Can You Learn to Delay Your Gratification?

Just watched another fascinating lecture on TED, a huge collection of speeches delivered by renowned guests on different ideas ranging from organism to orgasm. It's a place to open your eyes to creative ideas and the latest technologies and researches. Recently, TED introduced translations to nine languages for its videos. I highly recommend it.
In the video I watched, Joachim de Posada talked about the correlation between the ability to delay gratification and success. You will see some cute kids trying to hold off the temptation of Marshmallows. Here it is:

Kobe Bryant's Former Trainer = America's Next Star Phys. Ed. Teacher?

The New York Times reported on June 4, the creation of a teaching dream team which represents a bold experiment in the history of American education. (Link here)  According to the report, the teachers will be paid $125,000 a year, nearly twice the salary of an average New York City public school teacher, but can be fired at will just like employees in the private sectors.  The team of eight will include a former trainer of Kobe Bryant of the Lakers, two Ivy League graduates, and some other experienced teachers.  This experiment will let us see whether a more free-market approach to teacher hiring is the answer to the lagging performance of New York City's public school system.  The hope is that the higher salary will attract more qualified teachers who have the skills and passion to handle the pressure of working longer hours and meeting long- and short-term academic goals.  The idea looks good on paper, but measuring the results could be a tricky thing.  How do you measure the performance of Mr. Carbone, who, I quote from the article, "[d]eveloped Kobe from 185 lbs. to 225 lbs. of pure muscle over eight years".  Do you play his students against students in other schools or do you weigh them before and after the school year?  Do you measure the success with standardized tests or some other specialized test?  

David Pogue on the Cellphone Trends of 2009

David Pogue, technology reviewer for the New York Times, delivered a fascinating, wildly entertaining (and hilarious, in my humble opinion) lecture on the cellphone trends of 2009.  Think again if you are using one of those voice mail transcibing services that he mentioned in the video. I have embedded it here:

Removing stubborn files (from a virus or a malware) manually

The other day I had to remove two files which Prevx 3.0 had flagged as malicious.  It wouldn't remove them for me unless I pay for the full version (starting from $24.95 a year).  I would recommend the software for two reasons: 1) it picked out some bugs that my other malwares had not (I have SUPERAntiSpyware, Spyware Terminator, Virus Scan, Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware--I know I am a clean freak! :) ); and 2) it lists where the harmful files and registry entries are.  I usually don't pay for spyware removal not only because I am a cheap bastard -- don't get me wrong, you could probably tell that I AM a quintessential cheap bastard for all those free anti-spyware scanners only computer-- but mostly because I have reservations on the effectiveness of these softwares.  Will I get my money back if your software can't clean the worm?  I am too stingy to give it a try.  Thankfully, Prevx 3.0 lists the bad files and their respective directories.  

My brother and I decided to try removing them manually.  We followed some standard directions.  (WARNING: If you don't know what you are doing, you could do serious harm by deleting a .dll file.  But on the other hand, if your computer is infected with a tenacious, annoying bug, attempting to delete the identified harmful files might cause no more harm than doing nothing at all.)  We tried to use command prompt in safe mode, add the files to removal list on reboot, etc. .  But to no avail, the files are clever enough to boot along with windows so that it is still in use in safe mode.  The challenge is to load a clean copy of windows at startup and delete the bad files while they are not in use.  We thought of the Windows installation disc immediately. (If Microsoft sells an infected copy of windows to its customers, do you think people will ever buy Windows again???)  We discovered--Not to discredit some other posters on this page, but we really had not read those comment before we tried to used the this--that Microsoft has provided this Windows Recovery Console for just that purpose.  It loads a clean copy of Windows system files on the installation disc into RAM and gives you the chance to remove the malicious files while they are not active.  Lesson learned.