showing ” Start sidebar when Windows Starts “ From now on windows sidebar won’t start when windows 7 start up.

Aero Snap will help you to maximize, minimize and resize the windows just by dragging and dropping it into the screen corners. I dont advice to turn it off as the Aero Snap feature really helps to speed up working with windows by arranging them side by side. But, if you are not a regular user of the same, you may proceed by turning of aero snap in windows 7. Open the Windows 7 ” Control Panel ” and double-click on ” Ease of Access Center ” icon. Now click on the ” Make it easier to focus on tasks ” seen at the bottom in there Now untick the check box saying ” Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen ” . Right click on the Windows 7 taskbar and select ” Properties “. Now untick the ” Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop ” option from there. That will now disable the Aero Snap in Windows 7.

The Aero Peek feature in Windows 7 helps you to peek through all open windows by hiding all other windows and showing only the outlines of all windows. Aero Peek is similar to the ” Show Desktop ” Feature in XP and Vista. If you have followed step 3 then Aero Peek will be automatically disabled. If not, Right Click the Taskbar and choose Properties. Un-select the ”Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop” option. The aero peek feature will now be disabled in windows 7.

Double click the ” Power Options ” in the Control panel. Click the down arrow showing ” Show Additional Plans ” to see the ” High Performance ” power plan.

Now just activate the ” High Performance ” plan and that’s it. You may go for the advanced settings for further tweaking if you want.

For disabling thumbnails in Windows 7, Double Click on ” Computer ” >click on the “Organize” drop-down menu and select the “Folder and Search options” Under ‘Files and Folders’ section, go to the “View” tab and tick the check box showing “Always show icons, never thumbnails” checkbox.

To Disable The Screen Saver and Wallpaper in Windows 7, Right click on desktop and choose “Personalize”. Click the Screen Saver link ” From the Screen Saver drop down menu, Set it to “None” and click “Apply” and then “OK”. Now click on “Desktop Background” link. From the “Location” drop down menu select “Solid Colors” and pick one color and click “OK”.

Type ” msconfig ” in the “RUN” option from start menu press [Enter] to open up the System Configuration Utility. Now navigate to the “StartUp” tab. Untick the Entries which are not needed

To disable the system sounds in Windows 7, Type mmsys.cpl in RUN From the Windows 7 Startmenu search box and press [Enter]. Navigate to the “Sounds” tab. Now from under “Sound Scheme:” select “No Sounds” > Click “Apply” > “OK”.

Then came the reversal: from the 1920s to 1980, it shrank back to levels not seen since the mid-19th century.

Does observing just one and a half cycles really show that there is a regular pattern in the dynamics of inequality? No, by itself it doesn’t.

In our book Secular Cycles (2009), Sergey Nefedov and I applied the Phillips approach to England, France and Russia throughout both the medieval and early modern periods, and also to ancient Rome.

And the cycles of inequality were an integral part of the overall motion.

Cycles in the real world are chaotic, because complex systems such as human societies have many parts that are constantly moving and influencing each other.

Understanding (and perhaps even forecasting) such trend-reversals is at the core of the new discipline of cliodynamics, which looks at history through the lens of mathematical modelling.

One of the most important forces affecting the labour supply in the US has been immigration

Another reason why the labour supply in the US went up in the 19th century is, not to put too fine a point on it, sex.

This connection between the oversupply of labour and plummeting living standards for the poor is one of the more robust generalisations in history.

The population of England doubled between 1150 and 1300.

causing the population of London to balloon from 20,000 to 80,000.

fourfold increase in food prices and a halving of real wages.

when a series of horrible epidemics, starting with the Black Death of 1348, carried away more than half of the population, the same dynamic ran in reverse.

Much the same pattern can be seen during the secular cycle of the Roman Principate.

Naturally, the conditions affecting the labour supply were different in the second half of the 20th century in the US. An important new element was globalisation

Falling wages isn’t the only reason why labour oversupply leads to inequality. As the slice of the economic pie going to employees diminishes, the share going to employers goes up.

And so in 13th-century England, as the overall population doubles, we find landowners charging peasants higher rents and paying less in wages: the immiseration of the general populace translates into a Golden Age for the aristocrats.

the number of knights and esquires tripled between 1200 and 1300.

Only the gentry drank wine, and around 1300, England imported 20,000 tuns or casks of it from France per year. By 1460, this declined to only 5,000.

In the US between around 1870 and 1900, there was another Golden Age for the elites, appropriately called the Gilded Age.

And just like in 13th-century England, the total number of the wealthy was shooting up. Between 1825 and 1900, the number of millionaires (in constant 1900 dollars) went from 2.5 per million of the population to 19 per million.

On the face of it, this is a wonderful testament to merit-based upward mobility. But there are side effects. Don’t forget that most people are stuck with stagnant or falling real wages. Upward mobility for a few hollows out the middle class and causes the social pyramid to become top-heavy.

As the ranks of the wealthy swell, so too do the numbers of wealthy aspirants for the finite supply of political positions.

The civil wars of the first century BC, fuelled by a surplus of politically ambitious aristocrats, ultimately caused the fall of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire.

very intense status rivalry

Archaeology confirms a genuine and dramatic shift towards luxury.

Social Darwinism took off during the original Gilded Age, and Ayn Rand (who argued that altruism is evil) has grown astonishingly popular during what we might call our Second Gilded Age.

Labour markets are especially sensitive to cultural norms about what is fair compensation, so prevailing theories about inequality have practical consequences.

the US political system is much more attuned to the wishes of the rich than to the aspirations of the poor.

Inverse relationship between well-being and inequality in American history. The peaks and valleys of inequality (in purple) represent the ratio of the largest fortunes to the median wealth of households (the Phillips curve). The blue-shaded curve combines four measures of well-being: economic (the fraction of economic growth that is paid to workers as wages), health (life expectancy and the average height of native-born population), and social optimism (the average age of first marriage, with early marriages indicating social optimism and delayed marriages indicating social pessimism).

In some historical periods it worked primarily for the benefit of the wealthy. In others, it pursued policies that benefited the society as a whole. Take the minimum wage, which grew during the Great Compression era and declined (in real terms) after 1980.

The top marginal tax rate was 68 per cent or higher before 1980; by 1988 it declined to 28 per cent.

In one era, government policy systematically favoured the majority, while in another it favoured the narrow interests of the wealthy elites. This inconsistency calls for explanation.

Unequal societies generally turn a corner once they have passed through a long spell of political instability.

We see this shift in the social mood repeatedly throughout history — towards the end of the Roman civil wars (first century BC), following the English Wars of the Roses (1455-85), and after the Fronde (1648-53), the final great outbreak of violence that had been convulsing France since the Wars of Religion began in the late 16th century.

The worst incident in US labour history was the West Virginia Mine War of 1920—21, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The US, in short, was in a revolutionary situation, and many among the political and business elites realised it.

The US elites entered into an unwritten compact with the working classes. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged (no revolution).

while making such ‘categorical inequalities’ worse, the compact led to a dramatic reduction in overall economic inequality.

The co-operating group was mainly native-born white Protestants. African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and foreigners were excluded or heavily discriminated against.

When Barry Goldwater campaigned on a pro-business, anti-union and anti-big government platform in the 1964 presidential elections, he couldn’t win any lasting support from the corporate community. The conservatives had to wait another 16 years for their triumph.

It is no coincidence that the life of Communism (from the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) coincides almost perfectly with the Great Compression era.

when Communism collapsed, its significance was seriously misread. It’s true that the Soviet economy could not compete with a system based on free markets plus policies and norms that promoted equity.

all of these trends are part of a complex and interlocking system. I don’t just mean that everything affects everything else; that would be vacuous.

Cliodynamics also explains why historical reversals in such diverse areas as economics and culture happen at roughly similar times. The theory of secular cycles was developed using data from historical societies, but it looks like it can provide answers to questions about our own society.

In other words, we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp, at which the US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. This prediction is not a ‘prophecy’. I don’t believe that disaster is pre-ordained, no matter what we do. On the contrary, if we understand the causes, we have a chance to prevent it from happening. But the first thing we will have to do is reverse the trend of ever-growing inequality.

even at the height of the economic crisis, Europeans are thinking of a future when they will want to go back to less rigid interpretations of fiscal rules.

recent elections across the Continent have illustrated how politics — specifically getting elected — are still the most important motivating facto

If even one member state faces a domestic political calculus arrayed against integration, the entire effort could be thrown off course.

In Portugal, the Secretary of State for Emigrant Communities recently said that up to 240,000 people (roughly 2 percent of the nation's population) have left the country since 2011, due in large part to unemployment and economic contraction.

Independent of their ideological orientation, most EU governments have applied the austerity policies proposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The traditional parties' lack of alternatives to austerity has generated a growing unease among local populations.

Such crises of legitimacy are often accompanied by an increase in euroscepticism, since many of these new parties blend anti-establishment rhetoric with opposition to the European Union or Germany's leadership of the bloc.

First, political uncertainty often generates instability in the financial markets.

Second, and perhaps most important, the economic crisis creates an environment conducive to the growth of extremist political views, both from the left and from the right.

At a broader level, the famed Framingham Heart Study followed 750 women with no previous heart disease over 20 years. Those who took the fewest vacations proved to be twice as likely to get a heart attack as those who took the most. A 2005 study of 15,000 women found that the risk of depression diminished dramatically as they took more vacation.

It is unclear which missile systems Pyongyang is supposedly moving.

The United States is taking the development of the KN-08 seriously and has already moved to increase its Ground-based Midcourse Defense array accordingly.

If tested successfully, they prove that North Korea is capable of launching longer-range missiles from mobile units.

But more immediately, the systems enable North Korea to shape the perceptions of those involved in peninsular affairs.

The threat of miscalculation or an accident grows as the level of tension grows. Even if the other countries do not see North Korea as seriously pursuing a war, they must step up their own precautions and rules of engagement as precautionary measures.

With those caveats, I do consider waxing unemployment precipitated in part by automation an extremely likely near-term future scenario.

In rough strokes, the story of machines displacing and immiserating skilled workers reiterates the very genesis of capitalist modernity.

In contrast with the Neo-Luddites of today, the nineteenth-century Luddites expressed no desire to terminate civilization but instead fiercely defended their economic interests against capitalist competition that would reduce them dependent wage labor.

Despite the lack of even basic computers – much less artificial intelligence – some radicals in the nineteenth century already proposed that necessary labor could be reduced to a few hours per day.

The later Technocracy movement made automation the core of their analysis, argued it would cause mass unemployment, and promoted a society of equally distributed abundance managed by technical experts.

As concise distillation of the desires described above, the following passage for Oscar Wilde's “The Soul of Man under Socialism” poetically proclaims a techno-utopian position years before the dawn of twentieth century

Even manufacturing still requires vast human labor at the moment. Living and working conditions for many twenty-first-century factory workers aren't meaningfully better than over a hundred years ago. State-socialist attempts at rationally planned industrial development have had dubious material benefits while inflicting intense environmental damage and human suffering.

Our current circumstances suggest automation of at least basic physical tasks will keep advancing; lights-out factories already exist. The prospect of robots replacing humans at the majority of present-day jobs appears genuinely plausible if far from certain.

I favor the latter.

Social relations would become profoundly altered if – consistent with Wilde's utopian vision – each individual had independent access to basic necessities and comforts without having to toil.

When it comes to post-scarcity, the differences between libertarians and anarchists like myself blur.

Barring nanotech genies who grant unlimited wishes, I assess community control of the means of production as my desired arrangement. With proper political mobilization, robotization may allow for prosperous self-sufficient or largely self-sufficient communities.

Although the life of any single worker means little or nothing to them, they cannot annihilate the working class without doing the same to their own privilege. Robots change this. Human obsolescence could spell doom for the masses. If structural dynamics drive behavior, a powerful enough group of elites might simply liquidate the unruly hordes of no-longer-need labors.

I want to give automated utopia an honest try, but I also desire fertile landbases for my primitivist comrades. As personally enamored as I am with the transhumanist path, I encourage and endeavor to practice a revolutionary pluralism that respects meaningful diversity.

I did get a plausible-sounding explanation of the design process from Tom Bohan, who heads up Menupages, the fantastic site that lists menus of restaurants in several large cities. "Say you're a designer and you've got to demo a site you've spent two months creating," Bohan explains. "Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What's going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn't know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it's great and money well spent."

2. Many used some data, but they unfortunately used silly data strategies/metrics.

A lot of people get fired for this. Sadly not right away, because it takes time to realize how spectacular of a waste of money getting to real-time data was.

Real-time data is very expensive.

It is also very expensive from a decision-making perspective

even in the best case scenario of the proverbial pigs flying, they'll obsess about tactical things.

That is a cheaper systems/platform/data strategy.

That is also a way to get people to sync the data analysis (not data puking, sorry I meant data reporting) with the speed at which the company actually makes decisions (data > analyst > manager > director > VP > question back to manager > yells at the analyst > back to director> VP = 6 days).

The difference between a KPI and a metric is that the former has a direct line of sight to your bottom-line, while the latter is helpful in diagnosing tactical challenges.

Along the way you also learn how not to stink. Bounce rate goes from 70% to a manageable 30%. Takes three months.

From the time people land on your site it might take another 12 – 25 pages for them to buy or submit a lead. Focus on all that stuff. The tough stuff. Then you'll make money.

it does not take a very long time for your Senior Management to figure out how lame the Likes metric is and that it drives 1. Zero value on Facebook and 2. Zero squared economic value or cost savings to the business.

Here's one… We are looking at two consumer product brands, the tiny company Innocent Drinks and the Goliath called Tide Detergent.

Even with 10x the number of Likes on Facebook the giant called Tide has 4x fewer people talking about their brand when compared to the David called Innocent.

In a massively large company they've carved out an identity uniquely their own. They refuse to be corrupted by Coca Cola's own Facebook strategy of constant self-pimping and product ads masquerading as "updates." As a result pound for pound Innocent's fan engagement on its page is multiple time better than Coca Cola's - even if the latter has many more likes.

Not going to happen.

as all decent SEOs will tell you, is that search results are no longer standardized. Rather they are personalized. I might even say, hyper-personalized. Regardless of if you are logged in or not.

Universal search for example means that personalized results will not only look for information from web pages, they also look for YouTube/Vimoe videos, social listings, images of course, and so on and so forth.

So check your keyword ranking if it pleases you.

But don't make it your KPI.

Friends don't let friends use CPC as a KPI. Unless said friends want the friend fired.

Content consumption is a horrible metric. It incentivises sub optimal behavior in your employees/agencies.

If you are a news site, you can get millions of page views

And it will probably get you transient traffic.

And what about business impact from all these one night stands ?

Then measure the metric closest to that. Hopefully some ideas above will help get you promoted.

My hypothesis is that TV/Radio/Magazines have created this bad habit. We can measure so little, almost next to nothing, that we've brought our immensely shaky GRP metric from TV to digital. Here it's called impressions. Don't buy impressions.

If you are willing to go to clicks, do one better and measure Visits. At least they showed up on your mobile/desktop site.

Impressions suck. Profit rocks.

If the simple A/B (test/control) experiment demonstrates that delivering display banner ad impressions to the test group delivers increased revenue, buy impressions to your heart's content. I'll only recommend that you repeat the experiment once a quarter.

You can buy impressions if you can prove via a simple controlled experiment that when we show impressions we got more engagement/sales and when we don't show impressions we did not get more engagement/sales.

This is not a metric, this is more of a what data you'll use to target your advertising issue.

Our primary method of buying advertising and marketing is: "I would like to reach 90 year old grandmas that love knitting, what tv channel should I advertise on." Or they might say: "I would like to reach 18 to 24 year olds with college education who supported Barack Obama for president." And example of demographic and psychographic segments.

We use that on very thin ice data, we bought advertising. That was our lot in life.

Intent beats demographics and psychographics. Always.

Search has a ton of strong intent. It does not matter if you are a grandma or a 18 year old. If you are on Baidu and you search for the HTC One, you are expressing strong intent. Second, content consumption has intent built in. If I'm reading lots of articles about how to get pregnant, you could show me an ad related to that

The first intent is strong, the second one is weaker.

Many of us simply roll our eyes and click away when yet another medical study contradicts the last study—so what else is new? Coffee’s bad for you, until it’s good for you—and so is red wine. Antioxidants are essential, or they’re useless. And so on. Contradictory studies are an essential part of the science-news stream—and, in fact, an important part of science itself. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

The fact that it didn’t, and that the two studies conflict, has unintentionally revealed a different truth about diet and aging. In both studies, the monkeys that ate less were healthier by a number of measures—and suffered far less from age-related disease. Even better, when taken together, both studies reveal a different path toward living a healthier life—one that doesn’t require self-starvation.

Over the years, various researchers have shown that caloric restriction can extend life in bats, dogs, and even spiders, and on down to nematode worms and single-celled organisms like yeast. After decades of work, it remains the only way known to increase maximum lifespan. So a lot is riding on the concept, scientifically speaking.

In the 1990s, Leonard Guarente of MIT discovered a class of longevity genes in yeast called sirtuins that appear to be activated by a lack of food. Sirtuins appeared to be “conserved” in evolution, meaning that they appear in nearly all species, on up to humans. Sirtuins are thought to have evolved as a way to enable animals to survive periods of famine. They seem to work by regulating certain metabolic pathways and reduce the amount of damage cells endure.

If researchers could somehow identify and isolate that mechanism, they’d be that much closer to some kind of longevity pill. Except for one inconvenient fact: Caloric restriction itself does not always work.

While 80 percent of the monkeys were still alive, the restricted animals had better measures of cardiovascular health, hormone levels, and blood-sugar management, an early indicator of diabetes risk. So it came as a bit of a surprise, eight years later, to find that the hungry monkeys are not actually living longer.

In fact, caloric restriction really seemed to work best in standard laboratory mice. This may be because they are predisposed to eat a lot, gain weight, and reproduce early—and thus are more sensitive to reduced food intake. (Slate’s Daniel Engber has written about how overfed lab mice have distorted scientific research.)

But in a long-awaited, well-funded monkey study like this, an “odd” result could not be ignored. Still stranger was the fact that even though the underfed monkeys were healthier than the others, they still didn’t live longer. They had lower incidence of cardiovascular disease, as well as diabetes and cancer—and when these diseases did appear, they did so later

At first, it seemed like a scientist’s nightmare: The control group is indistinguishable from the test group. In clinical trials, a result like this would kill any drug candidate. Then de Cabo took a closer look at a seemingly minor difference between the Wisconsin and NIA studies: the animals’ diets.

Furthermore, the NIA diet consisted of 4 percent sucrose—while in the Wisconsin diet, sucrose accounted for some 28 percent of the total calories.

“In physics, a calorie is a calorie,” says de Cabo. “In nutrition and animal physiology, there is more and more data coming out that says that the state of the animal is going to depend more on where the calories are coming from.”

In his study based on the two-year experience, Walford reported that the main effect of caloric restriction was to drastically lower his fellow crew members’ cholesterol levels, to 140 and below—well below the average for people in the industrialized world. Walford concluded that a calorie-restricted diet would have the same beneficial effects that he and other scientists had observed in mice.

Several studies have shown that excessive leanness—seen often in calorie-restricting humans—can be as risky as obesity. Taken together, these studies suggest that the optimal body-mass index is about 25, which is on the verge of being overweight.

But if it’s OK to be almost overweight, it might not pay to go beyond that. Another key difference between the two monkey studies has to do with the definition of “ad libitum.” While the Wisconsin control-group monkeys were allowed to stuff themselves, with the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet for several hours at feeding times, the NIA monkeys were given a fixed amount of food. “You could view it as the Wisconsin monkeys were overindulging, like the rest of the American population,” says Rozalyn Anderson, a member of the Wisconsin team. Compared with           their Wisconsin brothers, then, the NIA monkeys in the non-calorie-restricted control group were arguably practicing a mild form of calorie restriction—and that, Anderson suggests, might have made a difference.

Having countries like Russia and China unwilling to see Iran crushed has helped. Iran can survive sanctions.

A failed military action would benefit Iran, proving its power. By contrast, a successful attack that dramatically delayed or destroyed Iran's nuclear capability would be a serious reversal.

The principle of mutual assured destruction, which stabilized the U.S.-Soviet balance in the Cold War, would govern Iran's use of nuclear weapons. If Iran struck Israel, the damage would be massive, forcing the Iranians to assume that the Israelis and their allies (specifically, the United States) would launch a massive counterattack on Iran, annihilating large parts of Iran's population.

Assuming the Iranians are rational actors, their optimal strategy lies not in acquiring nuclear weapons and certainly not in using them, but instead in having a credible weapons development program that permits them to be seen as significant international actors.

Up to this point, the Iranians have not even fielded a device for testing, let alone a deliverable weapon.

Both want to appear more fearsome than either is actually willing to act.

The Iranian strategy has been to maintain ambiguity on the status of its program, while making it appear that the program is capable of sudden success -- without ever achieving that success. The Israeli strategy has been to appear constantly on the verge of attack without ever attacking and to use the United States as its reason for withholding attacks, along with the studied ambiguity of the Iranian program.

If a country can develop nuclear weapons, there is no reason it can't develop hardened and dispersed sites and create enough ambiguity to deprive Israeli and U.S. intelligence of confidence in their ability to determine what is where.

first, whether the target had been destroyed when it was buried under rock and concrete; second, whether the target contained what Israel thought it contained; and third, whether the strike had missed a backup site that replicated the one it destroyed.

if the Israelis had an ultrasecret miracle weapon, postponing its use might compromise its secrecy. I suspect that if they had such a weapon, they would have used it by now.

The Americans emphasize these points, but they are happy to use the Israeli threats to build pressure on the Iranians. The United States wants to undermine Iranian credibility in the region by making Iran seem vulnerable. The twin forces of Israeli rhetoric and sanctions help make Iran look embattled. The reversal in Syria enhances this sense. Naval maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz add to the sense that the United States is prepared to neutralize Iranian counters to an Israeli airstrike, making the threat Israel poses and the weakness of Iran appear larger.

We see the Israelis talking as if they were threatened but acting as if they were in no rush to address the supposed threat.

It is the U.S.-Israeli byplay that is most fascinating. On the surface, Israel is driving U.S. policy. On closer examination, the reverse is true. Israel has bluffed an attack for years and never acted. Perhaps now it will act, but the risks of failure are substantial. If Israel really wants to act, this is not obvious.

Rather than seeing Netanyahu as trying to force the United States into an attack, it is more useful to see Netanyahu's rhetoric as valuable to U.S. strategy. Israel and the United States remain geopolitically aligned. Israel's bellicosity is not meant to signal an imminent attack, but to support the U.S. agenda of isolating and maintaining pressure on Iran. That would indicate more speeches from Netanyahu and greater fear of war. But speeches and emotions aside, intensifying psychological pressure on Iran is more likely than war.

The reality is quite different. Based on Wolff (2010), the bottom 40% of the population combined has only 0.3% of wealth while the top 20% possesses 84% (see Figure 2). These differences between levels of wealth in society comprise what's called the Gini coefficient, which is one way to quantify inequality.

When economists consider the desirable level of inequality, they usually define the ideal inequality from the perspective of economic efficiency: What level of inequality will motivate people to be the most productive and move up the wealth ladder? What level of inequality will allow those at the top to lift up society as a whole (say, by having the resources to invent new technologies)? What level of wealth will keep salaries low and competition high?

inequality is not just about economic efficiency. It's also about our day-to-day experience as citizens, the influence of envy, our social mobility, the importance of equal opportunity, our mutual dependency on each other, etc.

We took a step back and examined social inequality based on the definition that the philosopher John Rawls gave in his book A Theory of Justice. In Rawls' terms, a society is just if a person understands all the conditions within that society and is willing to enter it in a random place (in terms of socio-economic status, gender, race, and so on).

First, we asked 5,522 people to create a distribution of wealth among the five buckets such that they themselves would be willing to enter that society at a random place.

When we examined the results by other variables, including income and gender, we again found no appreciable differences. It seems that Americans -- regardless of political affiliation, income, and gender -- want the kind of wealth distribution shown in Figure 3, which is very different from what we have and from what we think we have (see Figure 2).

in another task, we made things simpler (see Figure 5) and asked people to choose between two unidentified distributions (again under the veil of ignorance). The first option, unbeknownst to participants, reflected the distribution of wealth in America. For the second option we modified the distribution found in Sweden, making it substantially more equal (we referred to this fictional nation as "Equalden").

similarity across the political spectrum is far more substantial than the differences.

The first is that we vastly underestimate the level of inequality that we have in America.

Second, we want much more equality than both what we have and what we think we have.

A third lesson concerns the political gap between Democrats and Republicans

One reason for this could be our inability to separate our ideology from our current state of wealth.

Another reason could be politicians, who, in order to rally people to their side, try to generate feelings of greater difference and opposition--and therefore conflict--than actually exist.

The veil of ignorance accomplishes something similar to blind taste testing.

when we express opinions about politics and life in general, we can't help but be influenced by our own varying degrees wealth and ignorance of others' lives. The veil of ignorance works to separate our core beliefs from the biases and prejudices we develop over time and through the subjective experience of being part of a certain class and demographic.

Social justice and optimal wealth distribution are highly complex topics, and it's hard to imagine that any study could dramatically change opinions about education, welfare, or tax reform. But consider this. When we ran the same basic experiment in Australia, we found Australians did not differ much from Americans in their views of the ideal distribution. When we ran another version of it with NPR listeners, and then readers of Forbes Magazine, the results were still basically the same. And most likely, if you participated in one of our tests, your response too would have fallen in line with these findings.

the single most important thing you can do to improve the battery life on your Nexus 5 is to lower the brightness.

However, those who are interested in a better automatic brightness management than offered by default on the Nexus 5 should check out Lux, a third-party app that is well-reviewed by users and professional reviewers.

Nexus 5 Battery Tips: How to turn off "Scanning Always Available" in the Nexus 5 (or any Android 4.4 KitKat device) settings menu.  Thomas Halleck / International Business Times

Unless you are using your Nexus 5 to drive to somewhere unfamiliar, or are using Waze in the car to avoid traffic, there is no need to keep GPS turned on. It draws a lot of power and offers little for the Nexus 5 experience.

Unless you are in range of a Wi-Fi signal that you will use, make sure that Wi-Fi is turned off on your smartphone.

Google included a feature in Android 4.3 that allowed apps and Google Play services to determine a user’s location using Wi-Fi, even when the phone’s Wi-Fi is turned off.

Animated wallpapers drain battery a lot more than a still image, so if you are looking for the greatest power performance on the Nexus 5, the Rocky Mountains are a better choice than live wallpapers like Sun Beam.

Make sure you have the most up-to-date software, including any Nexus 5 firmware, as well as all of your apps through Google Play. Apps that include battery-draining bugs or are poorly optimized will drain your battery unnecessarily.

Inequality caused states to cut education budgets! No, the recession did. But inequality caused the recession! No, an incomprehensible combination of housing policy, banking policy, financial regulation, normal cyclical adjustments, and yadda yadda caused the recession.

Higher levels of female obesity correlated with higher levels of gender inequality in each nation Of course, that’s not the impression you will get from the admonishments of public-health agencies and wellness businesses.

Yet the scientists who study the biochemistry of fat and the epidemiologists who track weight trends are not nearly as unanimous as Bloomberg makes out. In fact, many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain.

Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets.

‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.

It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence

In rich nations, obesity is more prevalent in people with less money, education and status. Even in some poor countries, according to a survey published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, increases in weight over time have been concentrated among the least well-off. And the extra weight is unevenly distributed among the sexes, too.

The story might go like this: being poor is stressful, and stress makes you eat, and the cheapest food available is the stuff with a lot of ‘empty calories’, therefore poorer people are fatter than the better-off. These wheels-within-wheels are required because the mantra of the thermodynamic model is that ‘a calorie is a calorie is a calorie’: who you are and what you eat are irrelevant to whether you will add fat to your frame. The badness of a ‘bad’ food such as a Cheeto is that it makes calorie intake easier than it would be with broccoli or an apple.

More importantly, ‘things that alter the body’s fat metabolism’ is a much wider category than food. Sleeplessness and stress, for instance, have been linked to disturbances in the effects of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain that the body has had enough to eat.

If some or all of these factors are indeed contributing to the worldwide fattening trend, then the thermodynamic model is wrong.